Perceptions of Complex Systems Are Governed by Power Laws

Many networks in natural and human-made systems exhibit scale-free properties and are small worlds. Now we show that people’s understanding of complex systems in their cognitive maps also follow a scale-free topology. People focus on a few attributes, relating these with many other things in the system. Many more attributes have very few connections. People use relatively short explanations to describe events; their cognitive map is a small world with less than six degrees of separation. These findings may help us to better understand people’s perceptions, especially when it comes to decision-making, conflict resolution, politics and management. In nature many networks from protein interaction (1) to metabolism (2) show scale-free properties. In human systems scale-free properties have been observed in the world-wide web (3), the internet (4), linguistics (5), sexual contacts (6), movie actor collaboration (7), and scientific collaboration (8). Here we show that people’s perceptions of ecosystems and other complex systems also obey power laws. We examined people’s perceptions of complex systems with the technique of cognitive mapping. Cognitive maps are networks that have weighted and directed edges (causal connections of varying strengths) between nodes (variables). Axelrod (9) first used signed digraphs to represent causal relationships among variables as defined and described by people and he called these representations cognitive maps. By using weighted connections instead of binary ones, Kosko (10) defined fuzzy cognitive maps. Cognitive maps have been used to examine decision-making (11), people’s perceptions of complex social systems (12), and for modelling in various fields including operations management (13), virtual reality (14) and environmental management (15). Eden et al. (16) have extensively used cognitive mapping to examine decision-making and problem-solving in businesses. Recently, fuzzy cognitive maps created with expert knowledge have been used in data mining of the world wide web (17).