Measuring Agency in Gamified Interactive Contexts – MA-GIC

Agency, defined as the ability to exercise control over one's life and pursue goals, is essential to well-being, psychological resilience and health. However, current measures of agency are limited: they often treat agency as a unidimensional construct, are prone to cognitive biases (e.g. social desirability), and focus on perceived or felt agency rather than individuals’ preferred forms of agency. These limitations often hinder the generalizability of these measures to real-life contexts. To address this problem, we aim to develop two complementary tools, specifically designed to measure and characterize people’s agentic preferences: a psychometric scale (WP1-1) and a gamified behavioral task (WP1-2), both designed to assess where each individual stands on two key agentic continua, i.e. goal abstraction (concrete vs. abstract) and engagement style (exploration vs. exploitation). These tools will then be used to predict how individuals evaluate different messages in various domains (e.g., work, health, education, leisure) (WP2-1) and, ultimately, to determine whether tailoring interventions to individuals’ agentic preferences promotes preventive health behaviors and improves adherence to health recommendations in real-life contexts (WP2-2). This study will be carried out in the general population, then in a cohort of patients suffering from lung or breast cancer, in collaboration with the Institut Curie and Santé Publique France. This research has the potential to improve the effectiveness of health interventions by tailoring recommendations to individual preferences.