Sense of Self-Agency and Other-Agency Under Social Interaction Contexts

Abstract

Sense of agency refers to the subjective perception of initiating and controlling one’s actions and their consequences within both individual and social contexts. It encompasses not only self-agency, where individuals feel in control of their actions from a first-person perspective, but also other-agency, where individuals comprehend the control exerted by others over their actions through mentalizing. This study explores the characteristics of implicit self-agency and other-agency in social interaction contexts using an interval estimation paradigm. The results indicate that voluntary actions lead to a temporal binding effect in individual contexts. Moreover, the reported intervals generated by the self in individual contexts are shorter than those in human-human and human-robot interaction contexts, suggesting a reduction in self-agency within social interaction contexts. Conversely, temporal intervals in human-human interactions are reported to be shorter than those in individual and human-robot interactions, indicating that other-agency remains unaffected. These findings highlight the distinct effects of social interaction contexts on self-agency and other-agency, offering novel empirical insights into human interaction behavior.

Keywords:

• Self-agency
• other-agency
• temporal binding effect
• human-human interaction
• human-robot interaction

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Research involving human participants and/or animals

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Additional information

Funding

This research was financially supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (62061136001, 32071055).

Notes on contributors

Guanhua Huang

Guanhua Huang received his master’s degree from the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2022. Currently, he is the head of R&D products for a medical device company. His research interests include cognition and consciousness.

Qiuhong Shi

Qiuhong Shi, currently a Master student of the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, majors in the Psychology of Artificial Intelligence. She got 10 years of working experience in IOT and Robotics industry. Her research interests include HMI (Human–Machine Interaction) and HCAI (Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence).

Shuang Zheng

Shuang Zheng received her master’s degree from the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2022. Currently, she is a research assistant in Beihang University. Her research interests include sense of agency and facial expression recognition.

Ke Zhao

Ke Zhao received his PhD degree from the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in 2014. Currently, he is an associate professor of Cognitive Psychology. His research interests include cognitive and emotional neuroscience, focusing on sense of agency and facial expression recognition.

Xiaolan Fu

Xiaolan Fu (Member, IEEE) received the PhD degree from the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in 1990. Currently, she is a senior researcher at Cognitive Psychology. Her research interests include visual and computational cognition: (1) attention and perception, (2) learning and memory, and (3) affective computing.