Agency in psychology is the capacity to influence your own life through your actions and choices. It’s the difference between feeling like things happen to you and feeling like you make things happen. Albert Bandura, the psychologist most associated with the concept, described it simply: people have a hand in determining the course their lives take. That idea, straightforward as it sounds, sits at the center of how psychologists understand motivation, mental health, and personal development.
How Psychology Defines Agency
Psychology treats agency as a measurable capacity rather than an abstract philosophical idea. Where philosophers debate whether free will truly exists, psychologists focus on something more concrete: can a person regulate their behavior, make deliberate choices, and follow through on plans? Roy Baumeister, a prominent researcher in the field, frames it as “an advanced form of action control that evolved to enable people to function and thrive in cultural groups.” In other words, agency is a skill set your brain developed because it helped humans cooperate, plan, and survive together.
This psychological view of agency has a few key features. It includes the ability to form intentions about what you want to do, anticipate likely outcomes before you act, monitor and adjust your behavior as you go, and reflect on whether your actions are actually working. These aren’t all-or-nothing abilities. They exist on a spectrum, and they can be strengthened or weakened by experience, mental health, and environment.
Three Forms of Agency
Bandura identified three distinct ways people exercise influence over their lives, and only one of them involves acting alone.
- Individual agency is the most intuitive form. You bring your own skills, effort, and decisions to bear on situations you can directly control. Studying for an exam, choosing what to eat, setting a boundary in a relationship.
- Proxy agency is influence exercised through other people. When you hire a lawyer, visit a doctor, or ask a manager to advocate for your promotion, you’re relying on someone who has the resources, knowledge, or authority to act on your behalf. This is still agency because you initiated the process and chose the person.
- Collective agency happens when people pool their knowledge, skills, and resources to shape outcomes together. Unions negotiating for better conditions, communities organizing around a shared goal, or a team coordinating on a project all represent collective agency. No single person could achieve the result alone.
Recognizing these three forms matters because people who feel powerless individually sometimes forget they can still act through proxies or groups. A sense of agency doesn’t require doing everything yourself.
The Role of Self-Efficacy
Self-efficacy is the belief that you can succeed at a specific task or handle a particular situation. It’s not the same thing as agency itself, but it’s the engine that drives it. Bandura considered self-efficacy the central mechanism of human agency because your beliefs about what you’re capable of shape what you actually attempt.
This connection has been tested directly in experiments. When researchers increase someone’s self-efficacy (through encouragement, modeling, or structured success experiences), performance goes up and emotional distress goes down. The relationship is causal, not just correlational. People who believe they can handle a challenge put in more effort, persist longer, and recover faster from setbacks. People who doubt themselves tend to give up earlier, avoid difficult situations, and spiral into anxiety or helplessness. The gap between two people with identical skills often comes down to how much agency each one believes they have.
The “Sense of Agency” and How Your Brain Creates It
There’s a useful distinction between agency as an objective capacity (you actually can influence outcomes) and the sense of agency, which is the subjective feeling that “I did that.” Your brain generates this feeling automatically, dozens of times a day, and it relies on a surprisingly specific process.
Your motor system constantly predicts what will happen when you act. Before your finger even reaches a light switch, your brain has already predicted the click, the resistance, and the room lighting up. When the predicted outcome matches the actual outcome, you experience a seamless sense of authorship. When there’s a mismatch, that feeling weakens or disappears. This is called the comparator model: your brain compares what it expected with what actually happened, and congruence between the two creates the feeling of control.
There’s also a secondary process that works after the fact. Sometimes you assess whether you caused something by reflecting on the relationship between your action and its effect. Did the outcome make sense given what you did? Was it plausible that you caused it? This post-hoc reasoning fills in the gaps when the real-time prediction system is uncertain.
Neuroscience research has linked the sense of agency to frontocentral brain areas involved in motor planning and control. These regions appear to become more sensitive to incoming information when you feel in control of your actions, and less responsive when you don’t. The sense of agency isn’t just a thought or a belief. It’s a neural process rooted in how your brain processes movement and its consequences.
How Agency Develops in Childhood
Babies aren’t born with a sense of agency, but the seeds appear remarkably early. By around 4 months, infants smile to get a caregiver’s attention and make sounds or movements intentionally to keep that attention. This is the earliest form of agency: realizing that your actions produce a response in the world.
By 6 months, babies show interest in their own reflection, suggesting a growing awareness of themselves as a distinct entity. At 9 months, they react meaningfully when a caregiver leaves, reaching out or crying, which signals they understand that other people are separate agents whose presence or absence they care about influencing. By age 2, children look to a parent’s face to figure out how to react in unfamiliar situations, a behavior called social referencing. This is a form of proxy agency: using someone else’s knowledge to guide your own response.
Each of these milestones builds on the last. The toddler who learns that crying brings comfort, that reaching brings a toy closer, and that pointing brings attention is assembling the basic toolkit of agency. When caregivers respond consistently to these actions, the child develops stronger beliefs about their ability to influence the world. When responses are unpredictable or absent, those beliefs can weaken.
When Agency Breaks Down
Disrupted agency is a core feature of several mental health conditions, not just a side effect. In depression, people often describe feeling like nothing they do matters, that outcomes are beyond their control regardless of effort. This learned helplessness is essentially a collapse of perceived agency, even when the person’s actual abilities remain intact.
In schizophrenia, the disruption goes deeper. People with schizophrenia often have difficulty distinguishing between actions they caused and events caused by something external. Research on individuals with a genetic condition strongly linked to schizophrenia (22q11.2 deletion syndrome) found that these individuals had considerable deficits in monitoring their own actions compared to age-matched controls. They struggled to accurately track both the timing and spatial accuracy of their movements, and they showed a bias toward attributing actions to themselves even when the feedback they were receiving had been artificially altered.
Interestingly, this wasn’t a problem with motor ability. Their physical performance was comparable to the control group. The breakdown was specifically in the monitoring and attribution system: the machinery that tells you whether you did something or something happened to you. This helps explain symptoms like auditory hallucinations, where a person’s own inner speech gets misattributed to an external voice, or delusions of control, where someone feels their body is being moved by an outside force.
How Agency Is Measured
Psychologists have developed tools to quantify something as subjective as feeling in control. The Sense of Agency Scale asks people to rate 13 statements on a 1-to-7 scale, from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree.” The statements fall into two categories.
Positive agency items capture feelings of control and authorship: “I am in full control of what I do,” “I am the author of my actions,” “The decision whether and when to act is within my hands.” Negative agency items capture the opposite experience: “I am just an instrument in the hands of somebody or something else,” “My actions just happen without my intention,” “While I am in action, I feel like I am a remote controlled robot.” The negative agency factor captures something the researchers describe as existential helplessness, a pervasive sense that you are not the one driving your own life.
These two factors are related but distinct. Someone can score moderately high on positive agency while still endorsing some feelings of helplessness, or vice versa. That nuance makes the scale useful for tracking how therapy, medication, or life changes affect a person’s sense of control over time.