Did you know that the control you feel influences your action?

The sense of agency (the feeling that we are in control of our actions and their effects) is a core component of self-awareness. A recent meta-analysis, conducted by Marika Mariano and Laura Zapparoli, shows that this experience is not fixed: it depends on how we act and on the kinds of consequences we obtain. The team analyzed 21 studies (more than a thousand participants) that used the intentional binding paradigm, a measure that assesses how close in time an action and its outcome seem to us. The smaller that interval appears, the stronger our implicit sense of agency.

The meta-analysis revealed three consistent patterns. First, voluntary actions reliably generate a sense of authorship, even when the outcome is not positive. Second, freedom of choice significantly increases that feeling, compared with imposed actions. Third, the outcomes of actions modulate the sense of agency: positive consequences strengthen it, whereas negative consequences tend to attenuate it – except when those negative outcomes are emotionally salient, such as in morally delicate, socially evaluative, or physically painful situations. In these cases, the emotional load can, paradoxically, increase the perception of responsibility.

Taken together, these data show that the sense of agency results from the interaction between freedom of action, the emotional meaning of consequences, and the cues the brain integrates to decide when, and why, we feel like the authors of what we do. This paper was published in the scientific journal Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, in the article Feeling in control when things go well: A meta-analytical account of how action-outcome valence shapes the implicit sense of agency as part of the research project 52/22 - How reward shapes volition: Neural correlates of motivated intentional actions to promote recovery of visual awareness, supported by the Bial Foundation.

ABSTRACT

The sense of agency, the feeling of being the author of one’s own actions and their outcomes, is a central aspect of self-awareness. Previous studies have typically relied on highly simplified laboratory tasks involving affectively neutral action–outcome pairs (e.g., tones or lights). While these paradigm are well controlled, they lack motivational and social significance. More recent work, however, has begun to examine how action-outcome influences agency-related processes. To synthetize this emerging evidence, we conducted a meta-analytic review of studies using intentional binding as a measure of implicit agency, focusing on the effects of outcome valence and including potential moderators such as predictability, volitional control, and outcome type.

Results show that intentional binding reliably occurs regardless of whether the actions produce positive or negative outcomes, and the effect was significantly stronger when actions were freely chosen. However, implicit sense of agency was consistently enhanced for positive compared to negative outcomes, suggesting a self-serving bias in agency attribution. Yet, in some contexts - such as morally charged or physically aversive outcomes - this pattern was reversed, highlighting the possible role of contextual salience. These findings support cue integration models of agency and underscore the importance of studying agency in emotionally meaningful and ecologically valid contexts.