Collaborative Research: Increasing choice process awareness to empower agentic decision makers

This research investigates how Americans can make choices that align with their personal values and individual goals—a cornerstone of personal responsibility and self-determination. The project develops innovative methods to measure "choice process awareness," examining how accurately people perceive what influences their decisions. By studying everyday choices in common contexts, we are showing that individuals vary widely in their awareness of choice processes and that increasing this awareness enables people to make choices more consistent with their own stated values. Unlike approaches that impose government or institutional solutions, this work respects individual liberty while addressing costly societal problems where people's actual choices often contradict their conscious intentions. The research employs a novel "Awareness of Choice Processes" (ACP) task that quantifies how aware people are of their decision-making processes and how well these processes align with their personal ideals (a property called “agentic alignment”). The project consists of five studies examining the relationship between awareness and agentic alignment in value-based choices. Studies 1-2 test whether awareness predicts agentic alignment. Studies 3-4 investigate whether increasing people’s awareness helps them make more aligned choices. Study 5 explores whether improving awareness and alignment in one kind of choice helps people build a generalized skill for being agentically aligned in other kinds of choices as well. This research advances a "capability" approach that honors individual autonomy; helping people become more aware of their choice processes enabling them to make decisions consistent with their own values. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.