Social Agency as a continuum

Abstract

Sense of Agency, the phenomenology associated with causing one's own actions and corresponding effects, is a cornerstone of human experience. Social Agency can be defined as the Sense of Agency experienced in any situation in which the effects of our actions are related to a conspecific. This can be implemented as the other's reactions being caused by our action, joint action modulating our Sense of Agency, or the other's mere social presence influencing our Sense of Agency. It is currently an open question how such Social Agency can be conceptualized and how it relates to its nonsocial variant. This is because, compared with nonsocial Sense of Agency, the concept of Social Agency has remained oversimplified and underresearched, with disparate empirical paradigms yielding divergent results. Reviewing the empirical evidence and the commonalities and differences between different instantiations of Social Agency, we propose that Social Agency can be conceptualized as a continuum, in which the degree of cooperation is the key dimension that determines our Sense of Agency, and how it relates to nonsocial Sense of Agency. Taking this perspective, we review how the different factors that typically influence Sense of Agency affect Social Agency, and in the process highlight outstanding empirical questions within the field. Finally, concepts from wider research areas are discussed in relation to the ecological validity of Social Agency paradigms, and we provide recommendations for future methodology.

Keywords: Cooperation; Joint action; Sense of Agency; Social Agency; Social interaction.

Fig. 1

Modified representation of the Pfister et al. (2014) trial sequence for Experiments 1 and 2 (grey section Experiment 2 only), showing timing information, actions according to actor roles, and tones

Fig. 2

Depiction of Social Agency as a continuum of cooperation with enhanced or diminished Sense of Agency effects in comparison to nonsocial agency. Each type of Social Agency that can be induced in an interaction is shown as a different colour along the continuum (e.g. ‘we’ agency as yellow). The colours deliberately merge to illustrate that these types of Social Agency are not clearly defined categories; the manipulation of one of more interaction elements can shift the kind of agency induced from one to another