Low Agency:

"Low agency usually means that a person does not strongly experience themselves as someone who can cause things to happen. They may understand intellectually that choices are available, yet subjectively life feels more like something that happens to them than something they can shape.

One major source is learning history. If repeated efforts have produced little effect—because of highly controlling parents, chaotic environments, chronic failure, arbitrary rules, or simply circumstances with very little actual control—a person can learn that initiative is not worth much. Psychology sometimes describes the extreme version of this as learned helplessness. The important part is not weakness of character; it is the learned expectation: my actions probably won't change the outcome anyway.

Low agency can also arise from lack of competence. Agency is easier to feel when you repeatedly encounter the sequence: I decide → I act → something changes → I learn → I become more capable. If someone has had relatively few opportunities to solve problems independently, tolerate mistakes, acquire difficult skills, or make consequential decisions, that feedback loop remains weak. They may therefore seek instructions, reassurance, permission, or consensus before acting.

Fear matters as well. Acting autonomously means accepting uncertainty and responsibility. Once you choose, you can be wrong. You can embarrass yourself, lose something, disappoint someone, or discover that your judgment was poor. For some people, avoiding the decision protects them psychologically: if somebody else chose, circumstances dictated it, or they simply waited, they do not have to confront their own fallibility. Low agency can therefore function as a form of risk avoidance.

There is also a strong connection with self-concept. Someone who thinks, I'm not very capable, I'm bad at making decisions, or other people know better than I do will naturally behave differently from someone whose internal stance is, I'll figure it out. Importantly, this self-concept is often partly produced by past behavior. Every time you make a decision, handle the consequences, and discover that you can cope, you accumulate evidence of your own effectiveness. Agency becomes self-reinforcing.

Social environments can either strengthen or weaken it. Some families, workplaces, relationships, and institutions reward initiative; others reward obedience, conformity, or constant consultation. A person can become remarkably passive in one environment and highly agentic in another. So agency is not simply a fixed personality trait.

Another factor is excessive dependence on external evaluation. If the central question becomes What will people think?, rather than What do I think is worth doing?, decision-making becomes outsourced. The person may have plenty of energy and intelligence but still possess relatively little psychological autonomy because every action first passes through an imagined social tribunal.

Agency also requires tolerating an uncomfortable fact: there is rarely enough information to know with certainty what to do. Highly agentic people are not necessarily more certain. Often they are simply more willing to make a best guess, act, observe the result, and correct course. Low-agency people may instead wait for certainty that never arrives.

And this is why agency can increase quite dramatically over a person's life. You can build it through hundreds of ordinary experiences: making decisions without excessive consultation, completing difficult projects, becoming professionally competent, setting boundaries, handling rejection, ending situations that are not working, managing your own money, organizing your time, solving practical problems, and discovering repeatedly: I can deal with what happens next.

Agency and self-confidence are closely related because the deepest kind of confidence is not necessarily “things will go my way.” It is closer to “whatever happens, I will be able to respond.”"