Undue Influence as Dynamic Constraint of Agency-Space: A Mechanism-Level Theory of Conscious Agency Under Control

Abstract

Prior theories of thought reform, coercive persuasion, bounded choice, coercive control, and undue influence have made enduring contributions by identifying tactics, environments, interpersonal patterns, and ideological conditions through which people may be controlled. Their principal strength is descriptive: they name the architecture of control. This article addresses a different theoretical problem: how that architecture becomes psychologically consequential inside the person. I propose Agency-Space Theory, a process-level account of undue influence as dynamic constraint of conscious agency. Agency-space is the structured field within which a person experiences possible thought, meaning, relationship, identity, and action. Undue influence occurs when external conditions narrow this field so that externally preferred outcomes become internally experienced as necessity, loyalty, morality, safety, or survival. The theory makes four contributions. First, it explains how control becomes internal constraint. Second, it distinguishes behavior from agency-space, explaining how voluntary-appearing compliance can coexist with constrained agency. Third, it predicts narrative and experiential entailments of narrowing, including reduced perceived alternatives, externally anchored meaning, altered self-other boundaries, temporal narrowing, compliance-as-necessity, demoralization, and compartmentalized self-models. Fourth, it specifies focused complex-adaptive-systems implications: feedback loops may stabilize constrained configurations; attractor-like patterns may deepen over time; path dependence may make earlier compliance alter later possibilities; and hysteresis may persist after exit. Cognitive dissonance, demoralization, and dissociation are treated as local processes within this broader account rather than as competing global explanations. The result is not another inventory of control tactics, but a theory of how control environments transform conscious agency over time.