Sense of Self-Agency and Other-Agency Under Social Interaction Contexts

Sense of agency refers to the subjective perception of initiating and controlling one’s actions and their consequences within both individual and social contexts. It encompasses not only self-agency, where individuals feel in control of their actions from a first-person perspective, but also other-agency, where individuals comprehend the control exerted by others over their actions through mentalizing. This study explores the characteristics of implicit self-agency and other-agency in social interaction contexts using an interval estimation paradigm. The results indicate that voluntary actions lead to a temporal binding effect in individual contexts. Moreover, the reported intervals generated by the self in individual contexts are shorter than those in human-human and human-robot interaction contexts, suggesting a reduction in self-agency within social interaction contexts. Conversely, temporal intervals in human-human interactions are reported to be shorter than those in individual and human-robot interactions, indicating that other-agency remains unaffected. These findings highlight the distinct effects of social interaction contexts on self-agency and other-agency, offering novel empirical insights into human interaction behavior.