Working with an Online Artificial Partner Enhances Implicit and Reduces Explicit Sense of Agency

A "sense of agency" is the feeling that one is the cause of events in the world. The presence of others has been shown to create a diffusion of responsibility and thus reduce individuals' explicit ratings of control. This notion has recently been conceptualised as "interfered agency". The current study investigated both explicit and implicit measures of agency in an interfered agency paradigm. In two online experiments, we showed that when being induced to feel that they were working with an artificial virtual agent who could potentially act in a shared task, participants felt less control i.e., explicit measure. We also found greater temporal binding (an implicit measure) implying a stronger sense of agency; that is, the opposite pattern of results compared with the explicit measure. Across the two experiments conducted online, we demonstrated that these effects were due to the implied ability for the partner to act and not an effect of social presence per se. We propose that explicit measures of agency reflect the conscious attribution of responsibility, while implicit measures reflect the strength of the representation of the causal links between action and effect. These data reinforce recent theoretical developments in our understanding of the sense of agency and social agency when working with an artificial partner.