Research and Publications - Department of Management

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Browsing Research and Publications - Department of Management by Author "Abdel-Hamid, Tarek"

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    Public and health professionals' misconceptions about the dynamics of body weight gain/loss
    (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014) Abdel-Hamid, Tarek; Ankel, Felix; Battle-Fisher, Michele; Gibson, Bryan; Gonzalez-Parra, Gilberto; Jalali, Mohammad; Kaipainen, Kirsikka; Kalupahana, Nishan; Karanfil, Ozge; Marathe, Achla; Martinson, Brian; McKelvey, Karma; Sarbadhikari, Suptendra Nath; Pintauro, Stephen; Poucheret, Patrick; Pronk, Nicolaas; Qian, Ying; Sazonov, Edward; Van Oorschot, Kim; Venkitasubramanian, Akshay; Murphy, Philip; United States Department of Defense; United States Navy; Naval Postgraduate School; University of Minnesota Twin Cities; University of Utah; US Department of Veterans Affairs; University of Los Andes Venezuela; Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University; VTT Technical Research Center Finland; University of Tennessee Knoxville; UT Institute of Agriculture; Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Florida International University; University of Vermont; Universite de Montpellier; Shanghai University; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa; BI Norwegian Business School; North Carolina State University
    Human body energy storage operates as a stock-and-flow system with inflow (food intake) and outflow (energy expenditure). In spite of the ubiquity of stock-and-flow structures, evidence suggests that human beings fail to understand stock accumulation and rates of change, a difficulty called the stock-flow failure. This study examines the influence of health care training and cultural background in overcoming stock-flow failure. A standardized protocol assessed lay people's and health care professionals' ability to apply stock-and-flow reasoning to infer the dynamics of weight gain/loss during the holiday season (621 subjects from seven countries). Our results indicate that both types of subjects exhibited systematic errors indicative of use of erroneous heuristics. Indeed 76% of lay subjects and 71% of health care professionals failed to understand the simple dynamic impact of energy intake and energy expenditure on body weight. Stock-flow failure was found across cultures and was not improved by professional health training. The problem of stock-flow failure as a transcultural global issue with education and policy implications is discussed. Copyright (C) 2014 System Dynamics Society