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.

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Sense of Agency (SoA) is the responsibility felt over our actions and their effects. Social Agency is when SoA occurs in a social context. Whether and how SoA and Social Agency differ remains largely unknown. As non-social interaction is fundamentally governed by the laws of physics and material properties, action-effect contiguity is expected. This is not so when interacting with conspecifics, who we know act under their own volition, at a time of their choosing. Therefore, temporal contingency is a characteristic where social and non-social agency may differ. In three experiments, this exploratory study directly compared the time course of implicit SoA in social and non-social cooperative interactions by varying action-effect intervals. Participants were told they were a) interacting via live webcams with another person (social condition), b) interacting with pre-recorded videos (non-social condition) or c) observing two pre-recorded videos (control condition; Experiment 3). Results across all experiments showed greater implicit agency effects for social compared to non-social conditions through Temporal Binding (i.e., the perceived compression of action-effect interval duration; TB), and this to a proportionally comparable degree across all action-effect intervals. Further, in Experiments 1 and 2, there was consistent social TB throughout, whereas non-social TB decreased during the second half. In Experiment 3, the non-social condition did not differ from control, whereas the social condition did, exhibiting enhanced binding. These findings indicate that implicit Social Agency is enhanced, compared to non-social agency, in cooperative interaction. Social Agency also exhibits TB effects at shorter action-effect intervals than non-social agency.