In Milgram’s analysis of his famous obedience-to-authority experiments, he used the word “agentic” to mean exactly not self-directed: a person in the agentic state “comes to view themselves as the instrument for carrying out another person’s wishes, and they therefore no longer see themselves as responsible for their actions.”
In this usage, you are an “agent” if you work to implement someone else’s values and decisions rather than authentically holding and making your own. This accords with (for instance) the expression “principal-agent problem”, in which the agent is supposed to be working only for the principal, and the problem arises when it gets its own ideas.
This is in direct contrast to the way “agentic” is often used ’round these parts, which seems to mean something like “effectively interacting with the world to implement any values and decisions, regardless of whose.”
Thanks for the counterexample! I hadn’t heard that usage of ‘agentic’ before, but yeah, Milgram uses ‘agentic’ to mean ‘obedient’ or ‘deferential’. In googling it, I came across this recent paper, which seems to misread Milgram’s usage of the words ‘agentic’ and ‘agency’ in precisely this way. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11263708/
In Milgram’s analysis of his famous obedience-to-authority experiments, he used the word “agentic” to mean exactly not self-directed: a person in the agentic state “comes to view themselves as the instrument for carrying out another person’s wishes, and they therefore no longer see themselves as responsible for their actions.”
In this usage, you are an “agent” if you work to implement someone else’s values and decisions rather than authentically holding and making your own. This accords with (for instance) the expression “principal-agent problem”, in which the agent is supposed to be working only for the principal, and the problem arises when it gets its own ideas.
This is in direct contrast to the way “agentic” is often used ’round these parts, which seems to mean something like “effectively interacting with the world to implement any values and decisions, regardless of whose.”
Thanks for the counterexample! I hadn’t heard that usage of ‘agentic’ before, but yeah, Milgram uses ‘agentic’ to mean ‘obedient’ or ‘deferential’. In googling it, I came across this recent paper, which seems to misread Milgram’s usage of the words ‘agentic’ and ‘agency’ in precisely this way. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11263708/