In foggy memory of a college course in sociology I took many years ago, I remember hearing about a study where a parent and their kindergarden-age child were paired off and given a pile of toy automobiles. Half of the toys were red and half were blue. Half were trucks, and half were cars, with each combination being about 1/4 of the vehicles. The task was to separate the toys into piles with common attributes, but only the child could touch the toys. It wasn't specified how the toys should be divided.
A pattern that emerged was that one group of parents tended to accomplish the task by making the child an extension of themselves: "Take that truck, put it in the pile over there", lots of pointing and direct instruction. A different group of parents tended to explain the goal to a greater degree, and let the child act on their own: "Put the red toys in one pile and the blue toys in another". The groupings seemed to correlate with all sorts of interesting things: education level, income, wealth, etc. I seem to remember thinking that maybe they had cause/effect backwards: that perhaps a tendency for direction vs delegation could drive the parents' ability to learn, earn, and conserve wealth. Unfortunately the groupthink of coordinated nodding got to me, and I didn't raise the issue.
Many years later, I was working with a talented friend at a software company. He and I were each project lead on two separate but related projects. He was an OO evangelist, to which I had not yet been assimilated, but have since adopted. In short, he was a very smart guy whose opinion I did (and still do) respect. Another difference between us was that he absolutely loved Microsoft Windows. I loathed it, preferring a UNIX command line. We had long since agreed to a friendly disagreement.
One day, we were working on a common chunk of code in his office. He demonstrated a test run, which consisted of going to the database window and creating a fresh database, going to a filesystem window, selecting a range of output files and deleting them, going to the system profiler window and clearing the cache, and lastly going to the application window, and (with a mere 6 more clicks or so) starting the app, which ran to completion and generated the desired data. He spoke at some length about how easy all this was, compared to the days he'd had to use UNIX for programming. (his college days) Just point, click, and it all worked! (If I were accurately reflecting his tone, I'd've used three exclamation points there) I asked him to come to my office and see me do the same thing, and he agreed. We got to my command prompt, I typed "runtest", and the script did everything that four window selection and dozens of clicks had done, only it was less error prone and faster.
He wasn't swayed, and his objection stays with me: "But you had to write that script!". He was eminently satisfied with a system that required his presence and direction. He wanted a tool:, I wanted an assistant, and was willing to take the time to train one (write the script). He really didn't want to waste time writing scripts, feeling that the goals changed often enough that you ended up spending more time writing than you saved by using them.
Two years ago I got a chance to follow up on that. At an offsite programmers' lunch for a different software company, I asked: "What is your computer doing for our company right now while you are at lunch?" Some folks said "Compilling", some said "Building datasets", others "Planning a new rack layout", etc. But by far the most said "nothing". Both groups were mystified that the other group was so big.
Hegl long ago separated "self" from "other", and I don't know if there's an official separation of "other" into "tool" and "agent". In the sociologic test, some parents were employing their kids as tools to accomplish the task, while others were using them as agents. It might be interesting to poll people who have become successful in various fields and ask them about how they think their parents might've approached the original test
