The Case for Social Support as Social Assistance: When Social Means to Personal Goal Pursuit Enhance Agency

the Milyavsky et al. (this describe a theoretical model on the compensatory nature between personal agency and social assistance as means to attain goals. They review evidence for the assertions that (1) higher personal agency reduces the motivation to use social assistance during goal pursuit, and (2) increased reliance on social assistance decreases motivation for, and sense of, personal agency. They assert that they have applied a general analysis to a broad range of sources of agency and assistance that enable individual goal pursuit, whether those goals are con-crete or abstract. The agency-assistance model is an ambitious attempt to reconcile several disparate social psychology literatures and form a cohesive explanation for the apparent compensatory nature of personal and social means to goal pursuit. Milyavsky et al. that their model achieves par-simony and they have certainly attempted to explain a large amount of data with few assumptions. However, in doing so, they have failed to account for several theoretical per-spectives with well-established explanatory power.