When you think you know what you're doing : experiencing self-agency over intended and unintended outcomes

Abstract

As social beings, people often find themselves in situations where the cause of events is ambiguous. One may experience having caused one's friends to laugh by telling a funny story, while their laughter may as well be caused by a person with a strange haircut who just walked by. Hence, the experience of being the cause of one’s own actions and resulting outcomes, also referred to as the experience of self-agency, is not a straightforward affair. This raises the question how experiences of self-agency arise in such social, ambiguous contexts. Previous research has shown that experiences of self-agency arise when action-outcomes match ones goals, but also when they match pre-activated (i.e., primed) outcome representations. Yet, how outcome priming affects self-agency experiences is still little understood. To shed more light on how outcome priming affects experienced self-agency, the present dissertation examined two key assumptions associated with goal effects on self-agency. That is, it is tested whether knowledge regarding the causal relation between actions and outcomes, and a focus on outcomes (rather than actions), is required for outcome priming to affect experienced self-agency. Furthermore, the present dissertation deals with whether and how experiences of self-agency resulting from outcome primes differ from experiences of self-agency resulting from goals. Since goals evoke unique control processes dealing with monitoring and feedback processing of achieving the specific desired outcome, processes that may be especially relevant when outcomes mismatch one’s goals, the effect of goals and primes on mismatching outcomes was directly compared