People Who Need People (and Some Who Think They Don't): On Compensatory Personal and Social Means of Goal Pursuit

We propose a new theoretical model depicting the compensatory relations between personal agency and social assistance. It suggests two general hypotheses, namely that (1) the stronger the individuals’ sense of personal agency, the weaker their motivation to utilize social assistance and the greater their consequent tendency to develop anti-social attitudes. Conversely, (2) the stronger the individuals’ reliance on social assistance, the weaker their motivation to be agentic, and the lesser their tendency to develop a strong sense of self. These relations are assumed to apply across levels of generality, that is, concerning agency and assistance within a single goal domain, as well as across domains where the source of agency (e.g., money, power) or assistance facilitates the attainment of multiple goals.