Measuring Differences Between Cognitive Maps

A causal cognitive map is a directed network representation of an individual's beliefs concerning a particular domain at a point of time. The nodes and the arcs joining them indicate causal beliefs. There have been few attempts to develop quantitative measures for such maps. The measures could be used to compare the maps of different individuals and also to track the changes in the beliefs of a single individual over time. They would assist in providing a more objective basis for qualitative analysis. In this paper we review current cognitive mapping research and then propose some measures for computing the difference between two maps, illustrating this work with a managerial example.