An Agency-Centered Psychology

Some helpful considerations for agency:

Third vs. First Person Perspective: According to Rychlak (1994), psychological science tends to theorize about individuals from a third-person perspective rather than from an individual perspective. From the third-person perspective, it is like watching two people arguing and then writing a theory about what they each must be thinking. Clearly, I cannot make a very accurate theory about what each person is thinking without directly asking them. Even if I were to give each person a multiple-choice questionnaire, such as "Are you thinking A, B, or C when you are arguing", I would still know little about what they were actually thinking.

Framing:  In contrast, according to Rychlak (1994), a first-person perspective captures how we each view the world through our own unique lens. I think of our lens as a frame I put around the experiences I am taking up and yielding to in my unique circumstances. What we see and frame is 100% tied to our past experiences, our current experiences, and our future direction.  What we see and frame is also 100% tied to our unique physical biology.  Despite the limitations and potentiality of our biology and social contexts, we can, however, still frame our experience otherwise (i.e., what gives us freedom). One could say that we are always framing our experience from within our unique circumstance, affirming meanings that will become part of how we further frame meaning from within our situated embodiment. Joseph Rychlak (1994) referred to this framing process as "affirming the ground or assumption for the sake of which she or he will be determined" (p. 314).  

When moving from a third- to first- person perspective, our theory of the mind changes from guessing what others are thinking to recognizing that all humans are agents who frame experience from within their own unique physical and social experience. 

Awareness: As an agent, I need awareness to frame my experience meaningfully. I may perceive things outside of my awareness with my brain (e.g., I perceive a tree, but that doesn't necessitate that I will frame a meaning about the tree). I need awareness to frame meaning (e.g., Oh look, I see that beautiful tree over there). I cannot draw meaning from what I see without affirming it via awareness "as grounds for the sake of which understanding or action will be furthered in cognition" (Rychlak, 1994, p. 309, see also Gorlin & Békés, 2021 on their article linking agency and awareness).  The meaning I have drawn from my framing of the tree now becomes part of the frame I will bring to bear on further conceptualizing of my experience and actions I may take.

When I work with clients, I help them understand how they uniquely frame and make meaning from their own experience. I like to think of awareness as the lens through which we point our agency in different directions leading to different meaning-making ends and actions. Each of us has our own way of framing experience from within our unique embodied, situated experience which we affirm in an on-going fashion across time as meaningful antecedents for further learning. The meaning we make includes how we frame and name emotional arousal in our bodies which often is one of the root causes for emotional problems. 

Affect/Emotion: Affect and emotion arise in, and because of, our interactions and our experiences in our environment. Affect and feeling (used interchangeably) are the words that we use to label our emotional reactions, I feel sad, or I feel annoyed. Emotion, in contrast, is the word that we use to describe the varied physical reactions that we experience (crying or tenseness). The fact that we distinguish the words affect from emotion aligns with the contrast that I am making between agency (concepts) and its embodiment (physical reactions). Lisa Feldman Barrett (2017) in her remarkable book, How Emotions Are Made, provides many studies describing the intersection of affect and emotion. She provides evidence for how emotions appear to be conceptually constructed.

Feldman Barrett explains the classical view that each emotion is thought to have a unique physiological fingerprint in the body across individuals. Her research shows, instead, that specific emotions are more like individuals in a population. She has found that there are no specific physiological patterns present for a single emotion across individuals, except that different emotions can generally be differentiated from each other.  How we interpret our emotions is tied to the context in which we experience them and what we have previously learned and understood about them. Sometimes tears, for example, can arise in us and, depending upon the context, it might reflect grief, or it might reflect joy.  Feldman Barrett provides evidence for how the brain gathers sensory information and essentially predicts how to act as it categorizes and conceptually organizes information. She uses the language of agency in interaction with biology and social reality. While she opts for an emergent mind (arising from biology) to describe what conceptualizes emotions, I like to think she has tapped into the agentic process that I am describing here. Could her work be touching on the interaction between a higher order, a more refined agentic process (which conceptualizes, and frames experience based on background knowledge) and its interactions and entanglement with a sensation gathering, prediction-adjusting brain in a unique social context? Rychlak, without being aware of Feldman Barrett's research, back in 1994 was writing about what he called, Affective Assessment. He described affective assessment as the agents' ability to conceptualize emotional arousal in the body and to assign preferences of like and dislike to the agents' on-going experience.

Inherent Moral Implications of Agency: Our minds always operate within our control unless we abdicate this control to our biology or to our social contexts. Sometimes we experience life as though we don't have a choice because our biology or social contexts limit our agency (e.g., through actions of authoritarian - vs. agency respecting - leaders, teachers, parents..etc.). When we come to understand ourselves as moral agents, we recognize that we are always framing our experience in a way that locks us into certain choices and locks us out of others. There are consequences, along a positive and negative continuum, for how we direct our agency and frame experience. 

I refer to humans as moral agents because the consequences of our agency affects others in our relational spheres. Our agentic choices (i.e., ends to which we have directed our agency) may intentionally or unintentionally limit the choices of ourselves and others (e.g., I can talk over you, so I do not need to hear what you are saying). 

The idea that our agency is free without any attached responsibility aligns with the libertarian view that elevates choosing above context, rather than capturing the agent-always-in-context. Recognition that we are moral agents means that we should pay attention to and be empowered by the freedom we bear, without forgetting the responsibility associated with how we direct our agency to act toward different ends that affect others. An agency-centered model inspires us to show compassion to ourselves and to others, recognizing that our choices are determined by where we have been. Ideally, being moral agents means we have to help ourselves and others to have more possibilities and to find win-win solutions for everyone in our sphere of influence.  Because we are moral agents, we can become united in purpose despite and because of our differences.