On The Nature of Experiencing Self‐Agency: The Role of Goals and Primes in Inferring Oneself as the Cause of Behavior

Weiden, Anouk van der; Aarts, Henk; Ruys, Kirsten I.

doi:10.1111/spc3.12075

Cited by 15 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 106 publications

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“…Hence, it will also be important to investigate long-term effects of these types of interventions ( Albarracin and Wyer, 2001 ). This long-term effect could be enhanced by giving people a sense of agency (i.e., allowing people to perceive themselves as the causal agents of behavioral outcomes) which could motivate them further to achieve a sustainable goal ( van der Weiden et al, 2013 ).…”

Section: Further Considerationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Environmentally Sustainable Food Consumption: A Review and Research Agenda From a Goal-Directed Perspective

et al. 2020

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The challenge of convincing people to change their eating habits toward more environmentally sustainable food consumption (ESFC) patterns is becoming increasingly pressing. Food preferences, choices and eating habits are notoriously hard to change as they are a central aspect of people's lifestyles and their socio-cultural environment. Many people already hold positive attitudes toward sustainable food, but the notable gap between favorable attitudes and actual purchase and consumption of more sustainable food products remains to be bridged. The current work aims to (1) present a comprehensive theoretical framework for future research on ESFC, and (2) highlight behavioral solutions for environmental challenges in the food domain from an interdisciplinary perspective. First, starting from the premise that food consumption is deliberately or unintentionally directed at attaining goals, a goal-directed framework for understanding and influencing ESFC is built. To engage in goal-directed behavior, people typically go through a series of sequential steps. The proposed theoretical framework makes explicit the sequential steps or hurdles that need to be taken for consumers to engage in ESFC. Consumers need to positively value the environment, discern a discrepancy between the desired versus the actual state of the environment, opt for action to reduce the experienced discrepancy, intend to engage in behavior that is expected to bring them closer to the desired end state, and act in accordance with their intention. Second, a critical review of the literature on mechanisms that underlie and explain ESFC (or the lack thereof) in high-income countries is presented and integrated into the goal-directed framework. This contribution thus combines a topdown conceptualization with a bottom-up literature review; it identifies and discusses factors that might hold people back from ESFC and interventions that might promote ESFC; and it reveals knowledge gaps as well as insights on how to encourage

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Section: Further Considerationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Environmentally Sustainable Food Consumption: A Review and Research Agenda From a Goal-Directed Perspective

et al. 2020

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“…In situations with multiple possible outcomes and multiple possible agents, motor predictions regarding the actual outcome can no longer reliably guide feelings of self-agency and consequently, retrospective cognitive inferences of agency become important (Aarts et al, 2005;van der Weiden et al, 2013a;Wegner, 2002). The cognitive inference model assumes that people infer self-agency based on knowledge and beliefs regarding the effects (e.g., laughter) of their actions (e.g., making a joke) before they perform them, and regarding the influence of other factors (e.g., someone who is imitating you in a funny way).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Abnormal agency experiences in schizophrenia patients: Examining the role of psychotic symptoms and familial risk

Prikken

Weiden

Renes

et al. 2017

Psychiatry Research

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“…Building on the notion that belief in free will often co-occurs with the pursuit of goal-directed behavior, Aarts and van den Bos (2011) tested the possibility that free will beliefs are associated with implicit processing of action-outcome relations underlying goal-directed behavior. The authors compared participants with either strong or weak dispositional free will beliefs in two different tasks that tapped into implicit aspects of agentic experience: (1) an intentional binding task, which measures the perceptual attraction of an intentional action and its sensory outcomes in terms of time, and (2) an action-outcome priming task, which assesses agency inferences resulting from a match between primed and actual outcomes (see Moore and Obhi, 2012 ; van der Weiden et al, 2013 ; for reviews). Aarts and van den Bos (2011) found that strong dispositional free will beliefs were associated with greater intentional binding and a stronger influence of primes on agency inferences.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Priming determinist beliefs diminishes implicit (but not explicit) components of self-agency

et al. 2014

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Weakening belief in the concept of free will yields pronounced effects upon social behavior, typically promoting selfish and aggressive over pro-social and helping tendencies. Belief manipulations have furthermore been shown to modulate basic and unconscious processes involved in motor control and self-regulation. Yet, to date, it remains unclear how high-level beliefs can impact such a wide range of behaviors. Here, we tested the hypothesis that priming disbelief in free will diminishes the sense of agency, i.e., the intrinsic sensation of being in control of one’s own actions. To this end, we measured participants’ implicit and explicit self-agency under both anti-free will and control conditions. Priming disbelief in free will reduced implicit but not explicit components of agency. These findings suggest that free will beliefs have a causal impact on the pre-reflective feeling of being in control of one’s actions, and solidify previous proposals that implicit and explicit agency components tap into distinct facets of action awareness.

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On The Nature of Experiencing Self‐Agency: The Role of Goals and Primes in Inferring Oneself as the Cause of Behavior

Cited by 15 publications

References 106 publications

Environmentally Sustainable Food Consumption: A Review and Research Agenda From a Goal-Directed Perspective

Environmentally Sustainable Food Consumption: A Review and Research Agenda From a Goal-Directed Perspective

Abnormal agency experiences in schizophrenia patients: Examining the role of psychotic symptoms and familial risk

Priming determinist beliefs diminishes implicit (but not explicit) components of self-agency

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