An opportunistic, insincere commitment can still bind future behavior

Evidence

Ukifune has chosen to leave her world because she has two potential lovers—the two most desirable men in her world—and she prefers to have neither rather than to have to choose between them. Yet this woefully weak person has made a stalwart commitment. At first, she intends to leave the world by dying, but she fails in her attempt and is rescued by chance to a nearby nunnery. Her decision to become a nun is then purely opportunistic. Her only actual commitment is to leave her world. If she cannot be dead, she can at least be a nun, even though she may have little commitment to any of the ostensible beliefs of Buddhism. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 243

Categorization

• XREF: Directly challenges the sincerity premise in commitment theory—links to Schelling’s self-command and to the reader’s interest in observable constraints on opportunistic behavior. — connects to: Humans commit and act despite imperfect information about the future — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1063; Behavioral prediction closes the open future freedom requires
• STORYSTEM: A character forced into a lifelong vow they don’t believe in, whose insincerity makes the binding all the more tragic—the commitment holds precisely because others assume sincerity.