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'Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing wholes. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing patterns of change rather than static "snapshots." ' ‐Peter Senge. The current research examined the psychological construct of systems thinking alongside other established psychological constructs of intelligence, personality, cognitive complexity and creativity to distinguish systems thinking as an independent psychological construct. Across two studies, results suggest that, while systems thinking may overlap with some of these constructs, notably intelligence and cognitive complexity, these constructs did not fully explain obtained variance in systems thinking scores and suggest that systems thinking may indeed be a distinct, perhaps foundational, psychological construct that may exist as an individual difference dimension. This exploratory study discusses the theoretical implications of systems thinking as well as further psychometric validation of the Systems Thinking Scale. © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Systems thinking is a cognitive style involving an implicit tendency to perceive the social‐ecological world as a multitude of interconnected complex adaptive systems. Previous research has shown that systems thinkers value and care for entities that transcend the self, such as other human beings and nature, signalling a more expansive self‐concept. Similarly, individuals high in empathy have an inclusive self‐concept, a stronger proenvironmental identity and value entities beyond themselves. The present study examined the hypothesis that systems thinking would share a positive relation with components of cognitive and affective empathy. Results from an online survey of 135 undergraduate students demonstrated that systems thinking shared significant positive correlations with perspective taking, empathic concern and fantasy. However, only perspective taking and empathic concern emerged as unique significant positive predictors of systems thinking. Results suggest that systems thinkers express an elevated capacity for the allocentric components of cognitive and affective empathy. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many of the greatest challenges in society have emerged as a result of humans acting within complex systems without fully understanding how they work. To address this problem, scholars from diverse fields have appealed to systems thinking. To date, a psychological perspective has been conspicuously absent from scholarship on this topic-a gap that the present paper seeks to fill by situating an individual difference measure of systems thinking in relation to well-studied constructs (e.g. holistic and relational thinking) and decision-making tasks in the psychological literature. Results indicate that the measure of systems thinking captures peoples' tendency to represent and reason about complex systems. The paper helps to validate a novel measure of an individual's tendency to engage in systems thinking and to provide a conceptual foundation for the thinking about the psychological underpinning of a systems thinking mindset. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of the present research was to examine the relationship between the cognitive paradigm systems thinking and an ecologically informed worldview, specifically the New Ecological Paradigm. One hundred and fifteen psychology undergraduate students completed an online questionnaire assessing systems thinking, ecological worldview, environmental value-orientation, connectivity to nature, and environmental behaviors. Results demonstrated that systems thinkers possess a stronger ecological worldview and sense of connectivity with nature, harbour biospheric environmental values, and engage in more pro-environmental behaviors than those scoring low on systems thinking. Furthermore, it was found that systems thinking both uniquely predicted and was predicted by the New Ecological Paradigm. Moreover, results demonstrated that systems thinkers are better able to acknowledge 'system membership' and possess a greater understanding of the characteristics of complex ecological systems and their mutual influence on social-economic domains. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]