Strong motivations cannot be ignored but only trumped by contrary motivations.

Evidence

Alberich’s curse could be seen as a commitment not to act from lust, a commitment to abjure love. Why is this commitment dubious? Alberich’s lust is largely not a matter of deliberate choice. Rather, it is something at least partly in control of him, something that gives him strong motivations, as love would do if he ever stumbled into it. His commitment to defy it means a commitment to ignore those motivations when they come. Typically, we think such a strong motivation cannot be literally ignored, although it can be trumped by a contrary motivation, such as Alberich’s desire for wealth and power. His psychological problem, once he has the Rhinegold, is to connect future motivations of love or lust to his contrary desire for power, so that his lust can be trumped in that moment when he already wears the ring made from the Rhinegold and he need no longer abjure lust to obtain the gold and its power. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 203

Categorization

• XREF: Core mechanism for Hardin’s trust conception: reliability comes from structuring incentives so one motivation (self-interest) reliably overrides another (impulse), not from willed commitment — reinforces the observable-constraint foundation the reader is using.
• DEFINE: Clarifies the psychological mechanism by which commitments actually work: trumping rather than ignoring motivations.