How does HCI Understand Human Autonomy and Agency?

Abstract

Human agency and autonomy have always been fundamental concepts in HCI. New developments, including ubiquitous AI and the growing integration of technologies into our lives, make these issues ever pressing, as technologies increase their ability to influence our behaviours and values. However, in HCI understandings of autonomy and agency remain ambiguous. Both concepts are used to describe a wide range of phenomena pertaining to sense-of-control, material independence, and identity. It is unclear to what degree these understandings are compatible, and how they support the development of research programs and practical interventions. We address this by reviewing 30 years of HCI research on autonomy and agency to identify current understandings, open issues, and future directions. From this analysis, we identify ethical issues, and outline key themes to guide future work. We also articulate avenues for advancing clarity and specificity around these concepts, and for coordinating integrative work across different HCI communities. CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing → HCI theory, concepts and models.

Mapping the Design Space of Teachable Social Media Feed Experiences

“…But how exactly do HCI researchers understand agency? Bennett et al [7] surveyed 161 publications across 30+ years of HCI and identified 4 key aspects of agency: self-causality/identity, material/experiential, interaction time-scales, and tradeoff between independence and interdependence. In our work, we draw mostly from the aspect of self-causality/identity 4 , which refers to the level and directness of a user's decision-making and action execution in line with their own values.…”

“…P9[IG]'s statement demonstrated a desire for self-causality, a key aspect of agency defined by the ability to make personal choices and see these decisions reflected in an outcome in line with their values and goals [7]. Participants even prioritized self-causality above content enjoyment: P8[IG] said that while they sometimes enjoyed the algorithm's suggested posts, they "would put it towards the end [of the feed], because it's not something I've decided I want to see."…”

“…In HCI literature, increasing user agency is often discussed as an aspirational ideal [6,7,20,67,70,88,115]. But how exactly do HCI researchers understand agency?…”

“…Given the concerns around implicit learning, many have sought to develop recommender systems with explicit controls [25,36,42,57,65,77,80,86]. Users have reported higher levels of satisfaction [46,55], trust [80], and engagement [42,65] when they were given opportunities to exert control over the system, even when the controls had no impact on the output [7,110]. Examples of explicit controls include thumbs up/down buttons to rate recommended items [37,116], sliders and toggles for adjusting desired content characteristics [44], drag-and-drop topic specifiers [25], keyword critique [86], and manual selection of the recommender algorithm [9,28].…”

“…1) and arrange them on a Miro board. 7 Our study was conducted virtually, 1:1 through Miro and Zoom. We invited each participant onto a copy of the board and interactively co-authored signals with them in Miro while communicating through Zoom.…”