Knowledge Base Repository
In addition to research papers, the Design Society is developing several valuable resources for those interested in the study of design. These include a repository of PhD theses, a library of case studies and transcripts of design activities, and an archive of our newsletters. Please note that these resources are accessible exclusively to Design Society members.
A THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK FOR INTEGRATING SENSE OF AGENCY AND PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY USING THE FREE ENERGY PRINCIPLE
Kensaku TANIYAMA; Shotaro KUSHI; Hideyoshi YANAGISAWA
Type:
Year:
2025
Editor:
Yong Se Kim; Yutaka Nomaguchi; Cees de Bont; Jianxi Luo; Xiaofang Yuan; Linna Hu; Meng Wang
Author:
Series:
Other endorsed
Institution:
The University of Tokyo, Japan
Page(s):
252-259
Abstract:
This study reformulates psychological safety interventions in team contexts within the Free Energy Principle (FEP) and active inference framework, focusing on sustaining their effects through the sense of agency. Psychological safety—vital for learning, performance, and innovation—often declines over time, with initial improvements fading due to organizational inertia. We identify the sense of agency, the feeling that one’s actions causally influence outcomes, as a key driver linking psychological safety, intrinsic motivation, and active participation in teams. Using FEP, we model the sense of agency as negative free energy and psychological safety as prior preferences minimizing expected free energy. Analytical results show: (1) greater prediction errors reduce the sense of agency; (2) adaptive interventions require dynamic tuning of prior variances—encouraging flexibility in novel phases and precision as familiarity grows; (3) psychological safety increases when predicted states align with desirable states; and (4) widening prior preferences supports safety under high expected prediction error, while narrowing preferences stabilizes mature settings. These findings translate interventions into quantitative operations on prediction distributions and prior preferences, offering design principles for feedback consistency, goal clarity, and staged precision-flexibility balance. By integrating sense of agency and psychological safety into a unified probabilistic framework, this study provides reproducible, behavior-level guidelines for sustaining learning-oriented team environments, advancing beyond atmosphere-focused approaches toward dynamic, uncertainty-aware organizational designs.
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