Agency
Ideas around agency, aka the sense of control that you feel in your life + your capacity to influence your own thoughts and behavior
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Agency
you are a self-modifying machine, a particle with partial control over its own future, and it pays to know what all the buttons do. I’ve heard many people describe to me what sound like levers in their own souls, but I know very few people who realize that they can pull on them deliberately, if they want to.
Duncan Sabien • The Levers of the Soul
I think often what’s going on with prompted agency is that it gives you permission to act, and many people aren’t good at acting without permission.
David R. MacIver • Learning to exercise agency
Learned helplessness, the failure to escape shock induced by uncontrollable aversive events, was discovered half a century ago. Seligman and Maier (1967) theorized that animals learned that outcomes were independent of their responses—that nothing they did mattered – and that this learning undermined trying to escape. The mechanism of learned... See more
Learned Helplessness at Fifty: Insights from Neuroscience
I was realizing how many personal and interpersonal issues ultimately traced back to feeling like one has little to no agency. Everything from confidence to motivation can be traced back to agency, at least to some extent.