Agency (sociology)

In social science, agency is the capacity of individuals to act independently and to make their own free choices. By contrast, structure is those factors of influence (such as social class, religion, gender, ethnicity, ability, customs, etc.) that determine or limit an agent and his or her decisions. The relative difference in influences from structure and agency is debated – it is unclear to what extent a person's actions are constrained by social systems.

One's agency is one's independent capability or ability to act on one's will. This ability is affected by the cognitive belief structure which one has formed through one's experiences, and the perceptions held by the society and the individual, of the structures and circumstances of the environment one is in and the position they are born into. Disagreement on the extent of one's agency often causes conflict between parties, e.g. parents and children.

The concept of agency has existed since the Enlightenment. René Descartes' phrase Cogito ergo sum stated that anyone who could think is an agent, and any agent capable of knowing that it can think was a subject. Immanuel Kant expanded on this theory by stating that the only way to truly become self-aware is to engage with the outside world. These definitions of agency remained mostly unquestioned until the nineteenth century, when philosophers began arguing that the choices humans make are dictated by forces beyond their control. For example, Karl Marx argued that in modern society, people were controlled by the ideologies of the bourgeoisie, and Friedrich Nietzsche argued that man made choices based on his own selfish desires, or the "Will to Power."

Thinkers have only just begun to empirically explore the factors that cause a person to feel as though they are in control — particularly, in control of a physical action. Social psychologist Daniel Wegner discusses how an "illusion of control" may cause people to take credit for events that they did not cause. These false judgements of agency occur especially under stress, or when the results of the event were ones that the individual desired (also see self serving biases). Janet Metcalfe and her colleagues have identified other possible heuristics, or rules of thumb, that people use to make judgements of agency. These include a "forward model" in which the mind actually compares two signals to judge agency: the feedback from a movement, but also an "efferent copy" — a mental prediction of what that movement feedback should feel like. Top down processing (understanding of a situation, and other possible explanations) can also influence judgements of agency. Furthermore, the relative importance of one heuristic over another seems to change with age.

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