The Influence Of Voluntary Action And Outcome Properties On The Sense Of Agency Under Predictability

Sense of agency refers to the subjective experience that influences the external world by controlling one’s own active actions.The production of sense of agency depends on the action of intention-action-outcome.Intention and action belong to the action selection,and the result belong to the scope of outcome monitoring,including predicted consequences and perceived consequences.The intention is the premise of the production of sense of agency,and then products the action appears with the intention and gets the result,sense of agency is produced in this process.There are multiple sources of the sense of agency in the procession.The multi-level model describes the three components of agency,including feeling of agency,judgment of agency and meta representation,which are integrated in a bottom-up and top-down manner to form a sense of agency.In this process,many factors will affect the production or level of the sense of agency,including the voluntary of action,the nature of results,social norms and predictability and so on.Previous studies have shown that the individual’s sense of agency in a coercion condition will be weakened,and the coercion reduces the individual’s voluntary of action,and the sense of agency is correspondingly weakened.But the conclusions are limited to outcomes that hurt others and benefit ourselves,and it is not clear that the results in this particular context can be replicated in other moral conditions.The meta-representation level emphasizes the influence of ethics on the sense of agency.When the result of the action can bring pro-social behavior benefits,such as receiving money for loving donations,the change of the sense of agency under coercive instructions and whether it is consistent with the sense of agency of voluntary actions is worth for exploring.The solution of this problem helps us understand how the change of the nature of the action result under the coercion condition will influence the sense of agency.At the same time,whether the property of the result can be predicted before the action can also have an effect on the sense of agency,which has an important role in distinguishing whether the perception of action-result depends on prediction in advance or retrospective inference after the fact.Therefore,this study uses the time interval estimation method to measure the agency of college students,and compared the dynamics of self-interest and altruistic behavior under the conditions of free choice and coercion,The purpose of this study is to explore the effects of the reduction of action intention and the nature of action consequences on the change of the sense of agency,and to investigate the role of intention in action judgment on the sense of agency in the meta-representation of different pro-social behavior outcomes.And further set the predictability and unpredictability conditions of the nature of the results,to explore the combination of the predictability of the results and the above conditions will have an impact on the sense of agency,in this paper,we explore the condition dependence of predictability of autonomy and outcome on action perception.The results show that:(1)free choice producing shorter interval estimation than coercion,which indicates that the voluntary action plays an important role in the production of the sense of agency,and coercion can reduced the agency of individuals,and is not affected by the predictability and properties of the outcome;(2)the self-interest outcome that can be predicted under coercive condition is stronger than the altruistic outcome,because the altruistic outcome estimation was longer than the self-interest outcome;(3)the self-interest and the altruistic outcome are not different under unpredictable condition.To sum up,sense of agency depends on the voluntary of action.Meanwhile,the influence of voluntary on sense of agency will be influenced by altruistic outcomes,which indicates that the action outcomes of moral level can have a top-down effect on the sense of agency.In addition,social value orientation and the sense of agency have a certain consistency.The research outcomes provide a basis for the multi-level model of the sense of agency,which is very helpful in the voluntary of the study of sense of agency.