The sense of agency, or sense of control, is the 📝subjective awareness of initiating, executing, and controlling one's own volitional actions in the world. It is the pre-reflective awareness or implicit sense that it is I who is executing bodily movement or thinking thoughts.
Philosopher Shaun Gallagher distinguished the sense of agency from the sense of ownership in 2000. Ownership is the feeling that a movement or thought is happening to me; agency is the feeling that I am causing it. If someone lifts your passive arm, you feel ownership of the movement but not agency over it.
Cognitive science offers several accounts of how the feeling arises. The comparator model, developed by Chris Frith, Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, and Daniel Wolpert, holds that the brain predicts the sensory consequences of each motor command from a copy of that command and registers agency when prediction and feedback match; a breakdown in this matching has been proposed to explain delusions of control in schizophrenia. Daniel Wegner and Thalia Wheatley argued instead in 1999 that the experience of will is inferred after the fact, when a thought precedes, fits, and has no rival as the cause of an action — a view that bears on debates about 📝free will. In 2002, Patrick Haggard and colleagues described intentional binding, in which a voluntary action and its effect are perceived as closer together in time, now a standard implicit measure of agency.
In trauma research, the concept describes what harm takes away. Psychiatrist Judith Herman's Trauma and Recovery (1992), which also introduced 📝Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD), identifies disempowerment and disconnection as the core experiences of psychological trauma, and frames recovery around restoring the survivor's power and control in the context of new relationships, including groups in which survivors learn they are not alone. In technology, the related call to 📝Reclaim Agency applies the idea to tools designed to capture and steer behavior.
As I wrote in 📝Before Violence Becomes Visible, when people have been harmed or isolated, I care about helping them find one another, be believed, and regain some sense of agency. Discovering you are not alone is often where it starts to return.