The time course of social and non-social implicit Sense of Agency

Abstract

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.