SAJA
Sense of Agency in Joint Action (ANR Projet de Recherche Collaborative, with Elisabeth Pacherie, 2016-2019)
Summary
Many of the most significant achievements of our species result from our capacity to engage in cooperative joint actions. The sense of agency experienced in joint action is thus a central subjective dimension of human sociality and an essential aspect of human cooperativeness. In this interdisciplinary project, we propose to pool together expertise from philosophy of mind and action, cognitive psychology and experimental game theory in order to investigate the sense of agency in joint action, its cognitive underpinnings and its role in supporting social cooperation.
Since the early 2000s, the sense of self-agency – the sense people have that they are the authors of their own actions – has attracted considerable research interest. Similarly, joint action has received increasing scholarly attention from researchers in a wide array of disciplines. Yet, only a handful of conceptual and empirical studies have begun to investigate the nature and cognitive underpinnings of the sense of agency in joint action. While their results suggest that in joint action contexts the sense of agency is altered, very little is known about the specific factors that contribute to this alteration, and the extent to which it involves a transformation of agentive awareness (e.g., a shift from a sense of self-agency to a sense of “we-agency”). The main purpose of this project is to address these issues both theoretically and empirically, with theoretical advances informing experiments laid out during the project, and conversely, empirical results leading to rethink conceptual notions in the field.
Our objective is to investigate experimentally the relations and differences between the respective mechanisms underlying our experience of agency in individual and in joint action and to determine under what conditions engaging in joint actions can induce transformations of agentive awareness. Research has shown that the processes that generate a sense of agency for an individual action are closely connected to the processes involved in the specification and control of that action. However, the mechanisms of action specification and control involved in joint action are typically more complex, since it is crucial for joint action that people coordinate their decisions, plans and actions. Inter-individual coordination issues arise at two broad levels: higher-level or strategic coordination issues concern whether to cooperate and towards what goal and lower-level coordinationissues concern sensorimotor coordination in the implementation of a joint goal. In addition, joint actions can involve various asymmetries in the respective contributions of the agents and in the coordination demands made on them.
The pursuit of this objective will engage two sets of empirical studies, combining for the first time experimental paradigms inspired by game theory and paradigms used in the study of motor coordination and agency in cognitive psychology. In the first series of studies, we will specifically test the role of low-level coordination processes and the effect of variations and asymmetries in low-level coordination demands on the sense of agency in joint action. In the second series of studies, we will investigate the interactions between high-level coordination processes and low-level coordination processes in a coordination task implementing situations of shared vs. divergent interests as they have been operationalized in game theory.
Collaborators:
Elisabeth Pacherie
Frédérique de Vignemont
Sacha Bourgeois-Gironde
Jérôme Dokic
Etienne Koechlin
Valentin Wyart
Patrick Haggard
Solène Le Bars (postdoc)
Tena Nevidal (M2 student)