Source
Haggard (2017), LIT-1009, “Society, agency and responsibility” (manuscript pp. 16–17) and Fig. 5, read in full in NOTE-827. The experiment is Caspar et al. (2016), Current Biology, cited as ref. 92 and not read here.
What was actually shown
Pairs of participants took turns as agent and victim, so each had felt the shocks. The agent pressed one of two keys. One delivered a visibly painful shock to the victim, synchronous with a tone, and earned the agent money. The other did neither. In the coercive condition the experimenter said which key to press before each trial. In the free condition the agent chose. The agent estimated the interval between keypress and tone, an implicit measure in which voluntary actions yield shorter estimates than passive movements.
- Interval estimates were “significantly greater” under coercion than under free choice. Under the measure’s interpretation, that is a reduced sense of agency.
- The auditory N1 evoked by the tone was smaller under coercion, “both when the action lead to a painful shock, and when it did not” (Fig. 5). This is the part of the result that is not a report.
The review’s reading: “obeying instructions reduces the sense of agency, producing an experience closer to passive movement than to voluntary action”. It ties this to the finding that more alternatives to choose from increase the sense of agency, and suggests that “social coercion effectively constrains an individual’s free choice” (p. 17).
Both measures could have come out the other way: equal interval estimates and equal N1 across conditions would have meant the instruction changed nothing in the experience.
What this does not say
- Not that the coerced agent is less responsible. “The finding does not, of course, legitimate the defense of ‘only obeying orders’, but it does explain how acting under coercion can lead individuals to experience a psychological distance” (p. 17).
- Not that the agent did not act. She pressed the key herself. The claim is about her experience of the act and of its outcome.
- Not about manipulation. The instruction was overt, and the agent knew where it came from. THEORY-235’s harm of covert influence runs through the agent’s not knowing, and THEORY-040’s manipulation acts on her psychological structure. Neither is tested here.
- “Coercive” is the review’s word for an instruction from an experimenter. No threat was made beyond the setting itself. Whether the effect needs authority, or comes from the loss of choice alone, is not separated in what is reported.
- One experiment, reported. Samples, effect sizes and replications are not given in the review.
Connections
No relation is declared.
- QUESTION-070 asks whose agency a wrong runs through when an organized whole acts through its members. This result is one fact about the member: acting on another’s instruction, she experiences her own act as less hers. It does not say whose agency the act is.
- THEORY-322, from the same reading. If coercion works through constrained selection, as the review suggests, the effect is an instance of that account’s selection signal.