Put your plan into action: The influence of action plans on agency and responsibility.

Abstract

While action plans and intentions have been considered to be important factors contributing to the personal sense of causation known as agency, the present research is the first to empirically investigate how action plans influence agency. Participants in multiple studies were required to plan or not to plan ahead their actions. Results consistently show that on trials in which participants were required to plan their actions, participants experienced reduced agency compared to trials in which participants were not required to plan their actions. These results were found for both explicit agency paradigms in which participants were asked for their experiences of causation (Studies 1 and 2), as well as in an implicit agency paradigm in which participants were asked to estimate the time between their actions and the consequences of their actions (Study 3). In addition, it was shown that the reduction in agency was smaller when plans and actions were temporally closer together (Study 4). In a final line of experiments we discovered that prior planning similarly reduced both the emotional experience of acting and feelings of responsibility in agents (Studies 5-7). However, the direction of this effect was reversed in observers, for whom cues related to planning by others increased attributions of responsibility toward those others (Study 8).

Sense of Agency as a predictor of risk-taking

“…Martinez et al's (2009) focus on motor actions and active involvement are intriguing given developments in the domain of cognitive psychology. Specifically, over the past two decades there has been great interest in a construct referred to as the sense of agency, which is often defined as the feeling that we cause and control our actions and through those actions change our environment (Damen, van Baaren, Brass, Aarts, & Dijksterhuis, 2015;Marcel, 2003). This sensation of agency seems to come about in an automatic fashion during a day: We pull a cord to turn on the light in and it feels like we caused the light to occur; we raise our hand and see that through our action, we can cause a bus to stop; we even feel a sense of achievement when our bluff pays off at a Poker game.…”

Uptake of planning as a self-regulation strategy

“…) Our results suggest that the act of planning one's actions can both support and thwart the basic need of autonomy. An interesting parallel is research showing that prior action plans can reduce the experience of agency, possibly because action plans could increase the relative automaticity of action (Damen et al, 2015). In our study, the interviewees pointed out that planning can hinder a sense of spontaneity and freedom and the plan itself can start to feel forced and like a duty.…”

Time for Action: Verbal Action Cues Influence Temporal Binding

“…In the domains of temporal binding and agency, time perception is often measured either using the Wundt-clock paradigm (Haggard et al, 2002;Wohlschläger et al, 2003a,b;Moore and Haggard, 2008;Moore et al, 2009a,b) or using the interval judgment task (Engbert et al, , 2008Cravo et al, 2009;Haering and Kiesel, 2014;Damen et al, 2015). In the Wundt-clock paradigm, conclusions about temporal binding are drawn based on the differences with the estimated and actual time events, using a virtual clock interface as an instrument to gauge time, and featuring baseline blocks to be able to correct for individual error.…”