The Affective Side of Agency
Addressing the question of how affect and agency are related.
Updated March 25, 2026 | Reviewed by Tyler Woods
At every moment, there is something a person/animal is trying to do (a goal) and a reason they are trying to do it (a context for that goal). In the Affect Management Framework (AMF; Haynes-LaMotte, 2025 ), contextualized goals are constantly shifting in the brain, informed by the senses of the world and the body ( vision , hearing , touch , taste , smell , interoception , and proprioception ) as well as the semantic factors of meaningfulness , certainty , and agency .
Because our affect is attached to our goals, what contextualized goals we take on and how and when we choose to pursue or relinquish across similar situations can be described as different affect management policies .
Affective Side of Agency
In this post, I hope to expand upon the affective side of agency as described in the AMF:
Rather than serving passive or purely veridical computational purposes, the brain exists to promote acting in meaningful ways upon the environment (Parr et al., 2022; Sterling & Laughlin, 2023; Thornton & Tamir, 2024). As part of implementing hierarchical Bayesian estimation (Clark, 2015; Clark, 2023), the brain must decide at each moment which goals are worth pursuing and which are not. Alongside certainty and meaningfulness, a sense of agency, or control of one’s effects on the environment, is necessary in making these decisions. Efference signals, which allow animals to anticipate and detect the sensory effects of their own actions, are believed to be a phylogenetically basal trait (Jékely, Godfrey-Smith, & Keijzer, 2021; Godfrey-Smith, 2016), and may even be a fundamental building block of conscious experience (Vallortigara, 2021; Wen & Imamizu, 2023). Consistent with these ideas, research with humans suggests that a sense of agency is key to motivation and affect management.
For example, people are willing to give up material rewards in order to retain a sense of agency over their losses and wins in decisional tasks, an effect which could not be accounted for by overconfidence in one’s abilities nor a lack of information, and instead appears to reflect the intrinsic value of choice or agency in the brain (Bobadilla-Suarez, Sunstein, & Sharot, 2017; Owens, Grossman, & Fackler, 2014).
Agency and Task Performance
Across other contexts, studies have found that people tend to under-delegate rather than over-delegate despite the costs to instrumental goals (Bartling, Fehr, & Herz, 2013; Fehr, Herz, & Wilkening, 2012), and tend to overvalue their own creations and ideas (Franke, Schreier, & Kaiser, 2010; Koster et al., 2015; Norton, Mochon, & Ariely, 2012). Similarly, psychological reactance (Brehm, 1966; Brehm & Brehm, 2013), the mechanism presumed to be responsible for phenomena like reverse psychology (Macdonald, Nail, & Harper, 2011), involves reestablishing a sense of personal control by orienting oneself opposed to the environment when perceiving a threat to one’s agency from that environment (Steindl, Jonas, Sittenthaler, Traut-Mattausch, & Greenberg, 2015).
In a series of studies by Eitam, Kennedy, and Higgins (2013), participants received varying levels of control feedback information in a visual task. They found that control feedback enhanced task performance and that this effect persisted even after providing additional outcome feedback about their level of success. Interestingly, in the third study, this control feedback effect became weaker when there was a time delay, with a significant drop-off in effect when the visual feedback was delayed by only 300 milliseconds after the response. A pair of studies by Karsh and Eitam (2015a) then extended these findings by showing that people frequently engage in actions that provide control feedback even when those actions hinder, rather than cohere with, task performance. This suggests that receiving immediate visual feedback signifying control over one’s environment has a reward value over and above its relevance to the goal in question, and is congruent with research showing that people find inherent value in choice beyond its instrumental value (Leotti & Delgato, 2011). Eitam and colleagues (2013) describe the concept of choice as “a kind of one-shot action-outcome contingency manipulation” (p. 8) that may, in itself, provide the chooser with a sense of agency.
However, just like meaningfulness and certainty, at least a part of the sense of agency operates outside of conscious awareness. For example, a series of five studies by Karsh, Eitam, Mark, and Higgins (2016) investigated the effects of a sense of agency at different levels of conscious awareness on performance in a perceptual task. In line with the predictions of their control-based response selection framework (CBRSF; Karsh & Eitam, 2015b), they found that, whereas participants’ implicit sense of agency influenced the speed of responding (i.e., decision-making that happens largely below conscious awareness), their explicit sense of agency was related to their frequency of responding, a variable presumed to be under greater conscious awareness.
Using a different experimental design, Penton, Wang, Coll, Catmur, and Bird (2018) found that participants were slower to respond to the task when there was less sense of contingency between participant responses and visual feedback. Another study by Hemed, Karsh, Mark-Tavger, and Eitam (2022) found that, consistent with the CBRSF, the questions of whether and broadly how to act were influenced by a conscious sense of agency, whereas response speed was only influenced by implicit sensorimotor processes, similar to the findings of Karsh and colleagues (2016).
Two Sources of Agency in the Brain
In total, these studies indicate that, as outlined by the CBRSF, there are at least two sources of a sense of agency in the brain, with one coming from a more abstract, conceptual system that appears in conscious cognition (which corresponds to semantic processes in the AMF), and one coming from sensorimotor processes that are generally less a part of conscious awareness (e.g., proprioceptive signals, subliminal dynamics of visual processing).
In summary, across studies using different methodologies, people are motivated by a sense of agency beyond its connection with goal-related outcomes. Furthermore, research suggests that brains are dedicated to tracking a sense of agency at varying levels of conscious awareness. Similar to certainty and meaningfulness, the subjective value of agency is generally positive but is contextually determined. For instance, people report hoping for worse news if it means they will not have to make a difficult decision (Barasz & Hagerty, 2021), forgo medical screening that would theoretically give them more agency over their health (Golman & Lowenstein, 2018), and feel emotionally stressed in high-stakes moral decision-making (Greene, Sommerville, Nystrom, Darley, & Cohen, 2001).
In this way, both major approaches to agency – tightly holding onto it and relinquishing it (i.e., internal vs. external locus of control ; Rotter, 1966)—can impact how people feel and are therefore considered in the AMF to be different types of affect management strategies.
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