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Lumifer comments on To what degree do you model people as agents? - Less Wrong
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Hm, interesting. I have some terminological confusion to battle through here.
My mind associates "agent" with either Bond/MiB creatures or game theory and economics. The distinction you're drawing I would describe as active and passive. "Agenty"/PC people are the active ones, they make things happen, they shape the narrative, they are internally driven to change their environment. By contrast the "complex-system"/NPC people are the passive ones, they react to events, they go with the flow, the circumstances around them drive their behavior.
I don't think of active and passive as two kinds of people. I think of them as two endpoints on an axis with most people being somewhere in the middle. It's a characteristic of a person, a dimension of her personality.
A continuum is still a somewhat-unclear metric for agency, since it suggests agency is a static property.
I'd suggest modelling a sentience as a colony of basic Agents, each striving toward a particular utility-function primitive. (Pop psychology sometimes calls these "drives" or "instincts.") These basic Agents sometimes work together, like people do, toward common goals; or override one-another for competing goals.
Agency, then, is a bit like magnetism--it's a property that arises from your Agent-colony when you've got them all pointing the same way; when "enough of you" wants some particular outcome that there's no confusion about what else you could/should be doing instead. In effect, it allows your collection of basic Agents to be abstracted as a single large Agent with its own clear (though necessarily more complex) goals.
That's a bit different, I think. You're describing what I'd call the degree of internal conflict (which is only partially visible to the conscious mind, of course). However it seems that agency is very much tied to propensity to act and that is not a function solely of how much in agreement your "drives" are.
Crudely speaking, agency is the ability to get your ass off the couch and do stuff. Depressed people, for example, have very low agency and I don't think that's because they have a particularly powerful instinct which says "I want to sit here and mope".