Mechanisms of social agency

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. By the far least researched instance of Social Agency is in direct social interaction, i.e., where the effect of our action is the corresponding action of another person. For example, someone returning a smile you give as you walk past them. It is currently an open question how direct Social Agency can be conceptualized and, importantly, how it relates to nonsocial Sense of Agency.
The current thesis attempted to bridge that significant gap in extant literature by systematically comparing Social Agency to Sense of Agency, across implicit (i.e., feeling agency) and explicit (i.e., judging agency) measures. Study 1 set out to explore the time course of Temporal Binding (i.e., the perceived compression of time between causally linked actions and their effects; implicit measure) for Social Agency and Sense of Agency. Results demonstrated that Social Agency was greater than Sense of Agency, to a similar degree, across all action-effect intervals. Study 2 investigated if different measurement methods (namely estimating or replicating intervals) showed different sensitivities in detecting Temporal Binding effects. Results confirmed this was the case and that the different sensitivities varied across action-effect intervals. Study 3 sought to systematically investigate the time course of explicit Social Agency and Sense of Agency. Explicit results did not show a social modulation of agency as for the implicit measure, instead Social Agency and Sense of Agency had distinct time courses.
Findings indicate Social Agency may be a distinct construct from nonsocial Sense of Agency. Social-nonsocial differences in agency effects were found across implicit and explicit measures, in laboratory and online settings, and with stimuli of social and nonsocial appearance. Further, implicit and explicit results diverged, suggesting that feeling and judging Social Agency may be dissociated. Exploratory analyses propose imitation (by means of Temporal Similarity, i.e., whether the interaction partner took a similar amount of time to respond as the participant took to act) as a potential underlying mechanism for judging Social Agency.