Thinking about what agency / non-agency feels like from inside. Because you can observe other people’s motions, or read their words, but that does not necessarily explain the underlying mental mechanism.
My guess is that to agentic people, the world feels relatively straightforward, with clear cause-and-effect chains. You do the thing, you get the results; nothing too complicated about that. To non-agentic people, the world feels either too complicated, or adversarial. You do the thing, a butterfly flaps its wings, a chaotic outcome happens. Or you do the thing, your opponent notices and does their thing, the effect of your effort is cancelled or subverted. These are the gut-level predictions.
Note that “relatively straightforward” things can still require a lot of time and effort. I am not saying that to agentic people the world feels easy. It’s just that it feels guaranteed that when they spend the time and effort, the expected outcome will happen. And even if there is probability involved, the gods are throwing their dice fairly; you can increase your probability of success by repeated attempts. As opposed to a malicious force of fate watching and thwarting your efforts. The force of fate does not even have to be fully malicious; it could be some kind of mediocrity enforcer, which ensures that things go relatively okay even if you don’t try too hard, but also ensures that your extraordinary efforts will fail.
How do these different perspectives arise? Other people tell us about their experience and beliefs. Other people interpret our own experience as a consequence of either our effort or blind fate—we internalize some of those explanations. People around us may support us with our plans (and thus become multipliers of our agency), or opposed us, e.g. because of envy or just some general status-regulation emotion. This could be more complicated, for example people may support those of our plans they approve of, and sabotage those they don’t approve of, thus shaping us to be kinda productive but not agenty: good at working on someone else’s goals.
These perspectives are further maintained by self-fulfilling prophecies. If you don’t believe you could succeed, you won’t even try… and therefore you won’t succeed. (A more insidious case is that on Monday you feel a surge of optimism and start working on something. On Tuesday your usual mood returns and you give up. Oops, now you have evidence that you fail even if you try.) Your beliefs shape your social bubble—agenty people probably surround themselves with those who are competent and cooperative; non-agenty people surround themselves with other non-agenty people and sometimes even saboteurs because they don’t see the red flags (if every effort is doomed to fail, there is no harm in trying to make people realize that sooner).
Agency is not a global variable, it can be different for different area of life. For example, you can feel in control and be creative in your kitchen, but feel fatalistic about your job; or vice versa. But I suspect that in some ways this generalizes, perhaps by analogy: how you feel about some new thing you have never tried before may depend on the reference class you put it in. For example, you may in general feel good about “technical skills”, bad about “social interaction”, and your attitude about being e.g. a technical leader will depend on whether you perceive it as primarily the former or the latter.
Assuming that this model is approximately correct, the following could be interventions to increase your agency:
keep logs of your efforts and outcomes; make the connection between them more salient
focus on doing things that are actually under your control, perhaps the feeling of being in control will generalize to other parts of your life (for example spend more time learning specific skills, and less time debating politics)
spend more time with cooperative people, and avoid people who discourage you from your plans (even if they offer their “services” as helpful critics)
keep logs of your efforts and outcomes; make the connection between them more salient
This will only work in the case where you are irrationally under-estimating the connection between your efforts and outcomes. It may be that you correctly estimate your actions often fail to lead to the desired outcomes.
I also wonder if a lack of agency itself is rational in some cases. Are people really less agentic than they ought to be, in general? I want to have more agency so I can accomplish X Y and Z. But is a lack of (increased) agency protecting me from instability and chaos that I couldn’t psychologically handle right now? Times when I had less agency, I also feel like I would have been able to handle chaos less. Maybe to increase agency, a person needs the psychological stability and safety to be able to survive a bunch of effortful, risky bets.
I imagine a failure mode where people “dream” about achieving X for a long time, but actually never do any specific steps towards it. Or worse: they do a specific step, but only a little one.
So their conclusion is “despite wanting X and actually working to achieve it, I failed”.
With logs, this could change to “after spending 20 minutes trying to achieve X, nothing”—which suggests the alternative interpretation that 20 minutes is obviously not enough.
.
I agree that lack of agency can protect your slack. Probably also protect you from people who think you are too much active for your status.
How does your system classify people who are very proactive and confident about their actions cause and effect but are wrong and not updating on failure?
Relevant for people who are in that situation. Not relevant for those who want to increase their agency… unless there is a reason to suspect that this might happen to them afterwards.
Thinking about what agency / non-agency feels like from inside. Because you can observe other people’s motions, or read their words, but that does not necessarily explain the underlying mental mechanism.
My guess is that to agentic people, the world feels relatively straightforward, with clear cause-and-effect chains. You do the thing, you get the results; nothing too complicated about that. To non-agentic people, the world feels either too complicated, or adversarial. You do the thing, a butterfly flaps its wings, a chaotic outcome happens. Or you do the thing, your opponent notices and does their thing, the effect of your effort is cancelled or subverted. These are the gut-level predictions.
Note that “relatively straightforward” things can still require a lot of time and effort. I am not saying that to agentic people the world feels easy. It’s just that it feels guaranteed that when they spend the time and effort, the expected outcome will happen. And even if there is probability involved, the gods are throwing their dice fairly; you can increase your probability of success by repeated attempts. As opposed to a malicious force of fate watching and thwarting your efforts. The force of fate does not even have to be fully malicious; it could be some kind of mediocrity enforcer, which ensures that things go relatively okay even if you don’t try too hard, but also ensures that your extraordinary efforts will fail.
How do these different perspectives arise? Other people tell us about their experience and beliefs. Other people interpret our own experience as a consequence of either our effort or blind fate—we internalize some of those explanations. People around us may support us with our plans (and thus become multipliers of our agency), or opposed us, e.g. because of envy or just some general status-regulation emotion. This could be more complicated, for example people may support those of our plans they approve of, and sabotage those they don’t approve of, thus shaping us to be kinda productive but not agenty: good at working on someone else’s goals.
These perspectives are further maintained by self-fulfilling prophecies. If you don’t believe you could succeed, you won’t even try… and therefore you won’t succeed. (A more insidious case is that on Monday you feel a surge of optimism and start working on something. On Tuesday your usual mood returns and you give up. Oops, now you have evidence that you fail even if you try.) Your beliefs shape your social bubble—agenty people probably surround themselves with those who are competent and cooperative; non-agenty people surround themselves with other non-agenty people and sometimes even saboteurs because they don’t see the red flags (if every effort is doomed to fail, there is no harm in trying to make people realize that sooner).
Agency is not a global variable, it can be different for different area of life. For example, you can feel in control and be creative in your kitchen, but feel fatalistic about your job; or vice versa. But I suspect that in some ways this generalizes, perhaps by analogy: how you feel about some new thing you have never tried before may depend on the reference class you put it in. For example, you may in general feel good about “technical skills”, bad about “social interaction”, and your attitude about being e.g. a technical leader will depend on whether you perceive it as primarily the former or the latter.
Assuming that this model is approximately correct, the following could be interventions to increase your agency:
keep logs of your efforts and outcomes; make the connection between them more salient
focus on doing things that are actually under your control, perhaps the feeling of being in control will generalize to other parts of your life (for example spend more time learning specific skills, and less time debating politics)
spend more time with cooperative people, and avoid people who discourage you from your plans (even if they offer their “services” as helpful critics)
This will only work in the case where you are irrationally under-estimating the connection between your efforts and outcomes. It may be that you correctly estimate your actions often fail to lead to the desired outcomes.
I also wonder if a lack of agency itself is rational in some cases. Are people really less agentic than they ought to be, in general? I want to have more agency so I can accomplish X Y and Z. But is a lack of (increased) agency protecting me from instability and chaos that I couldn’t psychologically handle right now? Times when I had less agency, I also feel like I would have been able to handle chaos less. Maybe to increase agency, a person needs the psychological stability and safety to be able to survive a bunch of effortful, risky bets.
I imagine a failure mode where people “dream” about achieving X for a long time, but actually never do any specific steps towards it. Or worse: they do a specific step, but only a little one.
So their conclusion is “despite wanting X and actually working to achieve it, I failed”.
With logs, this could change to “after spending 20 minutes trying to achieve X, nothing”—which suggests the alternative interpretation that 20 minutes is obviously not enough.
.
I agree that lack of agency can protect your slack. Probably also protect you from people who think you are too much active for your status.
How does your system classify people who are very proactive and confident about their actions cause and effect but are wrong and not updating on failure?
Agenty, but… dysfunctional.
Relevant for people who are in that situation. Not relevant for those who want to increase their agency… unless there is a reason to suspect that this might happen to them afterwards.