The role of goals, actions, and outcomes in the sense of agency

The sense of agency refers to the sense of control we feel over our actions and their effects in the environment. We propose a new framework that defines the sense of agency as consisting of three components: the presence of a goal, the sense of control of the self, and the sense of control of the environment. Across six experiments, we altered participants' sense of agency by manipulating control of their actions and outcomes in reference to a goal. We found that participants' sense of agency was consistently the highest when both actions and outcomes were under their control and participants achieved their goal. However, contrary to previous theoretical predictions, we also found that unpredictable outcomes impacted participants' sense of agency more negatively than did manipulations impacting action control. Specifically, sense of agency was consistently lowest when participants did not achieve their goal. These results can be readily explained in the context of the G2C framework as a hierarchical integration of action and outcome information in reference to a goal. We discuss implications and suggestions for future work in this field.