What is Reflexivity?

Reflexivity describes a situation where observers of a system are also participants in it, so that their beliefs and actions feed back into and change the very system they are observing. Financial markets are a well-known example: investor expectations about prices can influence the prices themselves.

For systems thinkers, reflexivity is a caution against treating any social system as a fixed, external object to be studied from a neutral distance, since the act of measuring, forecasting, or intervening in a social system is itself a feedback loop that can alter the system's future behavior.