Definitions for "Reflexivity"
A post-structuralist concept increasingly used in industrial social geography (Storper, Barnes, Amin) to capture the ability of person to "reflect on their own reflections" and to understand the foundations of one's own knowledge and understanding of one's local environment and context. [Go to source
in its broad meaning this is used to refer to the capacity of researchers to reflect upon their actions and values during research, whether in producing data or writing accounts. More narrowly, ethnomethodologists use the term to describe a property of language, which reflects upon actions to make them appear orderly.
Perhaps better stated as reflectivity, it is the process of self-thought, of thinking about the meaning of events, of interactive situations, of the behavior of self and others in an effort to make sense of the circumstances.
the coreferential relation between a reflexive pronoun and its antecedent
(logic and mathematics) a relation such that it holds between an element and itself
A property exhibited by a relation if R(a,a), for arbitrary . For example, identity is reflexive, since a=a, for arbitrary .
One reason why forecasting, in human affairs, doesn't work very well. If people are expected to behave in a certain way, they're likely to change that way, and defeat (or compound) the forecast. Stock exchanges are a good example of reflexivity, with the investors trying to out-anticipate one another. Bandwagon and underdog effects are also example of reflexivity.