Feedback Loops

3. Factors That Make Conflict Intractable

In Brief

Feedback loops are loops in causal chains, such that effects become causes, creating new effects. This can me made clearer with the example of a thermostat, which operates on the basis of a simple feedback loop. In the winter, if the room gets too cold, the thermostat turns the furnace on and it stays on until it gets to the desired temperature and then it turns off. That's a negative feedback loop. If the thermostat is broken and it waits until the room is hot, and then turns the furnace on to heat it up more, that's a positive feedback system. Both kinds of systems exist frequently in nature and in social systems; hyper-polarization being one example of a positive feedback system which can get so hot as to be dangerous.

Feedback loops are loops in causal chains, such that effects become causes, creating new effects. This can me made clearer with the example of a thermostat, which operates on the basis of a simple feedback loop. In the winter, if the room gets too cold, the thermostat turns the furnace on and it stays on until it gets to the desired temperature and then it turns off. When it cools off, the thermostat turns the furnace on again. That keeps the temperature at a relatively stable level. An lot of the systems on our planet work like that—it is what allows the planet to remain hospitable to life. Basic supply and demand systems in economics work like that too. If the supply of oil gets high, the price goes down. If oil becomes scarce, the price goes up. That’s negative feedback—it keeps the supply and the demand in balance.

There also positive feedback systems. You can understand that by simply thinking about rewiring a thermostat so that when things get hot, instead of turning off the furnace, it turns it on. That would make a house get hotter and hotter still. If you then turn the furnace up more and more, that's obviously an explosive situation. That's the mistake, believe it or not, that the engineers made in their design of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor. And that's why it was such a catastrophe.

Despite their catastrophic nature, there are all sorts of positive feedback, explosive-loop systems in the natural and social systems of planet earth. Escalating conflict is an example. Someone insults someone else who insults them back. The response to the second insult results in a physical fight, which results in someone getting a gun…which results, possibly in someone getting killed. That’s a positive feedback system. Positive here doesn’t mean “good,” it just means more of something (like anger) creates more and more of that same thing, instead of dampening it down, as occurs in negative feedback systems. (You can remember it is opposite what you expect by thinking in terms of medical tests: negative outcomes are good (meaning you don't have COVID or cancer; positive outcomes are bad (you do have COVID or cancer. Similarly, negative feedback systems are usually helpful because they don't explode, while positive feedback systems can explode, or at least make things metaphorically very, very hot.

An interesting thing to note is that feedback loops are only level three on Kenneth Boulding's hierarchy of system levels. Above them (meaning more complex) are open-throughput systems, botanical systems, zoological systems, and human systems, which he breaks into two levels: psychological and social. So even though we can roughly describe social systems as following a negative or positive feedback pattern, the dynamics of human systems are actually orders of magnitude more complex than a simple thermostat (working or broken). That's why it is important to understand how systems work and work at as high a system level as possible. We will be talking a lot more about what this means in later parts of this Guide.