Self-agency

Self-agency, also known as the phenomenal will, is the sense that actions are self-generated. Scientist Benjamin Libet was the first to study it, concluding that brain activity predicts the action before one even has conscious awareness of his or her intention to act upon that action (see Neuroscience of free will). However an empirical study in 2019 shows that readiness potentials (agent-independent brain activity) were absent for deliberate decisions, and preceded arbitrary decisions only.[1]

Daniel Wegner defined the three criteria of self-agency: priority, exclusivity, and consistency. According to Wegner, priority means that an action must be planned before the action is initiated. The interval between the action and the effect is known as the intentional binding. Another criterion for self-agency is exclusivity, which means the effect is due to the person's action and not because of other potential causes for the effect. The last criterion Wegner suggested was consistency. Consistency means that one's planned action must occur as planned.

Internal motor cues are also an indicator in deciding whether an action occurred through self-agency, and can be measured by the generation of movement. If the predicted sensory state matches the actual sensory state, then self-agency has likely occurred. No models that predict agency have ever been proven.

Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel conducted a seminal work on the perception of external causal events. Work on attribution of agency to oneself, however, began with Benjamin Libet's conclusion that brain activity predictive of action precedes conscious awareness of the intention to act, which was later refuted (Neuroscience of free will). Since this demonstration psychologists have been trying to determine the relationship between the sense of agency, also known as the phenomenal will, and actual self-agency.

Daniel Wegner's book The Illusion of Conscious Will (Illusion of control) posits the phenomenal will as the illusory product of post hoc inference. Sense of agency, on this view, is a product of fallible post hoc inference rather than infallible direct access to one's conscious force of will. The attribution of self-agency is made most strongly when the following three conditions are met: priority, exclusivity, and consistency. Thus, one's action must be the exclusive potential cause of the event (exclusivity), one must have had prior thoughts or plans about the action before it occurred (priority), and the action that occurred must match the action that was planned (consistency). An inference of self-agency is thus made under at least three parameters of uncertainty.

On the contrary, neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell believes that self-agency (free will) is real and biologically grounded, not an illusion. He argues that freedom exists in degrees, emerging through evolution as living beings gained more control, self-modeling, and capacity for conscious choice. For Mitchell, agency means the brain’s ability to pause, reflect, and select actions based on goals and values, even within biological and environmental constraints.[2]

Most studies of self-attribution of agency can be categorized as examining one or more of Wegner's three conditions of priority, exclusivity, and consistency. By manipulating these three parameters in systematic ways, researchers have shed light on the role that each plays in self-attributions of agency.

Wegner suggests that temporal order is critical to attributions of self-agency; the agent must have planned or thought about the event/action before it occurred it in order to feel that he has willed it. This is a natural extension of the commonsense notion that a cause cannot occur after its effect. However, a range of findings have shown that, beyond the basic requirement of cause preceding effect, the specifics of the timing are important. Moreover, judgments of timing (and thus priority) can be influenced by variation of other parameters, chiefly Wegner's consistency condition.