Autonomous Agency and Social Psychology

Abstract

Autonomous agents, like autonomous nations, are able to govern themselves. They are not controlled by external forces or manipulated by outside agents. They set goals for themselves, establishing principles for their choices and actions, and they are able to act in accord with those principles. Just as deliberative democracies legislate so as to balance competing interests, autonomous agents deliberate to reach some consistency among their competing desires and values. And just as good governments create their laws in the open without undue influence by covert factions, autonomous agents form their principles for action through conscious deliberation without undue influence by unconscious forces. Autonomous agents are self-controlled not weak-willed, self-aware not self-deceptive. Given this description, it would be nice to be an autonomous agent. Indeed, we believe we are, for the most part, autonomous agents. 1 However, there are threats to this commonsense belief. Some philosophers argue that if causal determinism is true then we lack free will and hence are not fully autonomous or responsible for our actions. 2 One might also worry that if certain explanations of the mind-body relationship are true, then our conscious deliberations are epiphenomenal in such a way that we are not really autonomous. Philosophers also analyze political freedom and various socio-political threats to people's autonomy. But other threats to autonomy are less often discussed, threats that are not metaphysical or political but psychological. These are threats based on putative facts about human psychology that suggest we do not govern our behavior according to principles we have consciously chosen. For instance, if our behavior were governed primarily by unconscious Freudian desires rather than by our reflectively considered desires, we would be much less autonomous than we presume. Or if our behaviors were the result of a history of Skinnerian reinforcement rather than conscious consideration, our actions would be shaped by our environment more than by our principles. Since the influence of Freud and Skinner has waned, we might feel we have escaped such threats to our autonomy from the psychology. But, as I will explain below, more recent and viable theories and evidence from social psychology pose significant threats to autonomous agency.