tuesday, 21 may 2024—12:15
Bert Timmermans - Implicit & explicit social sense of agency in direct social interaction
Bert Timmermans, University of Aberdeen
Sense of Agency (SoA), the ownership we feel over our actions and their effects, is habitually studied in paradigms where simple actions cause a simple effect such as a tone or visual change, as the person interacts with an inanimate object. In social contexts however, SoA remains under-researched, but there the question fundamentally changes, as who you interact with can react to you out of their own volition. It is unknown how this Social Sense of Agency (SSoA) relates to nonsocial SoA. One critical way in which social and nonsocial interactions differ is the anticipated action-effect interval duration. If we press a light switch, the bulb will illuminate instantaneously, whereas if we smile at someone, they smile back at a time of their choosing. If they smile back too quickly, we may experience it as coincidental or unnatural. In a series of experiments, we look at how SSoA differs from SoA, and what mechanisms may be subtending this.