Research on empowerment often relies on attitudes, self-reported roles, or household outcomes that are shaped by social expectations and structural constraints. As a result, it remains difficult to distinguish what individuals truly value from what they feel obliged to express or enact. This paper proposes a new behavioral approach that views empowerment as the ability to maintain one’s intrinsic goals when confronted with competing pressures. Instead of asking respondents to describe their agency, the instrument invites them to reveal preferences through a series of resource allocation choices presented under varying informational and social conditions. By comparing how allocations shift across real-life contexts, normative expectations, and peer influence, the design captures the gap between individuals’ intrinsic valuations and the actions they take when pressures accumulate. These behavioral gaps, interpreted as distortions, form the foundation for a new measure of empowerment that focuses on preference stability rather than attitudes or status-based indicators. The framework highlights how structural limits, internalized beliefs, and perceived community expectations shape agency in different ways, making it possible to distinguish forms of constraint that are typically fused in survey-based metrics. The paper outlines the conceptual logic behind this approach, explains how behavioral responses reveal the alignment between goals and actions, and presents evidence from a pilot study demonstrating the feasibility and interpretive value of the instrument. This behavioral perspective offers a more direct and flexible way to study empowerment in diverse social and political environments.