Metacognitions of agency were investigated using a computer task in which X’s and O’s streamed from the top of a computer screen, and the participants moved the mouse to get the cursor to touch the X’s and avoid the O’s. After each 15 s trial, participants made judgments of agency and judgments of performance. Objective control was either undistorted, or distorted by (1) Turbulence (i.e., random noise), (2) a Lag between the mouse and cursor movements (of 250 or 500 ms), or (3) ‘Magic,’ (i.e., an increased radius around the X’s for which credit was given). In Experiment 1, college students’ judgments of agency showed that they were sensitive to all three manipulations. They also indicated that they felt more in control in the Lag conditions, where there was a rule on which they could potentially capitalize, than in the matched Turbulence conditions. In Experiment 2, older adults were also sensitive to all three manipulations, but less so than the college students. They were not sensitive to the difference between the Lag and Turbulence manipulations. Finally, in Experiment 3, 8–10 year-old children were sensitive to their loss of control equally in the Lag and Turbulence conditions. However, when performance was artificially improved, in the Magic condition, children took full credit and showed no evidence that they realized that the results were due to an external variable. Together, these findings suggest that people’s metacognition of agency changes in important ways across the lifespan.
Until recently, the idea that people might not know that they were the agents behind their own actions was almost inconceivable. The “I” who was doing the thinking, in Descartes’ (1637/1969) meditations, became his incontrovertible basis of all other knowledge. His metacognition about his own agency was the one and only thing Descartes could not doubt or deny. His thoughts could be wrong; his perceptions distorted; his knowledge inaccurate. But Descartes was unable to conceive of the possibility that it was not he who was doing the thinking and doubting. As Jeannerod and Pacherie (2004) put it: “A number of contemporary thinkers acknowledge that when I judge “I think X”, I may be mistaken about X and thus that the mind is not wholly transparent of itself. But they maintain, with Descartes, that when I judge: “I think X”, I cannot be mistaken about who the subject of the thought is. “ (p. 114). So, too, by this view, when actions are taken, we know, unmistakably and in a uniquely privileged way, that we are doing them ourselves.
This brand of privileged access, which Ryle (l949) called the ‘official doctrine’, has special status in the law. Eyewitnesses accounts—the report from a witness that they saw the perpetrator—hold enormous weight, both in court, in juror’s decisions, and even in the face of conflicting evidence (see, Fox & Walters, l986). However, even eyewitness reports pale by comparison to an individual’s confession. There is simply no more incriminating thing that a person can do than assert that they did it. Their attribution of self-agency with respect to the act of the crime is paramount. And, although everyone acknowledges that confessions might be coerced and hence not be valid (c.f., Kassin & Sukel, l997), if the confession is made freely and there is every reason to suppose the confessor believes it, then we the jury take this to be the most sure evidence that exists that the person indeed committed the crime.
