Mental Maps: Without Spaghetti They are Baloney

Nordhaus, W.D. (1975). Mental Maps: Without Spaghetti They are Baloney. IIASA Working Paper. IIASA, Laxenburg, Austria: WP-75-044

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Abstract

Gould and White show how "mental maps" of countries can be constructed. These maps can represent many facets of individual attitudes (preference, ignorance, prejudice, etc.). Once an individual preference structure has been constructed, Gould and White describe a technique for aggregating the preferences of individuals into "national" or "regional" preferences. Thus they illustrate the mental map of school leavers at Bristol, Aberystwyth, Liverpool, and Inverness over the preference for location in Great Britain (p.71 to 80), as well as maps for the United States for different regions. These maps are aggregations of individual maps, or preference structures. The technique used for constructing maps is to start with an ordinal preference map for individuals, then by the technique of factor analysis to combine or weight the individual preferences into an "aggregate preference structure."

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