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Agency is one of the semantic factors that impacts affect, as described by the Affect Management Framework.

Brains exist to promote adaptive exchanges within dynamic environments, and agency is key to this process.

People tend to do things that give them a sense of control, even when there's no other benefit to doing them.

People manage their affect by both seeking and rejecting a sense of agency in different situations.

At every moment, there is something a person/animal is trying to do (a goal) and a reason they are trying to do it (a context for that goal). In the Affect Management Framework (AMF; Haynes-LaMotte, 2025), contextualized goals are constantly shifting in the brain, informed by the senses of the world and the body (vision, hearing, touch, taste, smell, interoception, and proprioception) as well as the semantic factors of meaningfulness, certainty, and agency.

Because our affect is attached to our goals, what contextualized goals we take on and how and when we choose to pursue or relinquish across similar situations can be described as different affect management policies.

Affective Side of Agency

In this post, I hope to expand upon the affective side of agency as described in the AMF:

Rather than serving passive or purely veridical computational purposes, the brain exists to promote acting in meaningful ways upon the environment (Parr et al., 2022; Sterling & Laughlin, 2023; Thornton & Tamir, 2024). As part of implementing hierarchical Bayesian estimation (Clark, 2015; Clark, 2023), the brain must decide at each moment which goals are worth pursuing and which are not. Alongside certainty and meaningfulness, a sense of agency, or control of one’s effects on the environment, is necessary in making these decisions. Efference signals, which allow animals to anticipate and detect the sensory effects of their own actions, are believed to be a phylogenetically basal trait (Jékely, Godfrey-Smith, & Keijzer, 2021; Godfrey-Smith, 2016), and may even be a fundamental building block of conscious experience (Vallortigara, 2021; Wen & Imamizu, 2023). Consistent with these ideas, research with humans suggests that a sense of agency is key to motivation and affect management.

For example, people are willing to give up material rewards in order to retain a sense of agency over their losses and wins in decisional tasks, an effect which could not be accounted for by overconfidence in one’s abilities nor a lack of information, and instead appears to reflect the intrinsic value of choice or agency in the brain (Bobadilla-Suarez, Sunstein, & Sharot, 2017; Owens, Grossman, & Fackler, 2014).

Agency and Task Performance

Across other contexts, studies have found that people tend to under-delegate rather than over-delegate despite the costs to instrumental goals (Bartling, Fehr, & Herz, 2013; Fehr, Herz, & Wilkening, 2012), and tend to overvalue their own creations and ideas (Franke, Schreier, & Kaiser, 2010; Koster et al., 2015; Norton, Mochon, & Ariely, 2012). Similarly, psychological reactance (Brehm, 1966; Brehm & Brehm, 2013), the mechanism presumed to be responsible for phenomena like reverse psychology (Macdonald, Nail, & Harper, 2011), involves reestablishing a sense of personal control by orienting oneself opposed to the environment when perceiving a threat to one’s agency from that........

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