title: A matter of matching: how goals and primes affect self-agency experiences.
abstract: The sense of self-agency is a pervasive experience that people infer from their actions and the outcomes they produce. Recent research suggests that self-agency inferences arise from an explicit goal-directed process as well as an implicit outcome-priming process. Three experiments examined potential differences between these 2 processes. Participants had the goal to produce an outcome or were primed with the outcome. Next, they performed an action in an agency-ambiguous situation, followed by an outcome that matched or mismatched the goal or prime, and indicated experienced self-agency over the action-outcome. Results showed that goals reduce self-agency over mismatching outcomes. However, outcome-primes did not affect self-agency over mismatching outcomes but even enhanced self-agency over mismatching proximate outcomes. Goals and outcome-primes equally enhanced self-agency for matches. Our findings provide novel evidence that self-agency experiences result from 2 distinct inferential routes and that goals and primes differentially affect the perception of our own behavior.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands. a.vanderweiden@uu.nl
authors.forename: Anouk
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: van der Weiden
authors.forename: Kirsten I
authors.initials: KI
authors.lastname: Ruys
authors.forename: Henk
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Aarts
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006040:Goals; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning; D008297:Male; D011597:Psychomotor Performance; D012649:Self Concept; D020377:Self Efficacy