The Developmental Origins of Commitment

Joint actions, commitments and the need to belong

“…From these results, Gräfenhain et al (2009) concluded that by the age of three children have acquired an understanding of the nature of commitments in joint activity and of the obligations they carry for themselves and for their partners. Interestingly, Michael and Székely (2018) propose an alternative explanation for the findings of Gräfenhain et al's first study. They point out that in both experimental conditions, the 2-year-olds reacted to the interruption at a level as high as that of the 3-year-olds in the joint commitment.…”

“…We also discuss how our proposal relates to another proposal, the social motivation hypothesis, recently put forward by Godman and colleagues as a basic explanation of the appeal of prosocial behavior (Godman 2013;Godman et al 2014). In section 7, we discuss possible objections and contrast our view with a recent proposal by Michael and Székely (2018) on the developmental origins of the sense of commitment.…”

“…one may feel committed to contribute to another agent's goal simply by identifying this goal and realizing that the contribution of another agent is crucial to their achieving this goal (Michael, Sebanz &Knoblich 2016, Michael and Similarly, the mere repetition of patterns of interactions or the perception that one's partner is investing effort may generate a sense of commitment (Székely and Michael 2018). Michael and Székely (2018) further argue that the sense of commitment is a broader and less complex phenomenon than commitments in the strict sense and that this is reflected in the developmental timeline through which children progressively gain proficiency with commitments. According to them, children do not acquire proficiency with commitments by first acquiring the concept of commitments in the strict sense and then exhibiting a suite of behaviors licensed by the concept.…”

Foundations of a we-perspective

“…This term is yet highly ambiguous: it may, for instance, be understood in a phylogenetic way and would then refer to evolutionary developmental stages of collective behavior (e.g., Tomasello 2014). Moreover, "precursor" may as well be understood in an ontogenetic way thereby taking individual developmental stages into account (e.g., Brinck et al 2017;Michael and Székely 2018). Furthermore, the term might also be taken in a genealogical way such that a collective intentional state results (or may result) from an experiential state in a given situation.…”

Explaining Ideology: Mechanisms and Metaphysics

“… 7 The strain of commitment associated with acceptance might be accordingly weak for conventions that rely on empirical social expectations and strong for rules and agreements that entail obligation, while social norms that rely on normative social expectations might make for an intermediate case as long as they depend on our beliefs about the normative beliefs of others. For two views at the extremes of the spectrum, see Michael and Székely (2018) and Gilbert (2014, 39ff.). For the view that social norms rely on normative expectations, see Bicchieri (2017, 29ff.…”