Reclaiming Agency (From the Self-Help Crowd)
We're neglecting important elements of agency if we think it's only about 'doing stuff'
Hi, welcome to Subtle Sparks! This post is part of the Mindful Culture section of the newsletter, in which we look at psychology and cultural trends. Other sections - Tangled Biobank and Jungle Writing - deal with biology (+biotech) and creativity. You can subscribe to one or all the sections. Your support keeps this thing going. Thanks!
Dear agents, a little help?
Help, a new trend is rippling through self-help town. While we are collectively emerging from our ‘dopamine detox1’ hangover, we’re now being told to mold ourselves into high-agency2 people. Seize the day, seize control, and seize your destiny — hard to do with only two hands, but let’s roll with it. You know, bend reality to your will. It’s what all the cool kids are doing.
Yes, I’m exaggerating. There is a point, I promise.
I do not doubt that agency is an important trait. High agency is likely overall helpful in life, but, as you’d expect, the social media soundbites that present it to us either take unwarranted shortcuts or deliberately mislead us. To illustrate the limitations of the popular view of agency, consider the words of Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie:
It is easy to romanticize poverty, to see poor people as inherently lacking agency and will. It is easy to strip them of human dignity, to reduce them to objects of pity. This has never been clearer than in the view of Africa from the American media, in which we are shown poverty and conflicts without any context.
American psychologist Jerome Brunner only needs three words:
Agency presupposes choice.
Context and choice matter. High agency is not (just) about seizing control. It’s not (just) about doing things, and it’s not even about being a ‘doer’. Agency is more than that.
Actually, it’s two more things than that.
Triple check
A foundational 1998 paper on the psychology of agency distinguishes three components that, looped and linked, constitute agency: iteration, projectivity, and evaluation. This is also known as the triadic chordal structure of agency3.
Iteration is all about routines. That sounds odd. Isn’t high agency supposed to involve breaking routines? Quite the opposite, routines are the launching pads for agency. They teach you selective attention (what matters to you?), type recognition (are there people, relationships, or situations you keep running into?), and the ability to move among behavioral repertoires (how and when do you switch or adapt your routines?).
Projectivity is about imagining possible routes ahead. It involves several processes with fancy names (anticipatory identification, narrative construction, symbolic reconstruction, hypothetical resolution, and experimental enactment). Narrative? Symbolic? Sounds like a story to me. Projectivity comes down to imagining possible stories about yourself and (changing) your life.
Practical evaluation is (at last) where we truly get to the doing part. By running through a five-step cycle of problematization, characterization, deliberation, decision, and execution, you hone in on what ails you and ‘take control’ through (deliberate) action.
Any advice that tells you to ‘just do stuff’ almost entirely omits the first two components of agency. The doing is the icing on the cake; it’s the tasty layer that gets all the attention, but without an actual cake of thought and imagination underneath, it’s nothing more than expensive sugar.
Think again, together
The agency triplets have stood the test of time, even though they get different names sometimes. A 2018 review that bundles research in human agency also emphasizes this three-part structure4: self-reflectiveness (which roughly maps to iteration above), forethought (or projectivity), and self-reactiveness (or practical evaluation).
To engage in these activities, we need meta-cognition, or thinking about thinking.
The metacognitive capability to reflect on oneself and the adequacy of one’s capabilities, thoughts, and actions is the most distinctly human core property of agency.
Imagine that, the core of agency is not doing; it’s thinking, twice. More specifically, agency is rooted in introspection to find out what truly matters to you and in understanding the necessary benchmarks to assess your imagined actions. (What does that say about the agency of animals? Or AI ‘agents’?)
The review highlights that agency is not only about the individual: yes, it has an individual side, but also a socially mediated and collective side. Another triplet.
The individual side is what is under your personal control; the socially mediated side means using the resources, knowledge, and means of others (asking for help, mentorship, or - yes - lies and blackmail); and the collective side of agency refers to pooling your knowledge, skills, or resources with those of others to pursue a common goal.
Agency is not just about you and it’s not just about ‘doing stuff’; it’s reflection, imagination, and then doing stuff, alone or with others.
However, I am biased. I’m good at the imagination part and decent at the reflective part. It’s the doing part that trips me up.
Maybe I should just do stuff?
Routinely read the newsletter, imagine all the crazy ideas I still want to share with you, and take control: like, share, and comment. Let’s show the algorithm what agency is all about. 😄
Dopamine is very important for a variety of bodily functions. Don’t ‘detox’ from dopamine. That would basically lead to Parkinson’s disease.
The philosophical question is whether we actually have a lot of agency to begin with, which is not the focus here, but
recently wrote a very fine essay on it.My current (and ever-evolving) take on free will: it’s both real and not real (surely you didn’t expect a straight answer from me?). It’s real in the sense that money is real — an intersubjective reality, as Harari calls it. Deep down, it’s all particles and forces. At the most reductive, mechanistic level, there is no free will. But instrumentally, to live life, it is real. It exists in the tacit agreements on which society is built. Those agreements exist beyond the individual. Again, think of money. The coin, the paper, the numbers on the screen have - deep down - very little real value, and yet the value of money drives so much of our lives, our economic systems, and so on. Also, this needs a lot more nuance and is definitely not footnote material. I might have to think this through in a proper post. Maybe I have no choice?
Scientists give the best names to their theories and hypotheses.
Or the ‘triadic codetermination process of causation‘. See footnote 3.
Thanks for going a layer deeper on agency.
I also struggle with the 'doing' step. I'm starting to think that's because I spend time imagining the wrong things. I either imagine doing something that doesn't fit into my actual reality or that is too big of a step. I think the trick is imagining a small enough baby step that actually fits into your current life.
a) all your choices may be bad, and in being forced to choose a lesser evil, your agency is reversed
b) being forced to participate in a society that works against your best interests is inherently counter-productive
c) sometimes, even being noticed to be trying is counter-productive, even while it's mandatory to put yourself out to try
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Overcoming or knowing how to work around these external constraints is primary and mandatory. While they're part of your calculus, they're mis-prioritized.