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Cited by 978

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 4 of the 4 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Learning from Evidence in a Complex World

Open access
Sterman, John D.·2006·American Journal of Public Health

Abstract

Policies to promote public health and welfare often fail or worsen the problems they are intended to solve. Evidence-based learning should prevent such policy resistance, but learning in complex systems is often weak and slow. Complexity hinders our ability to discover the delayed and distal impacts of interventions, generating unintended “side effects.” Yet learning often fails even when strong evidence is available: common mental models lead to erroneous but self-confirming inferences, allowing harmful beliefs and behaviors to persist and undermining implementation of beneficial policies. Here I show how systems thinking and simulation modeling can help expand the boundaries of our mental models, enhance our ability to generate and learn from evidence, and catalyze effective change in public health and beyond.

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Metadata

Authors
Sterman, J. D.
Venue
American Journal of Public Health
Published
2006-03
Volume
96
Issue
3
Pages
505-514
ISSN
  • 0090-0036 (ISSN-L)
  • 1541-0048
OpenAlex
W2157800154
Cited by
978
References
4
FWCI
28.30
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
green

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Learning from Evidence in a Complex World. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.2105/ajph.2005.066043
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Sterman, J. D. (2006). Learning from Evidence in a Complex World. American Journal of Public Health. https://doi.org/10.2105/ajph.2005.066043

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.