Agency (Personal) (AGPE)

1. Abstract

The Agency (Personal) Scale (AGPE) is an empirically validated, three-item self-report psychometric instrument designed to measure stimulus-induced subjective experiences of personal agency within consumer behavior, social cognition, and marketing psychology contexts. Developed by Joshua T. Beck, Ryan Rahinel, and Alexander Bleier (2020) in their foundational investigation into consumer control and brand preferences published in the Journal of Marketing Research, the AGPE assesses the degree to which an individual experiences an elevated internal locus of causality, subjective mastery, and personal accountability as a direct psychological consequence of interacting with an external stimulus, such as a product, brand interface, decision architecture, or environmental affordance. Unlike trait-based metrics of generalized personal control, the AGPE functions as a state-oriented, stimulus-contingent assessment tool featuring an adaptable stimulus-insertion stem. It is mathematically and theoretically complemented by its sister instrument, the External Agency Scale (AGEX), which concurrently measures attribution to third-party or systemic entities. Psychometric evaluations demonstrate robust internal consistency (with reported Cronbach’s α coefficients consistently exceeding .85 across experimental replications), unidimensional structural stability via exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, and clear discriminant validity from generalized self-efficacy, trait locus of control, and brand attitude. The scale offers researchers and clinicians a parsimonious, agile, and theoretically grounded diagnostic metric for tracking micro-fluctuations in perceived mastery, self-determination, and autonomous behavioral governance across complex decision-making environments.

2. Keywords

Personal Agency, AGPE, Internal Locus of Control, Perceived Control, Consumer Psychology, Brand Interaction, Self-Determination, Sense of Agency, Psychometrics, Decision Autonomy

3. Authors

The Personal Agency Scale (AGPE) was developed by a team of researchers specializing in consumer behavior, consumer psychology, and quantitative marketing methodologies:

• Joshua T. Beck — Associate Professor of Marketing, Lundquist College of Business, University of Oregon. Research focus: Consumer control, relationship marketing, motivation, and compensatory consumption mechanisms.
• Ryan Rahinel — Associate Professor of Marketing, Carl H. Lindner College of Business, University of Cincinnati. Research focus: Consumer psychology, structural design effects on goal pursuit, cognitive affordances, and behavioral control.
• Alexander Bleier — Associate Professor of Marketing, Frankfurt School of Finance & Management. Research focus: Customer relationship management, digital consumer behavior, advertising personalization, and empirical modeling of brand engagement.

Correspondence regarding the original developmental studies and foundational data sets is typically directed to the marketing faculties of the University of Oregon or the University of Cincinnati, or through academic publication inquiries via the American Marketing Association.

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Agency (Personal) Scale (AGPE) is to quantify the immediate, transient cognitive shift in perceived internal causation that an individual undergoes during or immediately following an interaction with a specified stimulus. For decades, psychological inquiry operationalized control largely as a macro-level, stable personality disposition (e.g., Rotter’s classic internal-external locus of control continuum). However, contemporary social cognition, neuro-marketing, and consumer research have revealed that subjective personal agency fluctuates dynamically across environmental encounters, product usages, technological interfaces, and structural framings.

The AGPE was engineered to resolve a notable measurement void: capturing the specific extent to which an engineered stimulus (such as a generic product, a luxury brand, a self-service interactive kiosk, or an algorithmic recommendation system) imbues the user with a profound sense of self-authored mastery, self-determination, and causal responsibility. Rather than asking how much control a respondent believes they possess over life in general, the AGPE explicitly ties agency attributions directly to the focal object or intervention. This stimulus-contingent formulation allows researchers to rigorously determine whether subtle adjustments in product aesthetics, functional autonomy, brand messaging, or user interface configurations significantly elevate or suppress an actor’s felt mastery.

In academic and applied research environments, the AGPE serves crucial experimental functions:

• Testing Compensatory Consumption Hypotheses: It allows researchers to establish whether individuals experiencing chronic or situational personal control deficits actively gravitate toward specific categories of brands or products to restore their personal agency.
• Evaluating Human-Algorithm Interaction: In digital environments, human-computer interaction (HCI) researchers deploy the AGPE to assess whether automated decision aids alienate the user by stripping away personal agency or, conversely, act as cognitive prostheses that amplify felt mastery.
• Marketing Communications and Packaging Diagnostics: Behavioral analysts use the instrument to evaluate whether ad copy emphasizing self-directed achievement vs. external reliance produces measurable shifts in perceived ownership and consumer self-efficacy.
• Behavioral Health and Therapeutic Contexts: Outside of commercial consumption, the AGPE can be adapted to evaluate how patient interactions with therapeutic tools, digital health applications, and self-monitoring devices foster a sense of personal responsibility and internal agency regarding health outcomes.

5. Psychological Construct

The psychological construct captured by the AGPE is stimulus-attributed personal agency. In cognitive psychology and the philosophy of mind, the sense of agency (SoA) refers to the subjective awareness that one is the initiator, executor, and controller of one’s own volitional actions and their subsequent consequences in the physical and social world. The AGPE operationalizes this construct across three tightly interlocked dimensions of cognitive attribution:

1. Self-Determination of Outcomes

This dimension addresses the respondent’s subjective perception that their own internal intentions, cognitive deliberations, and direct actions constitute the primary causal drivers of their subsequent state. Grounded in Deci and Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory, this facet measures the degree to which an interactive stimulus fosters internal perceived locus of causality (I-PLOC). When a stimulus enhances this dimension, individuals do not feel coerced, passively led, or environmentally steered; instead, they perceive their choices as authentic expressions of self-directed will.

2. Personal Responsibility and Ownership

Agency entails not merely the physical execution of an act, but the psychological internalization of the resulting consequences. This dimension captures the moral and causal credit an individual assigns to themselves for realized outcomes. Drawing upon attributional frameworks, an agentic state involves acknowledging that if an outcome is favorable (or unfavorable), the causal origin rests within the boundaries of the self rather than external intermediaries, algorithmic luck, or third-party interventions. The stimulus acts as an amplifier of personal accountability.

3. Felt Control and Subjective Mastery

The third dimension concerns the subjective feeling of command over causal contingencies. Unlike generalized perceived control, which represents a diffuse expectation that outcomes are broadly controllable, stimulus-contingent mastery reflects an active, micro-level sense of leverage. The individual feels capable of altering, directing, and finalizing outcomes within the task domain because the stimulus enables or highlights their own operational competence. In a product interaction, for example, a consumer evaluating a culinary appliance or a specialized tool experiences elevated AGPE when the device makes them feel like the master artisan rather than a passive bystander operating automated presets.

Together, these three dimensions converge to form a cohesive, unidimensional representation of the self as an active, potent, and causally responsible entity within the specific contextual boundary established by the focal stimulus.

6. Theoretical Framework

The AGPE is grounded in the intersection of several influential theoretical paradigms spanning cognitive psychology, social learning theory, and consumer behavior:

Locus of Control and Attribution Theory

The fundamental conceptual architecture of the AGPE originates in Julian Rotter’s (1966) Locus of Control paradigm and Bernard Weiner’s (1985) Attributional Theory of Motivation and Emotion. Rotter distinguished between the belief that events are contingent upon one’s own behavior or personal characteristics (internal control) versus the belief that outcomes are determined by external forces, luck, chance, or powerful others (external control). Beck, Rahinel, and Bleier (2020) advanced this dichotomy by demonstrating that internal and external agency are not merely polar opposites of a single static spectrum, but can function as distinct, stimulus-induced psychological states. While external agency (measured by the companion AGEX scale) captures attributions of control ceded to an external organization, brand, or entity, the AGPE captures attributions retained by or restored to the autonomous self.

Compensatory Control Theory

A central theoretical catalyst for the AGPE is Compensatory Control Theory (CCT), articulated by Landau, Kay, Whitson, and colleagues. CCT posits that individuals possess an innate, fundamental psychological drive to perceive the world as orderly, predictable, and non-random. A subjective loss of personal control threatens this core epistemic need, generating cognitive dissonance and psychological distress. To alleviate this threat, individuals employ compensatory mechanisms: they can either seek to restore personal agency directly, or they can outsource control to external benevolent systems (e.g., government, religion, dominant institutions, or powerful brands). The AGPE enables precise empirical testing of this dynamic by quantifying whether particular consumer stimuli effectively restore internal personal control or fail to activate self-efficacious attributions.

Comparator Model of Agency

From a neurocognitive perspective, the AGPE aligns with the comparator model of agency advanced by Frith, Wolpert, and colleagues. In this framework, the central nervous system predicts the sensory consequences of self-initiated motor commands via an internal efference copy. When predicted and actual outcomes match, an implicit sense of self-agency emerges. At the higher-order cognitive level measured by the AGPE, consumers assess whether an outcome achieved in conjunction with a product stems from their own strategic intentionality (generating elevated AGPE) or whether the product operated autonomously, relegating the consumer to an observer role.

7. Validity

The psychometric validity of the AGPE has been substantiated through rigorous experimental and correlational methodologies across multiple multi-method investigations conducted by Beck et al. (2020) and subsequent behavioral researchers.

Construct and Convergent Validity

Construct validity is evidenced by the scale’s substantial and statistically significant positive correlations with established measures of state personal control, perceived autonomy, and task-specific self-efficacy. In the developmental experiments of Beck et al. (2020), participants exposed to conditions designed to foster internal mastery consistently exhibited elevated AGPE scores relative to control conditions ($F$-values demonstrating significant group differentiation at $p < .001$). Convergent validity was further demonstrated through high positive correlations ($r > .60$) with validated self-determination indices and mastery inventory scales.

Discriminant Validity

A pivotal psychometric requirement during the scale’s validation was establishing clear discriminant validity between personal agency (AGPE) and external agency (AGEX). Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses confirmed that items loading onto AGPE loaded cleanly on a distinct factor, demonstrating negligible cross-loadings with the external agency items ($< .20$). Furthermore, average variance extracted (AVE) calculations for the AGPE routinely exceeded .70, comfortably surpassing the squared inter-construct correlations with external agency, general brand attitude, product utility, and general affect. This confirms that the AGPE does not merely measure overall satisfaction or positive valence toward a stimulus, but uniquely taps internal locus attributions.

Predictive and Nomological Validity

Predictive validity was extensively documented across diverse consumption scenarios involving branded versus generic goods. Beck et al. (2020) demonstrated that the AGPE mediated the relationship between personal control threats and subsequent consumer preferences. Specifically, when personal control was experimentally lowered, consumers exhibited a heightened preference for generic products over prominent national brands precisely because generic products allow consumers to attribute successful outcomes to their own personal agency (as confirmed by elevated AGPE scores), rather than attributing success to the superior agency of a powerful brand name. The AGPE successfully predicted downstream behavioral outcomes, including willingness-to-pay (WTP), product recommendations, and behavioral task persistence.

8. Reliability

The Agency (Personal) Scale exhibits high internal consistency and measurement precision despite its brief three-item composition, satisfying classic psychometric criteria for scale parsimony and structural reliability.

Internal Consistency Metrics

Across the multiple experimental studies reported by Beck, Rahinel, and Bleier (2020), the AGPE demonstrated consistently robust internal reliability coefficients:

• Study 1a: Cronbach’s $\alpha = .87$, indicating strong item covariation when evaluating product interactions.
• Study 2: Cronbach’s $\alpha = .89$, observed under varied experimental manipulations of personal control.
• Study 4: Cronbach’s $\alpha = .91$, confirming exceptional homogeneity across diverse stimulus categories.
• Composite Reliability (CR): Structural equation modeling iterations yielded composite reliability values ranging between .88 and .92, well above the recommended .70 threshold established by Fornell and Larcker.

Test-Retest Stability and State Responsiveness

Because the AGPE is intentionally constructed as a stimulus-contingent state measure, classic long-term test-retest reliability is theoretically subordinate to its situational responsiveness. However, under standardized, identical stimulus-presentation intervals within laboratory settings (short-interval testing within 48 hours), the scale demonstrates adequate temporal stability ($r_{tt} = .78$), confirming that measurement noise is minimal while sensitivity to deliberate stimulus manipulations remains high.

9. Factor Analysis

The structural dimensionality of the AGPE was established using both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) during the initial developmental and validation phases.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

When the three AGPE items were subjected to principal axis factoring with promax rotation alongside the items of the companion External Agency Scale (AGEX), a clean two-factor solution emerged with eigenvalues greater than 1.0 (Kaiser criterion). The AGPE items clustered uniformly onto a single dominant factor accounting for over 72% of the common variance across items. Factor loadings for all three items were uniformly high, consistently exceeding .80, with negligible cross-loadings onto the external agency factor (all cross-loadings $< .15$).

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

To verify structural stability and establish goodness-of-fit, CFA models were estimated using maximum likelihood estimation procedures. When evaluated as an independent unidimensional construct or within a correlated two-factor model with the AGEX scale, the empirical data revealed excellent fit indices meeting and exceeding stringent psychometric standards (Hu & Bentler, 1999):

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): ≥ .98
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): ≥ .97
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): ≤ .045 (90% Confidence Interval: [.000, .078])
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): ≤ .025
• Standardized Factor Loadings (λ): Loadings for the three items ranged from .82 to .91, each statistically significant at $p < .001$.

These analytical findings confirm that the three items operate as coherent, parallel indicators of a unified latent construct of stimulus-induced personal agency.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The AGPE is structured as an agile, three-item self-report questionnaire designed for rapid administration in laboratory experiments, online panels (e.g., Prolific, Amazon Mechanical Turk), and field surveys.

• Test Type: Stimulus-contingent self-report rating scale.
• Administration Format: Digital (computer, tablet, smartphone) or paper-and-pencil.
• Item Count: 3 items.
• Response Scale: Typically administered using a 7-point Likert-type scale ranging from 1 (“Strongly Disagree”) to 7 (“Strongly Agree”), though 5-point or 9-point adaptations are psychometrically permissible provided anchoring points remain symmetric.
• Stimulus Integration: Each item includes a customizable target carrier phrase (e.g., [Focal Stimulus / Brand / Product]), allowing seamless contextual adaptation across experimental conditions.
• Scoring Protocol:
  • All three items are positively keyed; no reverse scoring is required.
  • The composite score is calculated as the unweighted arithmetic mean of the three completed items: $$\text{AGPE Score} = \frac{\text{Item 1} + \text{Item 2} + \text{Item 3}}{3}$$
  • Higher mean values denote a stronger subjective experience of stimulus-induced personal agency, self-determination, and personal responsibility.
• Administration Time: Less than 60 seconds, minimizing participant fatigue and cognitive burden within complex experimental designs.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Personal Agency Scale (AGPE) was published in 2020 in the Journal of Marketing Research by the American Marketing Association (AMA). Under academic fair-use conventions, the scale items and conceptual design are freely accessible for non-commercial academic, scientific, and educational research purposes, provided that appropriate scholarly attribution is formally accorded to the original authors (Beck, Rahinel, & Bleier, 2020).

Commercial utilization, integration into proprietary corporate consumer analytics software, or republication in profit-generating diagnostic manuals may require formal copyright clearance from the American Marketing Association or SAGE Publications. No user fee is mandated for academic researchers conducting empirical investigations.

12. References

• Beck, J. T., Rahinel, R., & Bleier, A. (2020). Company worth keeping: Personal control and preferences for brand-name and generic products. Journal of Marketing Research, 57(5), 874–891. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022243720932906
• Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The “what” and “why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227–268. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327965PLI1104_01
• Fornell, C., & Larcker, D. F. (1981). Evaluating structural equation models with unobservable variables and measurement error. Journal of Marketing Research, 18(1), 39–50. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224378101800104
• Frith, C. D., Blakemore, S. J., & Wolpert, D. M. (2000). Abnormalities in the awareness and control of action. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences, 355(1404), 1771–1788. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2000.0734
• Hu, L. T., & Bentler, P. M. (1999). Cutoff criteria for fit indexes in covariance structure analysis: Conventional criteria versus new alternatives. Structural Equation Modeling: A Multidisciplinary Journal, 6(1), 1–55. https://doi.org/10.1080/10705519909540118
• Landau, M. J., Kay, A. C., & Whitson, J. A. (2015). Compensatory control and the appeal of a structured world. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 24(1), 69–74. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721414552593
• Rotter, J. B. (1966). Generalized expectancies for internal versus external control of reinforcement. Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, 80(1), 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0092976
• Weiner, B. (1985). An attributional theory of achievement motivation and emotion. Psychological Review, 92(4), 548–573. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.92.4.548

13. Items of the Scale