Why Does Our Sense of Agency and Control Matter So Much?

Over 50 years ago, Brehm, (1966) proposed ‘A theory of psychological reactance’ which through empirical studies outlines something profound about our behavior. Brehm identified the conditions under which we experience a profoundly strong compulsion to regain our freedoms. What are the conditions under which this happens? We express our need to reassert ourselves when we feel that our freedoms have been threatened, or lost, or when our options are curtailed, or when we face outcomes that we feel we had no choice over.

Since the ’50s and '60s researchers started a line of work that identified the psychological necessity of feeling a sense of agency (our feeling that we are the ones that bring about the changes we experience in ourselves and the world around us), and a sense of control (our feeling that we are the ones the can reliably determine desirable outcomes or else avoid undesirable ones). Both our agency and control are expressed over our own being, and in our environment, and we need both agency and control in order to function in a healthy way. What is more, the historical legacy of agency and control also came with strongly associated connections to prediction (Kelly, 1955) and, causality (DeCharms, 1968; Kelley, 1971).

How are all these different concepts connected? The basic view proposed early in psychological history and that some researchers, like myself, have extended is that agency and control are embedded in all cognitive operations that interact with conditions of uncertainty because they are essential to reducing uncertainty. What does this mean?

Uncertainty comes in many forms. There are limits to knowing what will happen in future states of the world. There are limits to knowing how people around us are going to behave, and what their intentions are. There are limits in determining the reliability of the information we currently have available to make decisions over. There are more types of uncertainties, but the ones I have listed give enough of a guide as to the vast range that we experience daily.

In order to combat our experiences of uncertainty, we have at our disposal a set of psychological processes that help to massively reduce facing a perpetual state of uncertainty. To start with, our mental operations (memory, perception, reasoning, decision-making, problem-solving, learning) work from basic building blocks, causal representations. Causal representations give us a lot for free. They structure and order our experiences by logically connecting them into causes and effects, and that carries a temporal and spatial code (i.e. when and where the effect will occur after the cause is observed). When these cause and effect associations happen regularly, we can learn to anticipate what might happen next, and more to the point, we can learn to control what happens next, and that enhances our feeling that we have agency. We can see demonstrations of this right from the off.

A baby’s sensory world is an elaborate mess, and it is hard to know what is going on. In other words, the baby’s world is highly uncertain. But, the baby quickly starts to initiate their own causes, they can cry, and gurgle, and blow raspberries. These cases come with predictable effects. A large looming face will appear at some point that will give them something they will like, food, comfort, a smile, a soothing sound. The quicker these causal connections are learned, the quicker the baby can control their world, and that means that they are the masters of producing desirable outcomes almost at will. Things start to get a little more destabilizing for the baby when things change, and the effects (a caring face emerges) don’t always happen when the causes take place (a long wail). This is where some mental adjustment of acceptance is needed that things don’t always happen as you want them to (i.e. learning not to be selfish), or when you want them too (i.e. learning to be patient).

On the whole, our first experiences in the world involve a formation of causal representations that are connected to our actions generating things we like, or at least reducing things we do like (i.e. behaving under the rules of the household to avoid punishment). We develop by navigating the world in this way and build up our experiences of control and our sense of agency from interacting with the world. By causally connecting what we do to the events we later experience we can advance in the world as an autonomous being. We can further our reach by generating goals, that also reduce our uncertainty by projecting us into a future state of the world we might like. We start to plan and coordinate behaviors that incrementally work towards a goal, and maintain it, or even exceed it.

There is enormous variability between us in the general tolerance we have for infringements to our perceived freedoms, and for where those infringements are experienced. In fact, many of us forgo a lot. But human beings share in common something exceptionally psychologically basic. Whatever our threshold for threats to our agency and control, when that threshold is exceeded, we react, and sometimes in ways that society might be deemed as disproportionate to the original infringement.

There are legal and regulatory mechanisms that are designed to protect our rights and freedoms, but even without those systems in place, our psychological operations try to reassert our autonomy in minor as well as major ways. The point of this piece is to highlight the long history in the psychology of research that explores why this is the case, and where this is the case, and there are many things we can still learn from this literature.