Abstract
Levine, J., M. Muthukrishna, K. M. A. Chan, and T. Satterfield. 2015. Theories of the deep: combining salience and network analyses to produce mental model visualizations of a coastal British Columbia food web. Ecology and Society 20(4):42.http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-08094-200442
Highlights
Considerable work has been done describing the potential for mental models research to enrich our understanding of complex social-ecological systems (Lynam and Brown 2011)
In this paper we demonstrate a first iteration of an approach synthesized to elicit and represent widespread tacit beliefs about a regional food web
We outline some of the most basic measures that network analysis allows us to calculate that are relevant to mental models of food webs
Summary
Considerable work has been done describing the potential for mental models research to enrich our understanding of complex social-ecological systems (Lynam and Brown 2011) In theory, such insights about how people make sense of complex systems can help improve multistakeholder management of shared resources. One challenge is that people’s innate beliefs about their social-ecological system are often tacit, and cannot be stated directly without adequate elicitation efforts (Jansen et al 2006, Beratan 2007) Another is that, in many resource conflict or multistakeholder management contexts, actors constitute individuals, with individual mental models, and loosely affiliated groups, or blocs, more usefully described to each be acting within the logic of a more nebulous, “aggregate” mental model. These group-level aggregate models (sometimes called “cultural models”; see Appendix 1) can prove uniquely challenging to elicit, let alone represent with meaningful validity
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