Promises, Expectations, and Social Cooperation

Abstract

Promising serves as an important commitment mechanism by operating on a potential cheater's internal value system. We present experimental evidence on what motivates people to keep their promises. First, they feel that they are duty-bound to keep their promises regardless of whether promisees expect them to (promising per se e¤ect). Second, they care about not disappointing promisees'expectations, regardless of whether those expectations were induced by the promise (expectations per se e¤ect). Third, they are even more motivated to avoid disappointing promisees'expectations when those expectations were induced by a promise (interaction e¤ect). Clear evidence of some of these e¤ects has eluded the prior literature due to limitations inherent to the experimental methods employed. We sidestep those di¢ culties by using a novel between-subject vignette design. Our results also shed light on how promising may contribute to the self-reinforcing creation of trust.

Promises and expectations

“…There are, however, shortcomings of such a within-subject design because it introduces the possibility that participants may feel like they should di¤erentiate their answers. Mischkowski, Stone, and Stremitzer (2016) report similar results to ours using a between-subject design.…”

“…Because Vanberg (2008) and our design use exogenous variation in either promises or beliefs but not both, one would wish to disentangle the di¤erent e¤ects in a design that provides exogenous variation of both promises and beliefs. Recent contributions by Di Bartolomeo, Dufwenberg, Papa, and Passarelli (2017) and by Mischkowski, Stone, and Stremitzer (2016) who, in addition, provide evidence supporting our theory of conditional guilt aversion, are promising endeavors to …ll this gap.…”

Keeping them honest: Promises reduce cheating in adolescents

“…More recently, philosophers have suggested a hybrid account according to which trust in promises arises due to social conventions and breaking one's promise violates the established trust (Kolodny & Wallace, 2003). These theoretical debates are mirrored by different stances in the behavioral sciences with some researchers suggesting that promises are binding because of a preference for keeping one's word (Ellingsen & Johannesson, 2004;Vanberg, 2008), because of an aversion to disappointing other's expectations (Charness & Dufwenberg, 2006), or because of a combination of both (conditional-expectation account: Ederer & Stremitzer, 2017;Mischkowski, Stone, & Stremitzer, 2019).…”

Morality, Compensation, and the Contractual Obligation

“…While the first one holds that, in brief, individuals tend to keep promises in order to avoid guilt from letting down the expectations of the promisee, the second one advances individual preferences for keeping promises, and for respecting shared and accepted moral norms. There is evidence corroborating both theories (Charness & Dufwenberg ; Mischkowski et al ). The present article contributes to this literature in revealing how moral perceptions underlying those reasons for individuals to keep promises hold in certain types of contingencies, namely those in which breach leads to an unfair outcome, while they do not necessarily hold in other ones.…”