Causality Loop

A causality loop can refer to the following:

• A temporal causality loop, or predestination paradox, more commonly referred to as a causality loop, is a theoretical phenomenon, which is said to occur when a chain of cause-effect events is circular. For instance, if event A causes event B, and event B causes event C, and event C causes event A, then these events are said to be in a causality loop.

• A causality loop diagram (also known as a causal loop diagram) is a scientific diagram showing the influence of two interrelated variables.

The concept of a causality loop is functionally comparable to positive feedback, coproduction, and co-evolution, each of which describes how two or more variables of a system affect each other and therefore create each other, albeit with respect to different variables operating at different scales. Co-production is concerned with the variables of science/technology and society operating at the scale of society. Co-evolution is concerned with the variables of species operating at the scale of the evolutionary process. Causality loops and positive feedback are more abstract, and theoretically applicable to any set of variables operating at any scale.

Co-production, causality loops, and positive feedback are also related to the concept of virtuous circle and vicious circle – when the co-production, causality loop, or positive feedback produces a desirable effect, systems change is described as a virtuous circle; when they produce an undesirable effect, systems change is described as a vicious circle. Because these concepts refer to variables interacting in a complex system, they all produce unintended consequences – virtuous cycles produce unintended benefits and vicious cycles produce unintended harms. Although such consequences are unintended in the sense that no actor deliberately intends for them to occur, unintended consequences are an expected emergent property of systems change (in accordance with the ways Langdon Winner proposes that artifacts can ‘have politics’), and can be used as an indicator of systems change. Taking examples from the field of environmental justice, although community empowerment was an unintended benefit of bucket brigades (which were originally intended as a practical air sampling device), they are an indicator of systems change. On the flipside, although environmental injustices may be unintentional, they are an expected consequence of inequality in our socio-economic system.

Although these various concepts have significant differences, a result of the disciplines from which they emerged and the topics to which they’re applied, they are functionally comparable in that they satisfy a similar conceptual function of describing dynamic and generative interaction between two or more variables in a system.