Francesca Bonalumi, Central European University, HU
Investigating commitment from a psychological perspective entails dealing with a major challenge: to understand which are the minimal conditions that trigger a feeling of commitment and the understanding that a potential partner is committed. We claim that by committing, an agent influences the expectations of her partner, engages her own social dispositions, and implicitly accepts to put herself in a position of being accountable for any potential defection. The empirical way to assess whether a commitment to do X is made is to measure the committed agent’s tendency to do X in spite of some material benefits for not doing X, and moral disapproval from her partner if she does not do X: these measures are made by presenting to participants several hypothetical situations in which elements such as the intentions of the committed agent, the consequences of her not doing X or the common knowledge of expectations vary. We test the hypothesis that the level of moral disapproval of an agent when a commitment is broken by a partner depends not only on the consequences of the breaking, but also and decisively on the perceived intentions of the partner, and her concrete attempts to prevent or minimize the loss that the agent is bound to suffer. Furthermore, we test the hypothesis that moral disapproval is not decisively sensitive to whether an agreement is explicit but whether there is common knowledge about the expectations of the agents.
