Feedback Loop

The feedback loop concept has several sources, and there are several different ways to think about it. One way is to think about the meaning of cause and effect. People often think about variable A causing outcome B to happen, and that being the end of it—a straight line from cause to effect. The logic behind feedback processes is that that picture often is too simple. Sometimes variable A causes outcome B, but outcome B then turns around and exerts an influence (directly or indirectly) on variable A, the original cause. This, in turn, causes variable A to make something else happen with respect to outcome B. In this circumstance, there is not a straight line of cause and effect, but a closed loop. Causality ...