An Investigation of Hidden Shared Linkages Among Perceived Causal Relationships in Cognitive Maps

Abstract

This study investigates cause and effect relationships in cognitive maps and the coexistence of pairs of such relationships in cognitive maps of a chosen group of decision-makers. We call the existence of a pair of causal relationships shared by the group of decision-makers in their cognitive maps inter-causal relationship. We investigate the coexistence of the chosen pairs of causal relationships in the maps in terms of one of the causal relationships being a necessary and/or sufficient condition for the existence of the other using the tools of fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis. We develop and propose a framework to extract and examine the inter-causal relationships from the cognitive maps. The proposed method is based on set-theoretic consistency and coverage measures. We used empirical data (of 71 cognitive maps) collected from a cognitive mapping approach performed by individuals in management teams within a strategic decision-making simulation process to test the proposed approach. Empirical results show that our method can identify inter-causal relationships and provide analytic results for a more complex interpretation if the information arises from the structure of cognitive maps.