The sense of agency in joint action: An integrative review

When people perform joint actions together, their individual actions (e.g., moving one end of a heavy couch) must be coordinated to achieve a collective goal (e.g., moving the couch across the room). Joint actions pose unique challenges for understanding people’s sense of agency, because each person engaged in the joint action can have a sense of agency not only at the individual level (a sense that “I moved my end of the couch” or “My partner moved their end of the couch”), but also at the collective level (a sense that “We moved the couch together”). This review surveys research that has examined people’s sense of agency in joint action, including explicit judgments of agency, implicit measures of agency, and first-hand accounts of agency in real-world settings. The review provides a comprehensive summary of the factors that influence individual- and collective-level agency in joint action; reveals the progress that has been made toward understanding different forms of collective-level agency in joint action, including the sense that agency is shared among co-actors and the sense that co-actors are acting as a single unit; and synthesizes evidence concerning the relationships between different measures of implicit agency and individual- versus collective-level agency in joint action. The review concludes by highlighting numerous outstanding questions and promising avenues for future research.