Doris offers a thought-provoking and persuasive account of the interrelations of self, agency, and moral action. We especially welcome its emphasis on social, dialogical, and evolved origins of agency, which echo to important developments in the field (Voyer & Franks Reference Voyer and Franks2014), suggesting that the sense of self, in arising from agency, is an evolved and cultural construction (Franks Reference Franks2014). Its broadly pluralistic approach to determining which aspects of context have a role in this process, and how, is congenial to an empirically grounded approach to agency and the self. However, we suggest that the account is incomplete in three significant ways.
First, Doris assumes dual systems – implicit and explicit in their representations and processes – that govern moral judgement, behaviour, and explanation. The former involve non-conscious, rapid, and relatively effort-free processes and judgements whose reasons are not open to introspective access. The latter involve conscious, slower, effortful processes and explanations that are framed in terms of narratives based on a person's values (in particular, as they are reflected in and debated through dialogical processes with those around them). This is, of course, a widely held view (e.g., Kahneman Reference Kahneman2011b; Stanovich Reference Stanovich2011). Doris does concede that this may be incomplete, that there may be representations and processes intermediate between these levels. We concur with the role for implicit and explicit systems, and following Voyer and Franks (Reference Voyer and Franks2014), we suggest an intermediate level is interpolated between them.
To see this, it is important to note what Doris's account of agency does not attempt to do. Doris focuses on what we might call “revealed” agency, by analogy with revealed preferences in economics: agency as revealed through the values that a person expresses through the actions they perform. We agree that the fine-grain of agency and responsibility should be connected to actions under the relevant values. However, we suggest that such a behavioural characterisation misses part of the puzzle about agency, which is that it is also felt or experienced, processed, and perhaps represented as an agentic state per se.
We suggest that it is important to provide an account of such experiences of agency, because they are a large part of the psychology of agency, they figure significantly in people's own normative explanations and justifications, and connect directly to the sense of self. Agency is simultaneously first-person and second- and third-person: It is a first-person subjective experience (e.g., the feeling that “I did this”) or a second-person experience (e.g., “we did this”: see below), which is grasped in part via dialogue with third-person views of others (e.g., “people do this”).
For the sense of agency, the sharp distinction between explicit and implicit processes is incomplete: Voyer and Franks (Reference Voyer and Franks2014) suggest that three different modalities are involved in its assessment: implicit (a “feeling” of agency), intermediate (a “perception”), and explicit (a “judgment”). The intermediate level of self-related processing is in line with recent developments in the field of cultural neuroscience (Han & Humphreys Reference Han and Humphreys2016; Sasaki & Kim Reference Sasaki and Kim2017). It may involve composing complex plans and actions from less complex ones but does not, in itself, require conscious awareness of that agency (e.g., holding a cup whilst someone else is pouring a drink in it). The three modalities are represented in different mental formats, each with their own characteristic form of intention. Cues about whether one is or should be viewed as the agent of an action are based on affordances (Dreyfus Reference Dreyfus and Hollinger1985; Gibson Reference Gibson, Shaw and Bransford1977; Franks Reference Franks2011; Kitayama & Imada Reference Kitayama, Imada, Maehr, Karabenick and Urdan2008), informational relations which may be based on evolved, perceptual, social, and cultural foundations. Affordances related to one modality may input to processing another, and the different modalities may generate mismatching conclusions about agency for a given action. Whereas for Doris the possible mismatch between levels is worrisome (suggesting defeaters for explanations for action), for our account it motivates a key form of dialogue between different cues for agency regarding an action.
This has two implications for Doris's view. The first is that the sense of agency – and its absence, e.g., institutionalisation, anaesthesia, extreme conspiracy theory belief (Franks et al. Reference Franks, Bangerter and Bauer2013; Reference Franks, Bangerter, Bauer, Hall and Noort2017) – is a situation-dependent state, which often takes characteristic forms in different social and cultural environments, so that in aggregation it can appear to be a stable trait related to particular ways of acting. It is important in explaining and justifying behaviour, though its normative evidential status is fraught. The second is that agency, as connected to subjective experience, is more various than Doris suggests.
This leads to our second point: Doris's social account of agency is not social enough. He focuses on social causes and consequences of agency, but does not take into consideration the social nature of its experience, which in turn can affect its expression. He considers “I” as a possible agent, and we concur with his broadly dialogical account of this. He does not, however, consider another important form of agency – “we” or joint/shared agency. People engage daily in many forms of joint actions and projects, ranging from walking together, sitting side by side on a commuter train, having dinner, playing football, etc. In these cases there is a plural subject, a sense or experience that “we” are the agent. Indeed many of the cases of moral decision making that form the focus of empirical studies on which Doris draws are, in their real-world manifestations, more properly thought of as cases of joint or shared moral decision making, for instance two surgeons operating on a patient and having to make a potentially life-threatening decision. Ultimately these are decisions that are made with the implicit or explicit belief that real or imagined others concur or demur.
There are complicated debates on how to understand joint agency, for example its relations to individual agency (e.g., Gilbert Reference Gilbert1989; Searle Reference Searle1995; Tuomela Reference Tuomela1995). On the one hand, there is the possibility that joint agency reduces to combinations of individual agency (“we”=“I am doing this, and so are you,” that is, we are both performing individual actions simultaneously). On the other, joint agency might be irreducible, sui generis (“we” just=“we are doing this,” without the possibility to separate individual actions concurring to the desired outcome). The possibility of such different senses of “we” has a long history in social and cognitive psychology (e.g., Brewer & Gardner Reference Brewer and Gardner1996; Swann & Buhrmester Reference Swann and Buhrmester2015; Tomasello Reference Tomasello2009; Turner et al. Reference Turner, Hogg, Oakes, Reicher and Wetherell1987). Whether joint agency does reduce for all or some states, it is likely that these two forms of joint agency generate qualitatively different experiences of agency.
There are two implications to note here. One is the relation to different moral sentiments in judging and cooperating with others. Bloom (Reference Bloom2016) has recently taken aim at the widespread notion that empathy is intrinsically morally valuable, an inevitable precursor to prosociality and cooperation. Empathy, the sense of sharing another's experience (and sense of agency in relation to external events), he argues, can in fact diminish moral action. By contrast, sympathy, the sense of being aware of another's experience as different from one's own (and of their differential agency in relation to external events), may be more likely to generate moral action. When they issue in joint remedial action against the suffering of the other, we suggest that these different states lead to different morally valenced forms of agency. Empathy reflects irreducible “we”: both have the same experiences, the same sense of agency and the same capacity and responsibility for remediation. Sympathy reflects reducible “we”: the “I” and the “you” are separable and represented and experienced as separate, with separate but possibly interconnected capacity and responsibility for remediation. In sum, sympathy reflects our reducible perspective on shared agency (“we”=“I am doing this, and so are you”), whilst empathy reflects our suggested irreducible perspective on shared agency (“we” just=“we are doing this”). The second implication is that the interpretation of joint and individual agency, and their relative preponderance in explanations of behaviour, are themselves related to different cultural tendencies to view oneself as more or less interdependent or independent on others regarding action and moral judgement.
This leads to our third and final point. Doris proposes that a dialogue of values generates agency and the sense of self, and notes that this relates to the wider culture in which the person lives and acts such that the values that come to characterise the narrative of the self may differ from one culture to another. We concur, but suggest again that this underplays the significance of the social and the cultural context.
Culture plays a key role in the nature and functioning of the values, which Doris suggests are constitutive of agency. Values vary across cultures, and behaviours that are prescribed in one culture may be proscribed in another (e.g., Schwartz & Sagie Reference Schwartz and Sagie2000). The degree to which those values are experienced as constraining and directing, also varies: cultures differ in “tightness” and “looseness” (Gelfand Reference Gelfand2012; Uz Reference Uz2015). Hence, the degrees of freedom in the dialogues that define agency will also vary between cultures: For a given action, it may range from a top-down imposition of widespread and tightly adhered-to norms to an interplay of equals. This has implications for agency at all three modalities, including the narratives generated to ascribe or avoid responsibility in the context or morality judgements and attributions. Voyer and Franks (Reference Voyer and Franks2014) suggest that the dialogue between individual and social and cultural affordances results in a sense of individual and/or shared agency for a given action. Where a similar outcome arises across actions or settings, this results in an increasingly stable or recurrent sense of agency, leading to patterns of self-construal, which can vary with culture (Markus & Kitayama Reference Markus and Kitayama1991).
In this way, culture also significantly influences the experience of agency itself. Above we noted the important distinctions between individual and shared/joint agency and the fact that Doris focuses only on individual agency. There has been a flourishing tradition in social psychology concerning self-construal (Markus & Kitayama Reference Markus and Kitayama1991; Reference Markus, Kitayama, Berman and Berman2003; Reference Markus and Kitayama2010) – the extent to which people in different cultures vary in the way they represent their sense of who they are by reference to social relationships and group memberships. Markus and Kitayama differentiate between two general, culturally sanctioned ways in which people construe who they are. First, independence is concerned with viewing oneself as separate from others, striving to achieve personal desires, being unique and consistent. Second, interdependence is concerned with viewing oneself as connected to others, striving to maintain harmony, to cohere in one's in-group and with the situation. This offers an individual-level counterpart to broad cultural differences in values between individualism and collectivism. Importantly, Markus and Kitayama note that the distinction ramifies for culturally variable normative models of agency: Independence prompts a model that takes the individual to be the key agent, whereas interdependence prompts a model of conjoint agency (Markus & Kitayama Reference Markus and Kitayama2010). Voyer and Franks (Reference Voyer and Franks2014) further suggest that the formation of a dominant independent self-construal is the result of repeated actions requiring predominantly individual agency, whilst the formation of a dominant interdependent self-construal is the result of repeated actions requiring predominantly shared/joint agency. These models suggest different normative tendencies towards construing challenges and opportunities as requiring joint agency (“we”) of various kinds, or individual agency. Again, different cultures not only offer different values to enter dialogues for agency, but also qualitative differences in the ways those dialogues function, and their expected outcomes, with important consequences for agency.
To conclude, Doris offers a persuasive yet partial picture of the origin of agency and its relation to self. We applaud his view of the role of social factors and dialogical relations in generating agency. However, we suggest it underplays the importance of individual and shared/joint experience of agency and the complexity and extent of the impact of the social and cultural environments in which these experiences take place.
You have
Access
Doris offers a thought-provoking and persuasive account of the interrelations of self, agency, and moral action. We especially welcome its emphasis on social, dialogical, and evolved origins of agency, which echo to important developments in the field (Voyer & Franks Reference Voyer and Franks2014), suggesting that the sense of self, in arising from agency, is an evolved and cultural construction (Franks Reference Franks2014). Its broadly pluralistic approach to determining which aspects of context have a role in this process, and how, is congenial to an empirically grounded approach to agency and the self. However, we suggest that the account is incomplete in three significant ways.
First, Doris assumes dual systems – implicit and explicit in their representations and processes – that govern moral judgement, behaviour, and explanation. The former involve non-conscious, rapid, and relatively effort-free processes and judgements whose reasons are not open to introspective access. The latter involve conscious, slower, effortful processes and explanations that are framed in terms of narratives based on a person's values (in particular, as they are reflected in and debated through dialogical processes with those around them). This is, of course, a widely held view (e.g., Kahneman Reference Kahneman2011b; Stanovich Reference Stanovich2011). Doris does concede that this may be incomplete, that there may be representations and processes intermediate between these levels. We concur with the role for implicit and explicit systems, and following Voyer and Franks (Reference Voyer and Franks2014), we suggest an intermediate level is interpolated between them.
To see this, it is important to note what Doris's account of agency does not attempt to do. Doris focuses on what we might call “revealed” agency, by analogy with revealed preferences in economics: agency as revealed through the values that a person expresses through the actions they perform. We agree that the fine-grain of agency and responsibility should be connected to actions under the relevant values. However, we suggest that such a behavioural characterisation misses part of the puzzle about agency, which is that it is also felt or experienced, processed, and perhaps represented as an agentic state per se.
We suggest that it is important to provide an account of such experiences of agency, because they are a large part of the psychology of agency, they figure significantly in people's own normative explanations and justifications, and connect directly to the sense of self. Agency is simultaneously first-person and second- and third-person: It is a first-person subjective experience (e.g., the feeling that “I did this”) or a second-person experience (e.g., “we did this”: see below), which is grasped in part via dialogue with third-person views of others (e.g., “people do this”).
For the sense of agency, the sharp distinction between explicit and implicit processes is incomplete: Voyer and Franks (Reference Voyer and Franks2014) suggest that three different modalities are involved in its assessment: implicit (a “feeling” of agency), intermediate (a “perception”), and explicit (a “judgment”). The intermediate level of self-related processing is in line with recent developments in the field of cultural neuroscience (Han & Humphreys Reference Han and Humphreys2016; Sasaki & Kim Reference Sasaki and Kim2017). It may involve composing complex plans and actions from less complex ones but does not, in itself, require conscious awareness of that agency (e.g., holding a cup whilst someone else is pouring a drink in it). The three modalities are represented in different mental formats, each with their own characteristic form of intention. Cues about whether one is or should be viewed as the agent of an action are based on affordances (Dreyfus Reference Dreyfus and Hollinger1985; Gibson Reference Gibson, Shaw and Bransford1977; Franks Reference Franks2011; Kitayama & Imada Reference Kitayama, Imada, Maehr, Karabenick and Urdan2008), informational relations which may be based on evolved, perceptual, social, and cultural foundations. Affordances related to one modality may input to processing another, and the different modalities may generate mismatching conclusions about agency for a given action. Whereas for Doris the possible mismatch between levels is worrisome (suggesting defeaters for explanations for action), for our account it motivates a key form of dialogue between different cues for agency regarding an action.
This has two implications for Doris's view. The first is that the sense of agency – and its absence, e.g., institutionalisation, anaesthesia, extreme conspiracy theory belief (Franks et al. Reference Franks, Bangerter and Bauer2013; Reference Franks, Bangerter, Bauer, Hall and Noort2017) – is a situation-dependent state, which often takes characteristic forms in different social and cultural environments, so that in aggregation it can appear to be a stable trait related to particular ways of acting. It is important in explaining and justifying behaviour, though its normative evidential status is fraught. The second is that agency, as connected to subjective experience, is more various than Doris suggests.
This leads to our second point: Doris's social account of agency is not social enough. He focuses on social causes and consequences of agency, but does not take into consideration the social nature of its experience, which in turn can affect its expression. He considers “I” as a possible agent, and we concur with his broadly dialogical account of this. He does not, however, consider another important form of agency – “we” or joint/shared agency. People engage daily in many forms of joint actions and projects, ranging from walking together, sitting side by side on a commuter train, having dinner, playing football, etc. In these cases there is a plural subject, a sense or experience that “we” are the agent. Indeed many of the cases of moral decision making that form the focus of empirical studies on which Doris draws are, in their real-world manifestations, more properly thought of as cases of joint or shared moral decision making, for instance two surgeons operating on a patient and having to make a potentially life-threatening decision. Ultimately these are decisions that are made with the implicit or explicit belief that real or imagined others concur or demur.
There are complicated debates on how to understand joint agency, for example its relations to individual agency (e.g., Gilbert Reference Gilbert1989; Searle Reference Searle1995; Tuomela Reference Tuomela1995). On the one hand, there is the possibility that joint agency reduces to combinations of individual agency (“we”=“I am doing this, and so are you,” that is, we are both performing individual actions simultaneously). On the other, joint agency might be irreducible, sui generis (“we” just=“we are doing this,” without the possibility to separate individual actions concurring to the desired outcome). The possibility of such different senses of “we” has a long history in social and cognitive psychology (e.g., Brewer & Gardner Reference Brewer and Gardner1996; Swann & Buhrmester Reference Swann and Buhrmester2015; Tomasello Reference Tomasello2009; Turner et al. Reference Turner, Hogg, Oakes, Reicher and Wetherell1987). Whether joint agency does reduce for all or some states, it is likely that these two forms of joint agency generate qualitatively different experiences of agency.
There are two implications to note here. One is the relation to different moral sentiments in judging and cooperating with others. Bloom (Reference Bloom2016) has recently taken aim at the widespread notion that empathy is intrinsically morally valuable, an inevitable precursor to prosociality and cooperation. Empathy, the sense of sharing another's experience (and sense of agency in relation to external events), he argues, can in fact diminish moral action. By contrast, sympathy, the sense of being aware of another's experience as different from one's own (and of their differential agency in relation to external events), may be more likely to generate moral action. When they issue in joint remedial action against the suffering of the other, we suggest that these different states lead to different morally valenced forms of agency. Empathy reflects irreducible “we”: both have the same experiences, the same sense of agency and the same capacity and responsibility for remediation. Sympathy reflects reducible “we”: the “I” and the “you” are separable and represented and experienced as separate, with separate but possibly interconnected capacity and responsibility for remediation. In sum, sympathy reflects our reducible perspective on shared agency (“we”=“I am doing this, and so are you”), whilst empathy reflects our suggested irreducible perspective on shared agency (“we” just=“we are doing this”). The second implication is that the interpretation of joint and individual agency, and their relative preponderance in explanations of behaviour, are themselves related to different cultural tendencies to view oneself as more or less interdependent or independent on others regarding action and moral judgement.
This leads to our third and final point. Doris proposes that a dialogue of values generates agency and the sense of self, and notes that this relates to the wider culture in which the person lives and acts such that the values that come to characterise the narrative of the self may differ from one culture to another. We concur, but suggest again that this underplays the significance of the social and the cultural context.
Culture plays a key role in the nature and functioning of the values, which Doris suggests are constitutive of agency. Values vary across cultures, and behaviours that are prescribed in one culture may be proscribed in another (e.g., Schwartz & Sagie Reference Schwartz and Sagie2000). The degree to which those values are experienced as constraining and directing, also varies: cultures differ in “tightness” and “looseness” (Gelfand Reference Gelfand2012; Uz Reference Uz2015). Hence, the degrees of freedom in the dialogues that define agency will also vary between cultures: For a given action, it may range from a top-down imposition of widespread and tightly adhered-to norms to an interplay of equals. This has implications for agency at all three modalities, including the narratives generated to ascribe or avoid responsibility in the context or morality judgements and attributions. Voyer and Franks (Reference Voyer and Franks2014) suggest that the dialogue between individual and social and cultural affordances results in a sense of individual and/or shared agency for a given action. Where a similar outcome arises across actions or settings, this results in an increasingly stable or recurrent sense of agency, leading to patterns of self-construal, which can vary with culture (Markus & Kitayama Reference Markus and Kitayama1991).
In this way, culture also significantly influences the experience of agency itself. Above we noted the important distinctions between individual and shared/joint agency and the fact that Doris focuses only on individual agency. There has been a flourishing tradition in social psychology concerning self-construal (Markus & Kitayama Reference Markus and Kitayama1991; Reference Markus, Kitayama, Berman and Berman2003; Reference Markus and Kitayama2010) – the extent to which people in different cultures vary in the way they represent their sense of who they are by reference to social relationships and group memberships. Markus and Kitayama differentiate between two general, culturally sanctioned ways in which people construe who they are. First, independence is concerned with viewing oneself as separate from others, striving to achieve personal desires, being unique and consistent. Second, interdependence is concerned with viewing oneself as connected to others, striving to maintain harmony, to cohere in one's in-group and with the situation. This offers an individual-level counterpart to broad cultural differences in values between individualism and collectivism. Importantly, Markus and Kitayama note that the distinction ramifies for culturally variable normative models of agency: Independence prompts a model that takes the individual to be the key agent, whereas interdependence prompts a model of conjoint agency (Markus & Kitayama Reference Markus and Kitayama2010). Voyer and Franks (Reference Voyer and Franks2014) further suggest that the formation of a dominant independent self-construal is the result of repeated actions requiring predominantly individual agency, whilst the formation of a dominant interdependent self-construal is the result of repeated actions requiring predominantly shared/joint agency. These models suggest different normative tendencies towards construing challenges and opportunities as requiring joint agency (“we”) of various kinds, or individual agency. Again, different cultures not only offer different values to enter dialogues for agency, but also qualitative differences in the ways those dialogues function, and their expected outcomes, with important consequences for agency.
To conclude, Doris offers a persuasive yet partial picture of the origin of agency and its relation to self. We applaud his view of the role of social factors and dialogical relations in generating agency. However, we suggest it underplays the importance of individual and shared/joint experience of agency and the complexity and extent of the impact of the social and cultural environments in which these experiences take place.