Public commitment makes future fulfillment costly to renege on by invoking present social constraints

Evidence

The key feature of organized diffusion is not the information it transmits but the social facts it creates. When a community makes a collective public commitment, it changes what every member knows about what every other member knows and believes. The pluralistic ignorance that sustained the old norm is dissolved by the act of public collective deliberation. The parent who privately doubted the practice but assumed everyone else approved discovers, through the deliberation process, that the doubt is widely shared. — , The Rod and the Child, 7371 (#expands, via linked claim)

As against this, there is the future orientation of trust. Trust is only possible in a familiar world; it needs history as a reliable background. One cannot confer trust without this essential basis and without all previous experiences. But rather than being just an inference from the past, trust goes beyond the information it derives from the past and takes the risk of defining the future. The complexity of the future world is reduced by the act of trust. In trusting, one engages in action as though there were only certain possibilities in the future. One fixes one’s present future to a future present. In this way one offers other people a determinate future, a common future, which is not readily apparent from the past. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 138 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Sustained commitment usually depends on external social institutions for enforcement.; Time-separated commitments cannot couple present and future motivations into a single net motivation — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 205; Trust reduces future complexity by committing to a determinate future — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 138 (+11 more)

Related

• Loose social conventions undermine our capacity to make credible long-term commitments (similarity 0.82)

Broader Connections

• Collective public commitment dissolves pluralistic ignorance by revealing shared doubt #expands (0.85) — , The Rod and the Child, 7371
• Future-oriented discourse evades present political participation #expands (0.80)
• Trust reduces future complexity by committing to a determinate future #expands (0.78) — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 138
• Loose social conventions undermine our capacity to make credible long-term commitments #contradicts (0.75)
• Obligation arises when social pressure and general demand for conformity are intense #corroborates (0.75) — HLA Hart, The Concept of Law (Clarendon Law…, 299
• Persistent practices are held in place by conditional preferences about social costs #corroborates (0.72) — , The Rod and the Child, 7322
• Complete absorption in the present makes future commitment impossible #corroborates (0.72) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 468