Self-Talks 7: The Human Agency

Being an agent is making things happen by one’s actions. We humans are believed to be someone who acts not just by nature but with other factors as well such as the endowments, belief systems, self-regulatory capabilities, and distributed structures and functions. To be an agent, we mainly consider our personal influence. Human agency has its core features including: intentionality, forethought, self-reactiveness, and self-reflectiveness. It enables people to play a part in their development, adaptation, and self-renewal especially in the thought of the changing world.

1. Intentionality — Intentions focus on plans of action. Intentions are representations of series of actions to be performed by the agent, there must be a proactive commitment on performing such actions as well. An intention of an action is like a draft of an essay, according to Bratman (1999), initial partial intentions are filled in and then adjusted, revised, refined, or even reconsidered as the emergence of new knowledge and information are considered during the execution of an intention. Take note, outcomes are not a characteristic of an agentive act but rather a consequence.
2. Forethought — Possible and foreseeable events motivate an agent to act up in the present. Through the exercise of forethought, people are able to set what they should do to avoid or to achieve something in the present. A person who have a forethoughtful behavior tends to have a sense of direction, coherence, and sometimes, have a meaning to their life. Most of the time, we construct the future events by also basing to what is happening around us, to our environment, and in our world, right after the construction, we will base in that constructed outcomes to know the actions that we are going to take.
3. Self-Reactiveness — An agent must also be a self-regulator and a motivator. Guiding yourself to attain a goal is important, you must always try to reshape and develop the current events to fully attain a goal. You must assess everything as you go on, if things are still working as according to what you want or not anymore. Such assessments are important for you to regulate and control the happenings, using your own personal standards, you could find it more easily if you are to assess things.
4. Self-Reflectiveness — An agent must also be self-examiners of his functioning. A person reflecting is enabled to assess his own motivation, values, and the meaning of his life pursuits. An agent must still see his own purpose in such actions because if not, actions performed will be worthless. An agent must regularly check on his self, asking, “Is this really for me?”. Self-reflectiveness is an important core feature of human agency as it could impact the other three core features.

Something you can think of:

In the Philippines, we had seen and witnessed a lot of political issues, whenever we were able to see it on TV, radio, newspapers, or through the internet. Such political issues where our politicians continuously fight with each other. Now, how can we achieve solidarity as a single nation if the fight starts at the leaders? Well, we, as citizens, could practice the power bestowed to us as we became a democratic country, which is, choosing the leaders for our country and countrymen. In every election, the buying and selling of votes is not a new issue. We, the young people, must not tolerate this, we are believed to be the agent of hope and so of change. In the 2022 election, let us be united and make a difference, let us give our nation the leaders it deserves. Our intention must be put on all of that and not just about for ourselves. We, as the agent of change, must have the clearest intention, considering every possible consequence or outcome to our action, while not losing against greed but winning with our moral standards. The goal is to have a better country, every step we are going to take to attain it must be thought carefully, let us not lose sight of it, be critical and rational, our country needs us.

References

SOCIAL COGNITIVE THEORY: An Agentic Perspective | Bandura, A