Cognitive Biases in Perceiving Feedback Loop Dominance

Abstract

Feedback loop dominance is a key concept to understand structural driving forces of system behavior. In this paper, we propose two kinds of shifts in dominant feedback loops: continuous shifts (CS) and discrete shifts (DS). With the help of questionnaires, we verified three hypotheses regarding cognitive biases in perceiving the shifts in dominant feedback loops: 1) failure in perceiving continuous shifts, 2) tendency of decision making based on discrete shifts, and 3) different perception on the dominant feedback loops between level variables and rate variables. We discussed the implication of these cognitive biases on time delay and timing strategy in decision-making processes.