title: Put your plan into action: The influence of action plans on agency and responsibility.
abstract: While action plans and intentions have been considered to be important factors contributing to the personal sense of causation known as agency, the present research is the first to empirically investigate how action plans influence agency. Participants in multiple studies were required to plan or not to plan ahead their actions. Results consistently show that on trials in which participants were required to plan their actions, participants experienced reduced agency compared to trials in which participants were not required to plan their actions. These results were found for both explicit agency paradigms in which participants were asked for their experiences of causation (Studies 1 and 2), as well as in an implicit agency paradigm in which participants were asked to estimate the time between their actions and the consequences of their actions (Study 3). In addition, it was shown that the reduction in agency was smaller when plans and actions were temporally closer together (Study 4). In a final line of experiments we discovered that prior planning similarly reduced both the emotional experience of acting and feelings of responsibility in agents (Studies 5-7). However, the direction of this effect was reversed in observers, for whom cues related to planning by others increased attributions of responsibility toward those others (Study 8).
authors.affiliation: Department of Social Psychology.
authors.forename: Tom G E
authors.initials: TG
authors.lastname: Damen
authors.affiliation: Department of Social and Cultural Psychology, Behavioural Science Institute, Radboud University Nijmegen.
authors.forename: Rick B
authors.initials: RB
authors.lastname: van Baaren
authors.affiliation: Department of Experimental Psychology, Ghent University.
authors.forename: Marcel
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Brass
authors.affiliation: Department of Social and Organizational Psychology, Utrecht University.
authors.forename: Henk
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Aarts
authors.affiliation: Department of Social and Cultural Psychology, Behavioural Science Institute, Radboud University Nijmegen.
authors.forename: Ap
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Dijksterhuis
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D005544:Forecasting; D006801:Humans; D033182:Intention; D008297:Male; D011930:Reaction Time; D012649:Self Concept; D012941:Social Responsibility; D013850:Thinking; D055815:Young Adult