It’s About Time! The Sense of Agency Increases After Spontaneous vs. Planned Actions but It Decreases After Externally Planned Actions

Whereas some actions are spontaneous and have consequences that are experienced nearly immediately, other actions are planned in advance, and there is a delay between the intention and the outcome. Currently, it is unclear how, if at all, the temporal dynamics of setting an intention impacts the sense of agency (Pacherie, 2015). The goal of this Registered Report was to address this issue and investigate how the delay between forming an intention and experiencing outcomes of one’s actions affects the sense of agency. Moreover, the mixed results obtained in past studies could indicate that contradictory mechanisms may be involved. To address these inconsistencies, we investigated two possible mediating processes: expectation-outcome congruence and a feeling of having an unconstrained choice. In two studies, participants performed a planned vs. unplanned vs. externally planned action, and their sense of agency, as well as proposed meditators, were measured. Study 1 was conducted online, used a between-subjects design, and additionally explored the moderating role of selected personality traits. Study 2 was conducted in the laboratory setting, used a within-subjects design, and additionally included an implicit measure of agency (i.e., a temporal binding task). In both studies, we found that the feeling of having an unconstrained choice, but not the expectation-outcome congruence, acted as a mediator between the planning manipulation and the explicit sense of agency. Specifically, participants reported a higher sense of agency after making spontaneous decisions compared to planned decisions because they felt that their choice was less restricted. In contrast, the sense of agency decreased even more when the plan was externally imposed.