A second order approach to cognitive mapping

That is quite a title. Let's go through the terms and start with...

Cognitive Mapping

Cognitive mapping is about translating the thoughts of a person into a map. Such a map usually consists of statements that capture the thoughts of that person. These statements are usually depicted as rectangles that are linked with arrows that express some relationship between them. So you end up with a crowded map with a bunch of rectangles and arrows. To top it off you can merge cognitive maps of different persons into a single one which then gives you a cause map. Figure 1 shows a zoomed out example.

Figure 1 Cause map of the World3 model [1] (colours represent [scattered] clusters)

Second order approach

Second order approach - that is more difficult.
The mapping has to be done by a person. There needs to be the mapper who maps the thoughts of, say, an interviewee. So you could argue that if it is the mapper who maps the thoughts of the interviewee, is it really safe to say that it is the cognitive map of the interviewee? Or is it saver to say that it is a cognitive map of the mapper - who after all asks about, interprets and records that what the interviewee says to him? Differently put, the mapper might create a cognitive map of his thoughts about a cognitive map of an interviewee's thoughts.


Now you can argue in all kinds of directions such as is it not rather a system, or a compound cognitive map, of mapper/interviewee? Or if you follow carefully the mapping procedure can you not be an objective mapper who creates a map without carrying over his or her thinking? That is another discussion though.

My point is about the strange phrasing of e.g. the map of a map or the thoughts of somebody else's thoughts. That usually is a good indicator that you deal with something second order. For the purpose of this post, a second order approach often has something to do with you putting yourself back into the picture - the picture that you have taken but which does not show you. Hence your involvement in the taking of the picture may have been forgotten - by others or even by yourself.


Back to the cognitive maps

In the title I mentioned a second order approach to cognitive mapping. I wonder whether it is sufficient to remark that your cognitive map is a map of somebody else's map of thoughts in order to reflect that you have been following a second order approach. Whatever you answer, a way to reinforce your approach is to simply put your thoughts into the cause map as well. When I did this the first time I started with two statements:

Figure 2 Mapper's cognitive map within a cause map

Over the course of my mapping I was able to extend this quite a bit. If anything, it was a really powerful (concise, minimum effort) tool for reflecting on, well, what I was doing there at all - and doing so in a brief, transparent way for the research participants. Since I also incorporated feedback of participants in my map I was able to explicitly build emergent ownership. That means "my" slice of the map showed visibly to participants what their stake in the developing of the map was.

Obviously this was a research project. But replace the word phenomenon with problem and you are good to go for a more business like context. Even if you are an external consultant, put in something like client's problem, use of cognitive mapping and solve problem, or so.

In summary if you, or your client, care about a second order approach, go ahead and try putting your mapper's cognitive map into the cause map. If you do not care about it, you might gain some benefits if you just do it for yourself, i.e. outside the participant map. See whether using the cognitive mapping can improve your cognitive mapping. Another instance when you probably should keep it to yourself is when your interviewees are against approaches like this. I could imagine, for instance, that people might raise an eyebrow when they expect you to be a hundred percent unbiased but then find your thoughts in their map.

(C) CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), Jo. Richter, http://causal-cognitive-mapping.blogspot.de/2017/02/a-second-order-approach-to-cognitive.html

 [1] http://vensim.com/model-analysis-world-dynamics