ArticlePloS one2018
Only giving orders? An experimental study of the sense of agency when giving or receiving commands.
Article in PloS one, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 31 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
31 citing papers in PubMed.
- The effect of experimenter identification on (dis)obedience and its mechanisms.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Embodied morality in a disembodied world: Dishonesty in real online interactions.Computers in human behavior reports · 2026Article
- Non-immersive robot teleoperation does not reliably affect egocentric dishonesty but can influence altruistic dishonesty.iScience · 2026Article
- Effects of action instruction source on the sense of agency: humans vs. artificial agents.Experimental brain research · 2026Article
- Intentional binding reflects pair dynamics and sense of agency in embodied joint action in human-human dyads but not in human-computer dyads.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- A cross-cultural EEG study of how obedience and conformity influence reconciliation intentions.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2025Article
- A multi-measurement study of the relation between deliberation and volition.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2025Article
- The impact of shared sense of agency and moral dispositions on intergroup dishonesty.Current psychology (New Brunswick, N.J.) · 2025Article
- Obedience induces agentic shifts by increasing the perceived time between own action and results.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- You do you: susceptibility of temporal binding to self-relevance.Psychological research · 2024Article
- Sense of agency in joint action: a critical review of we-agency.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- When the brain says "No!": An MRI study on the neural correlates of resistance to immoral orders.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- A computational text analysis investigation of the relation between personal and linguistic agency.Communications psychology · 2023Article
- Conflict experience and resolution underlying obedience to authority.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Influence of voluntary action and outcome valence on the sense of agency.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2023Article
- On the cognitive mechanisms supporting prosocial disobedience in a post-genocidal context.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Neuromodulation of the right temporoparietal junction alters amygdala functional connectivity to authority pressure.Human brain mapping · 2022Article
- Temporal binding of social events less pronounced in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Morality in the flesh: on the link between bodily self-consciousness, moral identity and (dis)honest behaviour.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- The anti-anxiety drug lorazepam changes implicit behaviors but not explicit evaluations of sense of agency under authoritative pressure: A functional magnetic resonance imaging study.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In human societies, agents are assumed to experience being the author of their own actions. These basic motoric experiences of action are influenced by social hierarchies, leading to surprising and morally significant results. Here we ask whether, under coercion, the sense of agency and responsibility pass from the person who receives orders to the person who gives them. Volunteers took turns to play the roles of 'commander', 'agent' or 'victim' in a task where the commander coerced the agent to deliver painful shocks to the 'victim'. We used 'intentional binding' as an implicit measure of sense of agency in both commanders and agents, in conditions of coercion and free-choice. We observed a reduced sense of agency when agents received coercive instructions, relative to when they freely chose which action to execute. We also found that sense of agency in the commanders was reduced when they coerced agents to administer the shock on their behalf, relative to when they acted by themselves. This last effect was associated with the commander's self-reported level on a psychopathy scale. Thus, coercion resulted in neither commander nor agent feeling agency for the effect of the action, as measured through implicit methods. Our results could have profound implications for social decision-making and social regulation of moral behaviour.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.