Human Agency

Human Agency refers to the capacity to make choices and act in the world. This research examines self-determination theory (Deci and Ryan), the three basic psychological needs (autonomy, competence, relatedness), learned helplessness (Seligman), and how governance systems either support or suppress human agency. OMXUS is designed to restore agency to individuals and communities by providing the conditions under which self-determination flourishes.

Executive Summary

Human agency emerges as a multifaceted, conditioned, yet genuine phenomenon:

• Scientific evidence shows our brains initiate decisions through processes we are often unaware of
• This does not erase conscious choice -- it refines our understanding of how it works
• We are neither puppets nor gods, but something in between: agents constrained yet capable, responsible yet embedded, free yet influenced
• Agency can be systematically supported or systematically destroyed -- and governance systems determine which

Self-Determination Theory

Self-Determination Theory (SDT), developed by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan beginning in the 1970s, is one of the most extensively researched frameworks in motivational psychology. SDT proposes that humans have three basic psychological needs that are essential for psychological health, intrinsic motivation, and optimal functioning.

The Three Basic Needs

Need	Definition	When Satisfied	When Frustrated
Autonomy	Experience of volition and self-endorsement of one's actions	Feeling that one acts from genuine interest and values; sense of choice	Feeling controlled, coerced, pressured; acting against one's values
Competence	Experience of effectiveness and mastery	Feeling capable, experiencing growth, meeting challenges	Feeling ineffective, doubting abilities, overwhelmed by demands
Relatedness	Experience of warmth, connection, and belonging	Feeling cared for, significant to others, part of a community	Feeling isolated, excluded, insignificant to others

The Evidence Base

SDT has been validated across:

• Cultures: Studies in over 30 countries including individualist (US, Australia) and collectivist (China, Japan, South Korea) cultures confirm the universality of the three needs
• Domains: Education, healthcare, sport, work, parenting, psychotherapy, environmental behaviour
• Age groups: Children, adolescents, adults, elderly
• Populations: Non-clinical, clinical, incarcerated, refugee, disabled

The research consistently shows that environments supporting autonomy, competence, and relatedness produce:

• Greater intrinsic motivation
• Higher quality performance
• Better mental health
• More prosocial behaviour
• Greater persistence and resilience
• Enhanced creativity
• Improved physical health

Autonomy vs Independence

A critical distinction in SDT: autonomy is not the same as independence. Autonomy means acting with a sense of volition and self-endorsement -- it is perfectly possible to autonomously choose to follow someone else's guidance, collaborate closely with others, or defer to expertise. The opposite of autonomy is not dependence but heteronomy -- acting because of external pressure, coercion, or control.

This distinction is central to OMXUS. Direct democratic participation is autonomous (you choose how to vote based on your values) even though it is inherently collective (you are participating in a shared governance process).

The Self-Determination Continuum

SDT describes motivation on a continuum from controlled to autonomous:

Type	Regulation	Example	Quality of Behaviour
Amotivation	None	"I don't know why I bother"	Poorest outcomes
External regulation	Rewards/punishments	"I do it because I'll be fined if I don't"	Low quality, ceases when incentive removed
Introjected regulation	Internal pressure	"I do it because I'd feel guilty otherwise"	Moderate, unstable
Identified regulation	Conscious valuing	"I do it because I believe it matters"	Good quality
Integrated regulation	Full assimilation	"I do it because it's who I am"	High quality
Intrinsic motivation	Interest and enjoyment	"I do it because I find it fascinating"	Highest quality, most creative

Current governance systems operate primarily through external regulation (laws, fines, imprisonment) and introjected regulation (guilt, social pressure). OMXUS aims to create conditions where civic participation operates at the identified, integrated, and intrinsic levels -- because the system actually serves participants' genuine interests.

Learned Helplessness

Martin Seligman's learned helplessness research, beginning in 1967, demonstrated that organisms exposed to uncontrollable adverse events develop a generalised expectation that their actions will not affect outcomes -- and subsequently fail to act even when control becomes available.

The Original Experiments

Dogs exposed to inescapable electric shocks subsequently failed to escape shocks even when escape was possible. They had learned that their actions did not matter -- and this learning transferred to new situations. The effect was robust and persistent.

Application to Humans

Learned helplessness in humans manifests as:

• Political apathy: "My vote doesn't matter" -- the single most common reason Australians give for disengagement from politics
• Welfare dependency: Systems that provide resources without agency create passivity
• Institutional compliance: People in highly controlled environments (prisons, bureaucracies, authoritarian workplaces) stop initiating actions
• Intergenerational disadvantage: Communities with prolonged lack of agency transmit helplessness to the next generation

The Three Dimensions of Helplessness (Abramson et al.)

The reformulated theory identifies three attributional dimensions that determine helplessness severity:

Dimension	Helpless Attribution	Agentic Attribution
Internal/External	"It's my fault"	"The situation was unfair"
Stable/Unstable	"It will always be this way"	"Things can change"
Global/Specific	"Nothing I do matters"	"This particular thing didn't work"

The most damaging combination is internal, stable, global ("It's my fault, it will always be this way, and nothing I do about anything will ever matter"). This is the attributional pattern associated with depression, and it maps precisely to the experience of citizens in governance systems that provide no meaningful mechanism for participation.

Learned Helplessness in Australian Democracy

Australian voter disengagement shows classic helplessness patterns:

• Compulsory voting masks the problem -- people attend polls but increasingly cast informal votes or vote without engagement
• Trust in government has declined from ~50% in the 1970s to ~25% in recent years
• Sense of influence: Only ~30% of Australians believe they can influence government decisions
• Youth disengagement: Young Australians show the lowest levels of political engagement and the highest levels of cynicism

The learned helplessness framework predicts this: when people are repeatedly exposed to a system where their input has no observable effect on outcomes, they stop trying.

Agency in Governance

What Supports Agency

SDT Need	Governance Feature That Supports It	Governance Feature That Frustrates It
Autonomy	Direct participation in decisions; freedom to choose	Delegated representation; decisions made by others "on your behalf"
Competence	Clear feedback on how your input affected outcomes; accessible information	Opaque processes; expert-only deliberation; no feedback loop
Relatedness	Community-based governance; knowing your neighbours; mutual aid	Atomised voting; anonymous bureaucracy; adversarial politics

The Agency Paradox of Representative Democracy

Representative democracy creates a structural paradox:

1. Citizens are told they have power ("you choose your representatives")
2. But individual votes have negligible statistical impact on outcomes
3. Representatives, once elected, face incentives that diverge from voter preferences
4. Citizens observe that their input does not produce corresponding outputs
5. Learned helplessness develops: "My vote doesn't matter"
6. Engagement declines, further reducing responsiveness
7. The cycle deepens

This is not a failure of individual citizens. It is a structural feature of a system designed in the 18th century for 18th-century communication constraints. The system produces helplessness as a predictable output.

Neuroscientific Perspectives

The Libet Experiments

Classic experiments by Benjamin Libet in the 1980s showed:

• A measurable uptick in brain activity (readiness potential) occurs before a person reports conscious intention to move
• Some information predicting a choice can be detected 7-10 seconds before conscious awareness

But Context Matters

Recent research indicates meaningful, deliberative choices engage the brain differently:

• Arbitrary decisions (flicking a wrist) show unconscious readiness potential
• Meaningful decisions (choosing which charity gets a donation) do not
• The brain appears to grant more conscious control when stakes are high

The Refined View

As Buccella and Dominik (2023) argue: "we are our brain" -- the fact that brain activity underlies our thoughts does not mean we are puppets. The ability to consciously reflect, weigh reasons, and make intentional choices is a product of brain activity -- just a highly complex one.

Evolutionary Perspectives

From an evolutionary standpoint:

• Human decision-making evolved because it was useful for survival
• Our ancestors faced countless choices where flexible behaviour was advantageous
• Natural selection shaped cognitive mechanisms that weigh costs and benefits

Pragmatic Free Will

What we experience as "free will" is an evolutionary product:

• Not a supernatural exemption from causality
• Rather, an evolved capacity to respond to stimuli in complex, goal-directed ways
• We have "adapted limited, pragmatic free will to make choices that aid survival and reproduction"

Cognitive Psychology

System 1 vs System 2

Daniel Kahneman's framework:

• System 2: Slow, effortful, logical thinking -- used for novel, complex decisions
• System 1: Fast, automatic, intuitive thinking based on heuristics -- used for most daily decisions

Most daily decisions rely on System 1, with the conscious mind often confabulating reasons afterward. This does not eliminate agency -- it means agency operates through the architecture of heuristics, defaults, and environmental cues as much as through deliberate reasoning.

Cognitive Biases

Dozens of biases have been documented:

Bias	Description	Implication for Governance
Confirmation bias	Seeking information that confirms existing beliefs	Polarisation in political discourse
Availability heuristic	Overweighting easily recalled information	Media-driven policy priorities (terrorism over road deaths)
Framing effects	Decisions influenced by how options are presented	Political spin altering public opinion on identical policies
Social proof	Following others' behaviour	Voter behaviour influenced by polls and perceived consensus
Status quo bias	Preference for current state of affairs	Resistance to systemic change even when current system fails
Dunning-Kruger effect	Overestimating competence in unfamiliar domains	Overconfident policy opinions without domain knowledge

These biases show that our agency is bounded by the architecture of our mind: we are not perfectly rational agents but susceptible to hidden influences. OMXUS addresses this through proximity weighting (domain expertise counts more) and transparent information systems (reducing availability bias).

Philosophical Perspectives

Three Major Positions

Position	View	Implication
Hard Determinism	Every event has deterministic causes; free will is illusion	Reform how we think about blame and punishment
Libertarian Free Will	Humans have free will not determined by prior causes	Robust moral responsibility for all actions
Compatibilism	Free will and determinism can both be true	Freedom means acting according to your own motivations without external coercion

OMXUS and Compatibilism

OMXUS's design is implicitly compatibilist:

• It acknowledges that behaviour is shaped by environment (Behavioral Plasticity)
• It does not use this as an excuse for inaction ("people can't change")
• Instead, it designs environments that support the best expressions of human agency
• It holds that people are responsible agents within their constraints -- and that the moral imperative is to remove unjust constraints

Comparison: Humans vs Animals vs AI

Dimension	Non-Human Animals	Current AI	Humans
Choice	Rudimentary, stimulus-driven	Simulated, no experience	Complex, reflective
Self-awareness	Limited (great apes, cetaceans)	None	Extensive
Reason-responsiveness	Limited	Pattern-matching only	Can weigh reasons, change mind
Moral agency	None (no concept of "should")	None	Full (can deliberate on ethics)
Environmental sensitivity	High (instinct-driven)	As programmed	High but can reflect on influence

Humans uniquely combine sophisticated cognition with self-awareness and the capacity to reflect on and modify their own decision-making processes.

How OMXUS Restores Agency

Agency Problem	Current System	OMXUS Solution	SDT Need Addressed
"My vote doesn't matter"	Negligible individual impact on elections	Proximity-weighted direct vote on specific issues; visible outcome	Competence (see your impact)
"Politicians don't represent me"	Delegated representation with misaligned incentives	No representatives; direct participation	Autonomy (act for yourself)
"I'm alone in this"	Atomised voting; adversarial politics	Community-based governance; mutual aid	Relatedness (belong to community)
"The system is too complex"	Opaque bureaucracy; expert-only deliberation	Transparent, auditable Bitcoin-anchored processes	Competence (understand the system)
"Nothing ever changes"	Electoral cycles; policy gridlock	Continuous participation; rapid policy adaptation	Autonomy + Competence (act and see results)
Learned helplessness	Repeated exposure to unresponsive systems	Responsive system; every input produces observable output	All three needs addressed

Key Conclusion

We are neither puppets nor gods:

• We have the capacity to reflect on impulses and regulate actions
• Yet we are influenced by factors beyond our control
• Our agency exists on a continuum and can wax or wane based on environment

Recognising these limits fosters humility and empathy -- understanding that people's actions result from a complex interplay of will and circumstance.

At the same time, recognising our unique capacity for agency is empowering -- we can shape our lives and be accountable for doing so, within limits.

The role of governance is to expand the zone of genuine agency -- to create conditions where people can act from autonomy rather than coercion, from competence rather than helplessness, from connection rather than isolation. OMXUS is designed to do exactly this.

See Also

• Two Monkey Theory
• Behavioral Plasticity
• Empathy Interventions
• Justice as Prevention
• Health Research
• Direct Democracy
• Voting
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