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Summary People may deny responsibility for negative consequences of their actions by claiming that they were “only obeying orders.” The “Nuremberg defense” offers one extreme example, though it is often dismissed as merely an attempt to avoid responsibility. Milgram’s classic laboratory studies reported widespread obedience to an instruction to harm, suggesting that social coercion may alter mechanisms of voluntary agency, and hence abolish the normal experience of being in control of one’s own actions. However, Milgram’s and other studies relied on dissembling and on explicit measures of agency, which are known to be biased by social norms. Here, we combined coercive instructions to administer harm to a co-participant, with implicit measures of sense of agency, based on perceived compression of time intervals between voluntary actions and their outcomes, and with electrophysiological recordings. In two experiments, an experimenter ordered a volunteer to make a key-press action that caused either financial penalty or demonstrably painful electric shock to their co-participant, thereby increasing their own financial gain. Coercion increased the perceived interval between action and outcome, relative to a situation where participants freely chose to inflict the same harms. Interestingly, coercion also reduced the neural processing of the outcomes of one’s own action. Thus, people who obey orders may subjectively experience their actions as closer to passive movements than fully voluntary actions. Our results highlight the complex relation between the brain mechanisms that generate the subjective experience of voluntary actions and social constructs, such as responsibility., Highlights • Responsibility for action is a key feature of human societies • It depends on association between actions and outcomes in the brain • Claims of reduced responsibility are sometimes based on “only obeying orders” • Two experiments suggest coercion can reduce implicit measures of sense of agency, Acting under coercion modifies the subjective experience of being the author of an action, reducing the perceived temporal association between actions and outcomes. Caspar et al. show that the neural processing of action outcomes under coercion more closely resembles situations of passive movement than actions carried out intentionally.

The sense of controlling one's own actions is fundamental to normal human mental function, and also underlies concepts of social responsibility for action. However, it remains unclear how the wider social context of human action influences sense of agency. Using a simple experimental design, we investigated, for the first time, how observing the action of another person or a robot could potentially influence one's own sense of agency. We assessed how observing another's action might change the perceived temporal relationship between one's own voluntary actions and their outcomes, which has been proposed as an implicit measure of sense of agency. Working in pairs, participants chose between two action alternatives, one rewarded more frequently than the other, while watching a rotating clock hand. They judged, in separate blocks, either the time of their own action, or the time of a tone that followed the action. These were compared to baseline judgements of actions alone, or tones alone, to calculate the perceptual shift of action toward outcome and vice versa. Our design focused on how these two dependent variables, which jointly provide an implicit measure of sense of agency, might be influenced by observing another's action. In the observational group, each participant could see the other's actions. Multivariate analysis showed that the perceived time of action and tone shifted progressively toward the actual time of outcome with repeated experience of this social situation. No such progressive change occurred in other groups for whom a barrier hid participants' actions from each other. However, a similar effect was observed in the group that viewed movements of a human-like robotic hand, rather than actions of another person. This finding suggests that observing the actions of others increases the salience of the external outcomes of action and this effect is not unique to observing human agents. Social contexts in which we see others controlling external events may play an important role in mentally representing the impact of our own actions on the external world., SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

For centuries, criminal and deviant behaviors have always been considered as a mystery because they do not represent the social norm. Why do some people hurt others or themselves? What guides the decision to perform good or bad actions? What is the role played by individual differences in such choices? Criminal behavior is not an unitary phenomenon and many approaches can be proposed to understand it. In the present thesis, I focused on the subjective experience that accompanies our actions commonly known as the sense of agency. The sense of agency can be defined as the experience of being the author of an action and its consequences. Therefore, understanding how the subjective experience of being responsible for an outcome influences our actions is a key issue for the notion of criminal responsibility. Throughout each chapter of the present thesis, I aimed at systematically explore how disturbances in the intention-action-outcome chain impact the sense of agency, by using behavioral and electrophysiological methods. I hope the methods and findings presented in this thesis will provide new routes to explore the human mind and particularly the sense of agency in the context of moral responsibility., Doctorat en Sciences psychologiques et de l'éducation, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished