What Is Agency, and What Does It Mean To Act Freely?

Agency: The Architecture of Human Action

You unlock your phone to check a single notification. Ten minutes later, you are still scrolling through videos and posts, feeling unable to tear yourself away. The downward scroll of your thumb feels automatic, yet somewhere inside, you recognize that you are still the one who keeps scrolling, looking for the next short that will grab your attention. This tension between acting and being acted upon captures the core problem of human agency. Are we directing our choices, or are we carried along by invisible habits and emotions that shape what we do?

Human agency is often misunderstood as a simple ability to make choices, but it is better understood as a dynamic way of being throughout one’s life. Behavioral scientists describe agency as an evolving process that emerges through relationship, reflection, and embodiment rather than as a string of isolated decisions. One argument, published in a forthcoming journal Frontiers in Psychology (Agency: What Does It Mean to Be a Human Being? (Williams, Gantt & Fischer, 2021), reframes the question of free will by emphasizing coherence and meaning. Looking at it this way, agency is not a single moment of decision but the ongoing combination of intention and action across a lifetime. It is not something we “have” but something we continually do. More like a state of being, than some process you stop and ponder before you make a choice.

This perspective can help explain why your behavior often feels both voluntary and automatic. We may act from a sense of internal necessity rather than external force. When we “choose” to keep scrolling, we are not influenced to act in a physical sense, but the structure of our attention and the rewards of the digital environment make resistance feel strange and somewhat wrong. Agency exists in the “friction” between impulse and reflection. The more attention we pay to that friction, the more deliberate our actions become since we consider the potential outcomes.

Sheldon and Martela, writing in The Journal of Positive Psychology (The Human Capacity to Choose Poorly: Free Will, Determinism, and Well-Being (Sheldon & Martela, 2021), expand on this by describing the human capacity to “choose poorly.” Their research explores the middle ground between concrete consequences and total freedom, suggesting that authentic agency includes the potential to make “bad” or less-than-perfect choices. They note that our sense of control is often intertwined with motivation and well-being. When people feel that their actions are self-directed and meaningful, they experience greater fulfillment, even when outcomes are uncertain. In contrast, when they feel controlled by circumstances, obligation, or social pressure, their sense of self weakens. The read? The ability to make mistakes, learn, and realign with one’s values is not a flaw in human agency but a defining feature of it.

Other behavioral scientists (Human Agency and the Foundations of Psychology: Reconsidering the Theological Roots of Freedom and Responsibility (Reynolds & Placido, 2019) trace the concept’s evolution from its religious origins to its modern psychological skeleton. In early Christian thought, Augustine understood agency as a moral responsibility bound to divine order. Human freedom was meaningful precisely because it operated within moral constraints. Over centuries, this religious framing gave way to more human-centered models. By the twentieth century, Albert Bandura’s social cognitive theory articulated agency as the product of four capacities: intentionality, forethought, self-reactiveness, and self-reflection. This model emphasized that humans are capable of shaping their environments as much as they are shaped by them. Later, the Transtheoretical Model of behavior change applied these principles to personal transformation, identifying stages such as precontemplation, action, and maintenance. Within that sequence, agency becomes observable as a process of self-organization: individuals move from passive awareness to active authorship of their choices.

Looking at all the historical change from religious thought to scientific modeling, agency emerges as the thread linking ancient ethics to modern psychology. It is the capacity to act within constraint, to learn from error, and to align behavior with meaning. Every deliberate act, even the decision to stop doom-scrolling, represents a small reclaiming of authorship. Agency, then, is not the lack of influence but the presence of intention. It transforms reaction into choice and existence into active participation.