In behavioral psychology, agents are goal-directed entities that can monitor their environment to select and perform efficient means-end actions that are available in a given situation to achieve an intended goal.
[7] The other half of the topic of agency deals with the arguments of determinism typically found in theories of personality and developmental lifespan.
Founding actors of Psychology (such as Sigmund Freud, and B.F. Skinner) defaulted on deterministic principles in order to form their theories.
Much of this is due to the scientific consensus of the era, particularly concerning Newtonian principles of linear time and the attempts made by earlier psychologists to have psychology recognized as a serious science.
The theory assumes that the rationality principle makes observers able to relate the action, the represented goal state, and the current situational constraints to decide whether an object is an agent.
[4] These results and later empirical studies[19][3][20][21] underpinned that agency recognition in humans can be explained by principle-based models rather than simple perceptual cues.
It was proposed[22] that the representation of agency can be based on the sensitivity to different abilities observed in agentive entities probably in humans and perhaps in non-human species as well.
[23] In humans, the species-specific social environment allows one to identify agents either based on their intentional behavior, on their non-communicative, rational, goal-directed actions, or by recognizing their communicative abilities.
In non-human species, however, besides these types of input information, unfamiliar potential agents can be identified based on their perceptual abilities.
[27][28][29] These studies reveal that when an agent exhibits an instrumental action it is expected by human infants to achieve its goal in an efficient manner, which is rational in terms of efforts in a given context.
One of these conditions appears to be political/social, indicating that lower access to food or undernutrition has a bidirectional influence on women’s agency in East African countries.
Previous research provided evidence for this assumption showing that this sensitivity affects the expectations of cotton-top tamarins, rhesus macaques, and chimpanzees.