Causality and diagrams for system dynamics

Polarity and causality are important concepts but have not received much attention in the system dynamics literature. The great effort it takes students to properly understand them has motivated this inquiry. In the framework of a conceptual model of interacting with complex systems, several cognitive tasks are proposed. This paper concentrates on one of them that deals with causal links’ polarity. An examination of other approaches that deal with causality and use more or less similar diagram languages shows that usually causality is only very broadly defined, and where it is operationally defined, this is done with respect to events rather than behavior. In contrast to these approaches, system dynamics is about behavior rather than events. We then revisit the traditional criticism of causal loop diagrams and show a way out, but add two new criticisms related to the inability of causal loop diagrams to address behavior: in fact it seems that they are closer to the event-related definition of causality. Also, the impossibility to execute them in simulations means that executable concept-models are to be preferred: they express important information a causal loop diagram cannot represent and on top of it they render the behavioral consequences visible (as opposed to the events). In conclusion, causal loop diagrams should only be used by experienced modelers, and be banned from educational use.