What is agency in psychology? At its core, agency in psychology is the belief that your actions can influence what happens next. While pop psychology often treats personal agency as simple willpower or high self-esteem, clinical and experimental science defines it as something far deeper. Dr. Martin Seligman, the father of positive psychology and the pioneer behind learned optimism, argues that agency in psychology is the foundational engine of human flourishing and historical progress.
In his landmark book, Agency: The Psychological History of Human Progress, Seligman synthesizes sixty years of behavioral research to show that agency in psychology consists of three vital capacities: efficacy, optimism, and imagination. Together, these three faculties govern whether we believe we can act, whether we expect our actions to yield results, and whether we can envision better alternatives to our present reality.
When you understand what agency in psychology is, you stop viewing your life as a passive reaction to external circumstances. In this conversation on Passion Struck, Seligman unpacks how human agency built civilization, why agency and mattering are deeply reciprocal, and how to develop a strong sense of agency to change your future.
What Is Agency in Psychology? Martin Seligman’s Perspective
For much of his career, Martin Seligman was associated with one of psychology’s most important discoveries: learned helplessness. His early research examined what happens when people repeatedly experience situations in which their actions seem unable to change the outcome. Over time, the expectation of powerlessness can become generalized. A person stops trying, even when circumstances eventually change and opportunities for action become available.
Looking back across six decades, however, Seligman sees a deeper continuity in his work. He realized that he had spent much of his career studying the absence of something rather than the thing itself. What appeared to be a story about helplessness, pessimism, and hopelessness was also a story about mastery, optimism, and human agency.
That realization became central to his latest work. Agency, in Seligman’s framework, is not simply confidence, motivation, or willpower. It is the psychological capacity to act on the world with some expectation that your actions can make a difference. It connects what you believe you can do now with what you believe might become possible in the future.
This is also where Seligman’s work on positive psychology becomes especially relevant. Rather than concentrating exclusively on diagnosing and correcting what goes wrong, positive psychology asks what allows people to develop their strengths and build lives characterized by flourishing. Agency provides a bridge between those two perspectives because it asks how people move from understanding themselves to actually changing the conditions in which they live.
The Three Components of Agency: Efficacy, Optimism, and Imagination
Seligman’s model breaks human agency into a three-part psychological framework. If any one of these pillars is missing, personal agency breaks down.
1. Efficacy: The Belief in “I Can”
Efficacy is your present-tense belief in your ability to execute a task. Coined extensively by Albert Bandura, self-efficacy is the conviction that you possess the skills, capacity, and agency to act in the immediate moment. Without efficacy, you never start. You remain frozen by perceived inadequacy.
2. Optimism: The Belief That Effort Pays Off
While efficacy addresses the present, optimism addresses the future. Optimism is the psychological expectation that good outcomes are likely and that your personal efforts will produce positive results over time. When faced with obstacles, an optimistic explanatory style prevents you from interpreting failure as permanent or pervasive, providing the stamina required to sustain agency.
3. Imagination: Seeing What Does Not Yet Exist
Imagination is the creative frontier of agency in psychology. It is the ability to project yourself forward and generate plausible alternative realities. Without imagination, efficacy and optimism have no target. You can be highly disciplined, but without an imagined future, your agency remains trapped in current routines.
In this episode, you’ll learn
- What is agency in psychology? And why Martin Seligman sees it as the culmination of his six decades of work.
- How efficacy, optimism, and imagination work together to create human agency and turn possibility into action.
- Why learned helplessness helped Seligman understand the psychology of mastery, flourishing, and the belief that our actions can matter.
- How agency connects with mattering, relationships, individual and collective progress, and the development of human flourishing.
- How AI is changing Seligman’s ability to test ideas, conduct research, collaborate creatively, and expand his own agency.
- Why the future of education and parenting may depend less on making children smarter and more on developing character, resilience, cooperation, and well-being.
What the History of Human Progress Reveals About Agency
Seligman’s latest book extends the idea of agency far beyond individual psychology and into the history of civilization.
One of the mysteries that captured his attention is the Axial Age, the period roughly between 1000 BCE and 500 BCE when major developments appeared across several civilizations, including the Greeks, Hebrews, Chinese, Persians, and Indians. During this period, philosophy, political thought, technology, cities, literature, and new forms of intellectual life began to develop with remarkable intensity.
Seligman developed a hypothesis about what may have changed: the emergence of language expressing human agency.
He wondered whether earlier cultures had fewer ways of expressing the idea that human beings themselves could act upon the world, while later cultures developed richer concepts corresponding to “I can” and “we can.” With the help of AI systems capable of working across ancient languages, he was able to investigate a question that he says would previously have been almost impossible to test within a human lifetime.
The conclusion he discusses in the interview is provocative: across these cultures, new agentic vocabulary appeared during this period.
Seligman sees language as more than a way of describing a psychological capacity. In his interpretation, the development of new words for human ability may have helped make new forms of human action imaginable.
The larger implication is striking. Civilization may depend partly on what human beings can imagine themselves capable of doing. When people possess language for agency, they can more readily conceive themselves as participants in history rather than simply as recipients of forces beyond their control.
Individual Agency and Collective Agency
The next question is more complicated: Is progress driven primarily by individuals who believe “I can,” or by communities that believe “we can”?
Seligman’s work on Western history has emphasized the growth of individual agency, but his examination of Chinese history led him toward a more nuanced perspective. He argues that Chinese history provides examples in which progress is associated with a balance between individual and collective agency. When individual agency is suppressed too strongly by collective demands, progress can stagnate. When there is room for both individual initiative and collective coordination, different possibilities emerge.
This creates a genuine tension rather than an easy formula.
Collective agency can provide belonging, consolation, cooperation, and social cohesion. Yet Seligman also raises a concern based partly on his decades of experience in academic institutions: groups do not automatically become better problem solvers simply because more people are involved.
His current analysis of modern America is explicitly tentative, and he is investigating an intriguing possibility: the forces that increase accomplishment and productivity may not always be identical to those that increase happiness and well-being. A society organized strongly around individual achievement may produce innovation and economic output while also placing psychological pressure on individuals. Greater collective identification may reduce some forms of distress while potentially limiting individual initiative.
The challenge, then, may not be choosing between “I can” and “we can.” It may be learning how to preserve enough individual agency for people to create, explore, and take responsibility while maintaining enough collective agency for communities to cooperate and care for one another.
Why Martin Seligman’s New Book May Be His Most Personal Yet
There is something fitting about the fact that Seligman’s book on agency emerged after such a long career. When John tells him he has read both an earlier manuscript and a later version, Seligman describes how his thinking changed between them. The newer manuscript placed greater emphasis on collective agency, the relationship between “I can” and “we can,” and the role of contribution and relationships in human progress.
That detail reveals something about how the book itself came together. Seligman was not simply writing a history and applying a psychological theory to it. He was using history to test a question that had followed him throughout his career: What happens when human beings come to believe that their actions can matter?
The book’s central historical mystery eventually led him into an unexpected collaboration with AI. After spending years studying the relationship between Chinese agency and agency in the Hebrew Bible, he asked Claude to help bridge two chapters he could no longer see objectively after years of staring at them. The machine identified a connection between the individual’s relationship to the state in China and the relationship between individual agency and divine agency in the Hebrew tradition.
For Seligman, the episode became almost a miniature demonstration of his argument. Agency expands when we gain new ways to imagine, investigate, and act upon possibilities.
That deeper thread connects his early research on helplessness with his newest book. A psychologist who began by asking whether helplessness could be learned eventually arrived at a much larger question: What allows human beings to believe in their capacity to shape the future?
How AI Is Changing Human Agency
Perhaps the most contemporary part of this conversation is Seligman’s account of how AI has changed his own research process.
He describes using Claude and ChatGPT to test hypotheses, examine large bodies of information, and challenge assumptions that would previously have required enormous amounts of time. In one example, he used AI to investigate claims about siblings, maternal employment, and depression. What once required an extended research project could now be investigated much more quickly.
For Seligman, this is not merely about efficiency. It changes what he can attempt.
He also describes AI as a creative partner. His view of creativity is partly based on the idea that important creative work can emerge through two minds working back and forth, correcting, challenging, and extending one another. He sees his interaction with AI through this lens.
He offers a particularly memorable example from his own book. His editor noticed that the transition between two chapters—one about Chinese agency and another about the Hebrews and the Bible—was missing. Seligman had spent years looking at the material without seeing the connection clearly. He asked Claude to read both chapters and propose a transition. The resulting connection helped him see a relationship he had overlooked.
For Seligman, that experience represents something more consequential than automation. The interaction expanded what he could see and, in turn, expanded his agency as a researcher and writer.
What Should Education Teach When AI Can Be Smarter Than Us?
AI also forces a difficult question about education.
For generations, schools have placed enormous value on knowledge, intelligence, and becoming the smartest person in the room. Seligman points out that this hierarchy is being disrupted. Machines can already process and retrieve far more information than a human being.
If knowledge becomes abundant, the educational question changes.
Seligman believes schools will need to place greater emphasis on character, well-being, leadership, kindness, cooperation, and flourishing. Education can increasingly become less about accumulating information for its own sake and more about developing the human capacities that determine what we do with that information.
This is closely connected to agency. Knowledge gives us possibilities, but character influences how we use them. Imagination can generate futures, but wisdom helps determine which futures are worth pursuing. Intelligence can solve problems, but cooperation determines what people can accomplish together.
The age of AI may therefore require a deeper understanding of what makes human beings valuable rather than simply a more sophisticated version of the education systems we already have.
The Parenting Question: Safety, Achievement, and Resilience
The conversation closes with a similarly difficult question about raising children.
John asks Seligman about the tension between overprotection and pressure to achieve. His answer is unusually honest because he does not pretend there is a simple solution.
Overprotection can keep children safe while limiting their opportunities to develop resilience in the face of uncertainty and difficulty. Pushing children toward achievement can build persistence and competence, but it can also expose them to excessive pressure, failure, and risks that parents understandably want to prevent.
Seligman acknowledges that he and his wife have approached this tension differently. He describes himself as more achievement-oriented and his wife as more protective, and their family life has become a process of compromise.
The larger lesson is that developing agency requires room for children to experience some relationship between effort and consequence. They need opportunities to discover that they can do difficult things, while also having relationships and environments that provide security when those efforts fail.
Agency grows within that tension between protection and exploration.
What Martin Seligman Wants the Next Generation to Believe
The final question John asks brings the conversation back from civilizations and artificial intelligence to something much more intimate.
Seligman has dedicated the book to two of his grandchildren, so John asks what belief about human possibility he hopes they carry into the future.
His answer is a belief in progress.
Seligman points out that his grandchildren reaching childhood already reflects an extraordinary transformation in human conditions. He wants them to participate in continuing that progress, while understanding that progress is larger than technological advancement. It also includes what he describes as spiritual progress.
That distinction gives the conversation its final dimension. Agency is ultimately about more than productivity, achievement, or control. It is about participation. It is about recognizing that our choices enter into relationships with other people, institutions, cultures, and generations.
We cannot determine everything that happens next. Agency begins with something more modest and more consequential: the belief that what we do can influence what happens next.
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About Today’s Guest, Martin Seligman
Martin Seligman is a pioneering psychologist, educator, and author whose work has transformed how we understand resilience, optimism, human flourishing, and the psychology of positive change. A professor at the University of Pennsylvania and director of its Positive Psychology Center, he first gained widespread recognition for his groundbreaking research on learned helplessness, which helped explain how repeated experiences of powerlessness can shape behavior and expectations.
Seligman became one of the leading figures in positive psychology, helping establish a scientific framework for studying what allows individuals and communities to thrive. He has authored more than 30 books and hundreds of scholarly articles, served as president of the American Psychological Association, and developed influential ideas around optimism, character strengths, and well-being.
His latest book, Agency: The Psychological History of Human Progress, brings together six decades of research to explore how efficacy, optimism, and imagination give people the capacity to shape their futures and contribute to human progress.
What Is Human Agency? Martin Seligman Explains the Power of ‘I CAN’
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FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)
What is agency in psychology?
Agency in psychology refers to an individual’s conscious capacity to make choices, take action, and exert influence over their thoughts, behaviors, and life trajectory.
What are the three components of agency according to Martin Seligman?
Seligman defines agency through three interrelated capacities: efficacy (believing you can act in the present), optimism (believing your efforts will yield future rewards), and imagination (envisioning new, constructive possibilities).
How does agency differ from self-efficacy?
Self-efficacy is one part of agency—specifically, your belief in your capability to execute a particular task. Agency in psychology is broader, combining efficacy with future-focused optimism and the imaginative capacity to conceive new goals.
What causes people to lose their sense of agency?
People lose their sense of agency when they experience learned helplessness—a state caused by repeated exposure to adverse conditions where their actions produce no meaningful change or feedback.
Can agency be learned and strengthened?
Yes. Agency can be developed through deliberate behavioral design, cognitive reframing, experiencing incremental mastery wins, and learning an optimistic explanatory style.
How does human agency influence societal progress?
Societies progress when cultural norms and institutions encourage citizens to believe their contributions matter. When belief in human agency rises, innovation, political freedom, and social flourishing naturally expand.
