Mental self‐renewal as a measure of systems thinking

Abstract

Systems thinking research confronts theoretical and empirical challenges, and new measures based on the cognitive sciences have been sought. In this paper, mental self-renewal is proposed as a suitable new theoretical construct for studying systems thinking. The objective was to construct and validate a psychometric scale of mental self-renewal (MSRS) and to investigate its associations with complex postformal thinking (CPFT), existing systems thinking scores (STSR) and visual remote associative thinking (vRAT). Data were collected by surveying 311 international designers. Exploratory factor analysis and correlative analyses indicate construct validity for a novel scale with 14 different factors that, when taken together, measure designer's mental self-renewal. The MSRS is a strong predictor of CPFT, whereas its correlation with STSR is weak. MSRS or CPFT did not predict performance in the vRAT test, while STSR did. In conclusion, MSRS can measure novel aspects of systems thinking; however, further research is necessary.