Personal Agency and Social Support: Substitutes of Complements?

Abstract

In their target article, Milyavsky et al. (this issue) make a strong case for the substitutability between personal agency and social support. Across various domains, they find that perceived personal agency decreases the reliance on social support and perceived social support decreases the perceptions of personal agency. In my own research, I observed a similar substitutability between personal and social control; for example, the presence of external controls such as parental supervision undermined self-control in pursuing academic goals (Fishbach & Trope, 2005). Furthermore, research on balancing (Dhar & Simonson, 1999; Fishbach, Zhang, & Koo, 2009) and licensing (Monin & Miller, 2001) often observed substitutability among the means to a goal. It is clear that personal agency and social support can be, and often are, substitutional means for goal achievement. This commentary starts where the target article ends— when (if ever) should we expect complementarity instead of substitutability between two means to achieving a goal? Milyavsky et al. (this issue) offer a boundary condition: agency and assistance should not undermine each other if one of them also serves as a means to another goal. Yet, I ask, when does perceiving one (agency or support) make it more likely that the person will also turn to the other? For example, when learning a new skill (such as playing tennis or speaking Yiddish), is it possible that the perception of social support makes people more confident in their personal ability, or that perceived ability increases the chances that the person will also seek assistance? Possibly, to master these skills, it is insufficient to rely on one means only. The learner would benefit from multiple routes or, alternatively, from a backup plan (i.e., if one means fails, they can rely on the other). The notion that personal agency and social support could at times complement each other is consistent with a key tenet of Goal System Theory: Equifinal means, while often imposing redundancy (“all roads lead to Rome”), also increase confidence (the traveler is pretty confident she will make it to Rome, one way or another). Thus, while the advantage of multifinal means to a goal is that they maximize attainment (“feeding two birds with one scone”), their disadvantage is that these means could undermine (“dilute”) the perceived instrumentality of each means to the goal. And while the advantage of equifinal means is that they increase confidence, the person feels that a goal is within reach; the disadvantage is that they can be substitutable. Many (but not all the) times, pursuing one of these means will trigger disengagement with the other.