Snowball effect
The snowball effect describes redensartlich create gaining chain reactions , mostly in the social area. The term is derived from the rolling and growing snowball , which in the mountains can possibly take on avalanche dimensions. So z. B. a crooked look at the dispute and this grows into a mass brawl . The classic metaphor describes the spread of a rumor . The chain letter and the fraudulent snowball system also make use of the snowball effect.
Demarcation
- In contrast to the domino effect , the snowball effect is associated with increasing intensity. This means that the snowball effect becomes larger and larger as time goes on. The domino effect, on the other hand, is mostly about events of the same or similar intensity that result from one another.
- In contrast to the snowball effect, in which small effects amplify themselves linearly or exponentially via a chain reaction and thus specify at least a rough direction, the butterfly effect describes the complete and unpredictable change of an entire system through a small change in the initial conditions. Self-reinforcing effects also play a role here, but the small change can completely reverse the direction of the system. In addition, the concept of the butterfly effect is not applied in a social context, but mostly to dynamic physical processes.
- In cryptography, the avalanche effect is the property of an algorithm (e.g. a block cipher or hash function ) to generate a completely different output with a minimal change in the input. Behind this is the formal information theory claim that with a change of input bits , each bit of the output with a probability of 50% has to change. Despite the etymological proximity to the snowball effect and at first glance appears to "overlapping" definitions so it is in both terms not to synonyms .