Imagine the feeling of complete control as you navigate through a task, making decisions and witnessing the outcomes of your actions. This sense of agency, or the subjective experience of being in control of one's actions and their consequences, is a fundamental aspect of human perception and behaviour. But what happens when we engage in joint actions, collaborating with others to achieve a shared goal? Does our sense of agency change in the context of these social interactions? These questions led us to conduct a scientific study aiming to explore the relationship between self-agency and joint-agency.
To delve into this intriguing topic, we recruited 40 participants and had them complete two distinct tasks. The first task, known as the intentional binding task, sought to measure participants' implicit sense of control over their actions. In this task, participants were asked to estimate the interval between their voluntary action (such as pressing a button) and the subsequent outcome (such as a visual or auditory feedback). This measure of intentional binding captures the phenomenon where individuals perceive the time between their actions and their outcomes to be compressed, indicating a heightened sense of control (see image above).
The second task, the joint haptic task, aimed to assess participants' sense of control in a joint action scenario. Here, participants engaged in a task together with with another person, or by themselves. The task involved working together in order to move a pole to either side of a box and required thinking counter-intuitively in order to complete effectively. After each trial they were asked to rate their perceived sense of control on a 7-point Likert scale. This provided insights into the experience of joint agency and how it compared to their experience of self-agency.
The results of our study were intriguing and shed light on the nuances of self-agency and joint-agency. Firstly, participants exhibited the intentional binding effect, perceiving the interval between their actions and outcomes to be significantly shorter in the volitional condition compared to the non-volitional condition. This finding replicated previous research, reaffirming the reliability of the intentional binding phenomenon.
Intriguingly, participants rated their sense of control to be significantly higher when acting independently compared to when acting with another person. This divergence in perceived control suggests that the experience of joint agency may differ from that of self-agency, and interestingly, the two may be inversely related. In other words, when engaged in joint actions, individuals may experience a diminished sense of personal control.
Furthermore, we found a noteworthy negative correlation between intentional binding and control ratings. This indicates that individuals who exhibited higher levels of intentional binding, reflecting a stronger implicit sense of self-agency, tended to report lower levels of perceived control when acting with another person. These findings suggest that implicit measures, such as intentional binding, may provide a more accurate reflection of the experience of agency in joint action, compared to explicit measures.
The findings from our study offer valuable insights into the complex dynamics of self-agency and joint-agency within a social context. They underscore the notion that the experience of agency in joint action may deviate from the experience of self-agency, and that these two experiences may be inversely related. The study also emphasizes the importance of employing both implicit and explicit measures to comprehensively understand the phenomenology of joint action. Implicit measures, such as intentional binding, can reveal subtle aspects of agency perception that explicit measures may not capture fully.
It is important to acknowledge that our study had a relatively small sample size, which may limit the generalizability of the findings. Future research endeavours should aim to replicate these findings using larger samples and explore the relationship between self-agency and joint-agency across various types of joint actions.
In conclusion, the project shed light on the intricate interplay between self-agency and joint-agency. By utilizing measures of intentional binding and control ratings, we gained a deeper understanding of the nuanced experience of agency in joint actions.
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