Human flourishing is spurred by the belief in individual Agency. Agency has three components: efficacy, optimism, and imagination. My central hypothesis is that increasing agency is the immediate cause of innovation and progress, and decreasing agency leads to passivity and stagnation. Agency is measured by the balance of the belief in individual agency versus the belief in the agency of the supernatural and of chance. Progress is measured by political freedom, scientific and artistic achievement, technological advance, and the quality of human life, This project will test this relationship across cultures and historical time, including the Greco-Roman epoch, Old and New Testament civilizations, the Middle Ages, Chinese and Indian history, the Renaissance, the Industrial revolution, the Atlantic Revolutions, and Catholic and Protestant changes in Europe and America from 1520-1950. Big-data lexical analysis will be a primary method.for the historical analyses.
Future human progress therefore depends on improved education toward more efficacy, more optimism, and more imagination. We will develop and test such educational advances in the laboratory and in schools.
It is well-confirmed in the helplessness and efficacy literatures that the presence of a belief in Agency is an immediate cause of serious effort and innovation and that the absence of this belief leads to passivity and despair. Has this been true across cultures and history, however? The development of machine learning and lexical analysis in the last decade now allows us to test this across history for the first time. If confirmed, the teaching of Agency will forge innovation and progress in the human future and we will develop curricula to teach agency.
Individual Agency has become an unpopular topic academically. Explanations of human stagnation are currently the politicized "isms" and the lack of external goods, as opposed to individual psychological strengths and weaknesses. We aim to battle this barrier, which is particularly a barrier for young scientist. We will battle it with scientifically gathered data: historical, religious, philosophical, educational, experimental and longitudinal.
New methods of lexical analysis for Hebrew, Chinese, Latin, Greek, and Hindi will need to be developed. Collaborations with young scholars in these languages and time periods will need to be established. Collaborations among psychologists, economists, political scientists, historians, and scholars in religion, literature and the arts will be needed to quantify progress across cultures. New curricula for Agency, i.e., efficacy, optimism, and imagination, will need to be developed and piloted. I have developed successful curricula for resilience and positive psychology for schools and corporations and I now welcome the possibility of doing so for agency.
1) Lexical indicators of Agency are developed and validated in English, Chinese, Hindi, Hebrew, Latin and Greek
2) Measures of progress (freedom, artistic, scientific and technological achievements, quality of life) are developed and validated across cultures and history
3) Technical cross-disciplinary journal articles on the above topics are published
4) The monograph and the tradebook on Agency and innovation are widely read,
5) Years 5 through 10: Agency as a driver of success becomes a major topic in Academia, overshadowing the "isms" and external deprivation explanations of human passivity and failure. Curriculum is widely adopted in schools and corporations.
The sweep of human history has been viewed through the eyes of economists, ecologists, Great Man historians, and Social Force historians, but not yet through Psychology. I contend that the psychological state of Agency is the immediate cause of human progress. In its absence, humanity stagnates. This mental state has three components: Efficacy, Optimism, and Imagination. Agency is an individual's expectation that "I can influence the world." Efficacy is an individual's expectation that I can influence something. Optimism is how long into the future efficacy is expected. Imagination is the range of scenarios over which efficacy is expected. Agency spurs innovation since efficacy causes trying hard; optimism causes sustained persistence, and imagination creates new departures.
Over the last 14000 years there have been several psychological epochs in which agency changes radically to keep pace with novel social and material demands. Before writing ("Pre-History") we can only infer agency from behaviors such as the control of fire, burial practices, and the invention of agriculture. The first epoch for which we have writing is the Divine Age in which the gods command and we humans obey. We have very limited agency. Then, after the Bronze Age, between 800 BCE and 600 BCE, we begin to develop an interior consciousness that observes the world from the standpoint of an agentic I. Greece and Rome have much expanded Agency–considerable efficacy, considerable prospection, and considerable imagination. Material, technological, artistic and political progress all follow from this Agentic self. After the fall of Rome, under the theology of Augustine in which God has primary Agency, the quality of human life becomes miserable and stays that way. Almost nothing is invented for 1000 years in the West. Then, around 1450, the Age of Progress in the West begins as we re-acquire substantial Agency. The printing press, Baconian Science, the New World, Michelangelo and Shakespeare in the Arts, Free Will in Theology, Vaccination in Medicine, True Wealth in Capitalism, and Political freedom all stem from Agency. The Agentic Self democratizes again during the Industrial Revolution and becomes universal around 1950.
We now stand at the dawn of the Age of Agency populated by fully Agentic individuals who peer far into the future in order to flourish. If potential barriers–nuclear war, pandemic, climate catastrophe, racial warfare, and financial collapse–can be overcome, this will be an age of efficay, optimism, and imagination. This will be the first Age of Well-being.
Potential Collaborators:
Darrin McMahon (Historian, Dartmouth)
Lyle Ungar (Computer Scientist, Penn)
Phil Gorski (Religion, Yale)
Rebecca Goldstein (Philosopher)
Yukun Zhao (Beijing)
Nicolas Baumard (Sorbonne)
References:
Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review.
Baumard, N. (2019). Psychological origins of the industrial revolution. Behavioral and Brain Sciences,42.
Goldstein, R. (2014) Plato at the Googleplex. Pantheon.
Gorski, P. (2017. American covenant. Princeton University Press
Ridley, M. (2020). How innovation works and why it flourishes in freedom: Harper
Seligman, M. (2012). Flourish. Simon and Schuster.
Seligman, M. (submitted). Agency in Greco-Roman Philosophy.
These research ideas were submitted in response to Templeton World Charity Foundation’s global call for Grand Challenges in Human Flourishing, which ran from September through November 2020.
Opinions expressed on this page, or any media linked to it, do not necessarily reflect the views of Templeton World Charity Foundation, Inc. Templeton World Charity Foundation, Inc. does not control the content of external links.
