Feedback Effects

Category: Social and Cultural Issues

The phenomenon of the self-fulfilling prophecy is well known. It is essentially the idea that the prediction of an event makes the event more likely to occur. This is the result of a feedback loop, where the nature of the prediction becomes known or evident to people or circumstances that might cause or prevent the effect in the first place.

A good example of this is the use of polls in elections. If the polls predict a certain outcome, this may have the result of influencing people to stay home, thus ensuring the outcome that had been predicted (Ansolabehere and Iyengar, 1994). This becomes an issue for analytics when polls, trends and other factors are used to project outcomes; "these forecasts aggregate polling data into a concise probability of winning, providing far more conclusive information about the state of a race" (Westwood, et.al., 2020).

At a certain point, these models can be deployed to change behaviour. For example, during the Covid-19 outbreak, projections were employed to encourage the population to follow physical distancing protocols and to influence political decisions. As epidemiologist Ashleigh Tuite says, "The point of a model like this is not to try to predict the future but to help people understand why we may need to change our behaviors or restrict our movements, and also to give people a sense of the sort of effect these changes can have" (Kristof & Thompson, 2020). But as Diakopoulos (2020) argues, "As predictions grow into and beyond their journalistic roots in elections, transparency, uncertainty communication, and careful consideration of the social dynamics of predictive information will be essential to their ethical use."

Examples and Articles

The self-perpetuating social feedback loops in AI-based predictive policing could stop social evolution
Ross Dawson, 2020. "It is nonsense to claim that there is â€œno biasâ€ in algorithms that are built on data about outcomes that may have resulted from bias, in this case either from the judicial system, or the different social systems in which individuals are raised and live their lives." Direct Link

Dangerous Feedback Loops in ML
David Blaszka, Dec 18, 2019. "If we train a model with a given set of features, and we exhibit action based on those features, then those features are now correlated with the outcome and all subsequent models will continue to use them." Direct Link

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