Summary
An attractor is a state, or set of states, that a system tends to settle into from many different starting points, and to return to after small disturbances. The term comes from the mathematics of dynamical systems. A pendulum slowing to rest at the bottom of its swing is the simplest case, a single point; a resting heartbeat is another, a repeating cycle. ‘Strange’ attractors have a fractal structure and are often chaotic, which makes the system’s path hard to predict.
Applied to societies and cultures, the word is a metaphor. The mathematician John Milnor cautions against the image it suggests: “there is no associated attractive force”.
Rationale
Systems thinkers might call the pull we describe an attractor: people begin to live differently, then “the other environments of our lives can tug us back”. We’ve kept to plainer words, undertow and habit.