Suicide Bombings, weddings, and prison tattoos: An evolutionary perspective on subjective commitment and objective commitment (original) (raw)
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The Philosophy and Psychology of Commitment
The phenomenon of commitment is a cornerstone of human social life. Commitments make individuals' behavior predictable, thereby facilitating the planning and coordination of joint actions involving multiple agents. Moreover, commitments make people willing to rely upon each other, and thereby contribute to sustaining characteristically human social institutions such as jobs, money, government and marriage. However, it is not well understood how people identify and assess the level of their own and others' commitments. The Philosophy and Psychology of Commitment explores and explains the philosophical and cognitive intricacies of commitment. John Michael considers how commitments motivate us and their often implicit and tacit nature. To flesh out the philosophical framework of his argument he draws on experimental work with young children, adults and human-robot interaction within the context of joint action, considering the role of the emotions and whether very young children are sensitive to commitment. Providing an important account of the nature and operation of commitment, this book is essential reading for those working in philosophy of psychology, cognitive science, experimental philosophy, and social and developmental psychology. It will also be of interest to those working in emerging fields such as human-robot interaction and behavioral economics.
The International Encyclopedia of Ethics, 2012
Everyday discourse suggests that commitments are a central feature of human lives. Many refuse invitations citing prior commitments. Some are said to fear commitment. Others are praised for taking their commitments seriously. Not surprisingly, commitment is frequently referred to in the human sciences and in those branches of philosophy concerned with human action, including ethics. Authors often fail to explain what they mean by “commitment” and there is no one explicit account of commitment to which everyone clearly refers. This discussion construes one's commitments as facts about one's normative situation – about what one has reason to do (see Normativity). One's normative situation can be affected by many factors. One factor is the exercise of one's will, as when one decides not to make a certain phone call, agrees to marry someone, or resolves to live an honorable life. In such cases one can be said to have produced a commitment of the will. This discussion focuses on such commitments. It distinguishes between personal commitments such as that arising from a person's decision, and joint commitments, which can be argued to be the outcome of the making of agreements and promises, among other interpersonal transactions. If some such proposal is correct and if, as some believe, those rules of conduct we call moral have their source in an agreement or something similar, then we cannot understand morality without understanding commitment (see Contractualism).
The Sense of Commitment: A Minimal Approach
This paper provides a starting point for psychological research on the sense of commitment within the context of joint action. We begin by formulating three desiderata: to illuminate the motivational factors that lead agents to feel and act committed, to pick out the cognitive processes and situational factors that lead agents to sense that implicit commitments are in place, and to illuminate the development of an understanding of commitment in ontogeny. In order to satisfy these three desiderata, we propose a minimal framework, the core of which is an analysis of the minimal structure of situations which can elicit a sense of commitment. We then propose a way of conceptualizing and operationalizing the sense of commitment, and discuss cognitive and motivational processes which may underpin the sense of commitment.
Commitment : The term and the notions
2008
The notion of 'commitment' is widely used in at least three major areas of linguistic inquiry: studies on speech acts, studies on modality and evidentiality, and the formal modelling of dialogue/argumentation. In spite of its frequent use, the notion has rarely been theorised for its own sake. In this introductory paper, we review the notion as used in the three areas mentioned above, paying particular attention to who commits themselves to what, and to whether commitment is essentially a private or a public attitude. The paper also introduces the eleven contributions to issue 22 of the Belgian Journal of Linguistics.
The Escalation of Commitment to a Course of Action
The Academy of Management Review, 1981
There are many instances in which individuals can become locked into a costly course of action. Because it is often possible for persons who have suffered a setback to recoup their losses through an even greater commitment of resources to the same course of action, a cycle of escalating commitment can be produced. In this paper, I review recent research on the escalation of commitment and try to integrate its complex and often conflicting determinants.
Breaking the right way: a closer look at how we dissolve commitments
Joint action enables us to achieve our goals more efficiently than we otherwise could, and in many cases to achieve goals that we could not otherwise achieve at all. It also presents us with the challenge of determining when and to what extent we should rely on others to make their contributions. Interpersonal commitments can help with this challenge-namely by reducing uncertainty about our own and our partner's future actions, particularly when tempting alternative options are available to one or more parties. How we know whether a commitment is in place need not, however, be based on an explicit, identifiable event; in many cases, joint action is stabilized by individuals' experience of an implicit sense of commitment, which is sensitive to subtle situational cues such as the effort costs invested by one or more agents. While an emerging body of work has investigated the conditions under which a sense of commitment may emerge and/or be strengthened, little attention has been paid to the conditions under which people are comfortable dissolving commitments. Specifically, what are the factors that modulate people's motivation and which determine whether circumstances merit the dissolution of a commitment? After evaluating and rejecting the answers to this question suggested by standard approaches to commitment, we develop a new approach. The core insight which we articulate and defend is that, when considering whether new information or changing circumstances merit the dissolution of a commitment, people virtually bargain with their partners, performing a simulation of a bargaining process with the other person, including imagining how the other will feel and act towards them, and what effect this will have on them. The output of this simulation is a consciously accessible, affective state which provides motivation either to dissolve the commitment or to persist in it. Overall, our account expands our understanding of the phenomenology of being motivated to act committed in joint activity, an area in which existing accounts of interpersonal commitment fall short.