Cybernetics is a science that studies the mechanisms of communication and control in systems, with an emphasis on circular, feedback, or self-referential processes. It is concerned not so much with the material or components of a system, but with the abstracted relations, functions, and information flows that govern its operation. It focuses on how systems use information in regulating their actions and steering toward their goal states, while counteracting perturbations. Being inherently transdisciplinary, cybernetic modeling can be applied to systems of any kind: physical, technological, biological, ecological, psychological, social, or any combination of those. Second-order cybernetics, in particular, studies the role of the (human) observer in the construction of models of systems and other observers. This self-referential modeling has direct applications to the study of social systems.