Volition, Agency and Responsibility

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The concept of individuals as free agents, who make voluntary actions, is the basis of modern societies. Yet voluntary action has proved difficult to study scientifically. This project first develops some key methods which can provide an evidence base for voluntary action: the ability to manipulate intentions with external experimental inputs, and the ability to measure the subjective experiences of volition and agency with informative psychometric measures. I then use these methods to study the cognitive mechanisms and the social impact of three key stages of processing that underlie voluntary action. These are: volition or intention itself, the sense of agency over action outcomes, and the link between volition and social responsibility. The fellowship achieves these objectives by a mixture of psychological experiments, theoretical work and interdisciplinary and wider engagement.The first part of the project deals with volition, and builds on my previous work on the relation between initiation of action and subjective experience of intending to act. My experiments will address a major, unresolved controversy. On one view, experiences of intention are retrospective confabulations, inserted post hoc into consciousness, as apparent causes for our own actions. On another view, conscious intentions are the consequence of activating brain mechanisms that prepare actions and predict action outcomes. These two very different views of individual control, have very different implications both for psychology, and for society generally. I will test these theories experimentally, with appropriate ethical permission, by presenting subliminal primes designed to promote or inhibit action and also by safe, non-invasive transcranial electrical stimulation of relevant brain areas.A second aspect deals with the "sense of agency" - the feeling that one's actions cause or control events in the outside world. This ubiquitous but elusive feeling is crucial to normal mental life, and forms a key component of the self. It also has obvious application to fields as diverse as law, interface engineering, and psychiatry. Again, people might infer agency retrospectively when action outcomes occur. Alternatively, intentional premotor processing might contribute to the feeling of being in control. A series of experiments test the latter hypothesis: does the process of selecting which action to make influence the sense of agency over action outcomes. In particular, stimuli that enhance fluency of forming intentions should boost sense of agency compared to stimuli that interfere with forming intentions, even when both stimuli are equally predictive of outcomes. Such experiments will test a predictive, as opposed to retrospective, view of agency, based on metacognitive experience generated by premotor processes that select and prepare actions.Finally, human voluntary action occurs in a social context. It is sometimes even thought to be a social construct: C.P. Snow famously said "We have to believe in free will to get along". This project will include the social dimension in experimental studies of voluntary action for the first time. Using game-theoretic methods such as Prisoner's Dilemma, I will test whether the sense of agency varies when an individual's action has socially-relevant effects on another person, compared to a baseline actions that produce simple outcomes without social meaning. The influence of action's reward value will be considered, as will the degree of co-operation between the two individuals. The data will inform theories on the roles of volition and responsibility in human culture.Ideas of volition and individual self-control are pervasive in society, and attract strong public interest. The evidence base generated will in turn inform other disciplines and will impact society generally, notably through an interdisciplinary workshop linking psychology of voluntary action and legal responsibility.