Counterintuitive Behavior of Social Systems.

Forrester, J. W. (1971). Counterintuitive Behavior of Social Systems. Technology Review, 52-68.

Type

Journal article

Intellectual base

Primary research

Year

1971

Link

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/15-988-system-dynamics-self-study-fall-1998-spring-1999/65cdf0faf132dec7ec75e91f9651b31f_behavior.pdf

Cited from

futurism_foresight, systems_cybernetics

Cited by

2 citations across 2 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Future Wheel
  • (4) The deeper abstraction, articulated by Forrester (1971) in his analysis of social-system counterintuitive behavior, is that most consequential change produces its most important effects indirectly, through chains of consequence whose individual steps may be modest but whose aggregate is substantial.

    This sourceFoundational system-dynamics paper; directly supports the claim that in complex social systems the most important effects of interventions arise indirectly through chains of consequence, with direct effects modest relative to higher-order outcomes.

• Leverage Points
  • Meadows' framework is a qualitative way of surfacing the same insight: system behavior is far more sensitive to some parameters than others

    This sourceFoundational system-dynamics paper establishing that in complex systems the most important effects of interventions typically arise indirectly through feedback chains, with direct effects being modest relative to higher-order outcomes.

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