Credible Commitments jordanmarsh6, September 11, 2021April 5, 2023 I have a friend getting a political science PhD that told me recently about a concept in his field called “credible commitments”. He described it in its most basic form like this: “credible commitments are about creating institutions that penalize oneself to such a degree for reneging on commitments, so as to make those commitments more credible.” I was immediately intrigued. Here are some examples he gave me. In times of war, a country could signal their commitment to the war by mobilizing troops and invading another country. I think you can imagine why a country would be more hard-pressed to back out of conflict once it has “committed” to the conflict like that. He also mentioned how the federal reserve bank is an institution set up by the U.S. government that acts as a barrier to borrowing too much in the short term so that it could damage the long-term financial health of the government. In conducting the business of an entire country, governments can use credible commitments to signal that their commitment is real. Similarly, we can use credible commitments in our personal lives to signal to ourselves and others that we’re serious about the change we want to make. When my friend first told me about credible commitments, my mind immediately thought of the power of symbolic ceremonies we undertake to make an impress on our minds to change. I wrote in a previous post about how my wife and I tried to make a commitment to not use social media anymore. We got a couple of rocks, wrote “social media” on them, and threw them into the Potomac River in DC. We even filmed ourselves in the act, with what felt like a rush of motivation to actually make it happen. I learned quickly that this wasn’t enough. We were back to using social media a month or two later like nothing had happened. HOWEVER, let’s consider two scenarios: You want to quit social media. You get a rock, write social media on it, and symbolically bury that bad habit under of gallons of water in a huge river. You want to quit social media. So you decide to try to cut back every once in a while. Which commitment seems more like a “credible commitment”? I’m still very candid about how our rock-throwing expedition didn’t totally change our behavior; but I am still certain that our commitment was greater than the second scenario. There is something about a symbolic, ceremonial commitment to something that makes it official. I really believe that that ceremonial step is crucial in determining to change ourselves; whether that change is to begin doing something we want or to stop doing something we don’t want. Self Improvement