Beyond Individual Agency: An Integrative Perspective on Human Agency Throughexistential Philosophy, Social Psychology, and Filipino Psychology

Abstract

Human agency is often defined as the ability to make decisions, take deliberate action, and shape one's own life. When agency is viewed primarily as an individual possession, that description is no longer complete. Individuals make decisions about relationships, groups, institutions, cultural norms, and material circumstances. In addition to incorporating a Filipino psychology perspective that centers personhood around relationality and cultural meaning, this integrative conceptual review integrates recent work in existential and humanistic psychology with social-psychological research on social agency, identity, collective action, and agency–structure relations. Conceptual fragmentation, an overemphasis on the individual agent, a lack of attention to lived meaning and responsibility, a limited integration of agency with structural conditions, and the underrepresentation of culturally grounded accounts of relational personhood are the five interrelated issues that the review identifies in the literature. Building on these gaps, the paper offers a three-dimensional framework that simultaneously understands agency as relational-social, structural-contextual, and personal-existential. Filipino ideas like kapwa, pakikipagkapwa, pagpapakatao, pagdududa, and ginhawa are employed as theoretical tools for reevaluating what an agent is and how agency is carried out rather than as ornamental cultural examples. The need to shift from individual-centered accounts to family agency is further supported by recent research on Filipino transnational families. The resulting model views agency as a situated process that people use to understand situations, make decisions, collaborate with others, act, face repercussions, and change their course of action. Proposals for empirical research, measurement, qualitative inquiry, cross-cultural comparison, and multilevel study are developed in this paper. It concludes that going beyond individual agency does not lessen personal accountability; rather, it situates accountability within the connections and circumstances that enable action