Perceiving commitments: When we both know that you are counting on me

Abstract

Can commitments be generated without promises or gestures conventionally interpreted as such? We hypothesized that people believe that commitments are in place when one agent has led a recipient to rely on her to do something, even without a commissive speech act or any action conventionalized as such, and this is mutual knowledge. To probe this, we presented participants with online vignettes describing everyday situations in which a recipient's expectations were frustrated by one's behavior. Our results show that moral judgments differed significantly according to whether the recipient's reliance was mutually known, irrespective of whether this was verbally acknowledged.