Furthermore, mutual commitments can be either complementary (as when Peter is committed to digging a hole as long as Jim is committed to paying him for it) or joint (Peter and Jim are committed to a shared goal, such as digging the hole together). Among interpersonal commitments, one can distinguish unilateral commitments (in which case one agent makes a commitment to a second agent but the second agent is not committed to anything) from mutual commitments (in which case she is also committed to something).
In what follows, we will put aside self-commitments and focus on interpersonal commitments. Thus, one can make a commitment to oneself ( self-commitments) or one can make a commitment to another agent ( interpersonal commitments). To this end, Herbert Clark (2006) has proposed to taxonomize commitments according to their recipient. In particular, it is important to distinguish among different types of commitment. It will be useful to begin with a few conceptual preliminaries.
To this end, we will develop a framework which specifies, on the one hand, the cognitive and motivational processes that lead people to sense that they or others might be committed and to act committed, and on the other hand, the general structure of situations which elicit the sense of commitment, as well as situational factors which modulate the sense of commitment. In the following, our aim is to fill in this gap. Moreover, commitment also facilitates cooperation by making individuals willing to contribute to joint actions to which they wouldn’t be willing to contribute if they, and others, were not committed to doing so – to participate in a political demonstration, for example, or to help clean up after the office Christmas party.ĭespite the importance of commitment for characteristically human forms of sociality, it is not well understood how people identify and assess the level of their own and others’ commitments, nor what motivates them to honor commitments. Commitments make individuals’ behavior predictable in the face of fluctuations in their desires and interests, thereby facilitating the planning and coordination of joint actions involving multiple agents ( Michael and Pacherie, 2014). The phenomenon of commitment is a cornerstone of human social life.
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