| Promises are a part of our daily lives; people make promises, some of which are kept and others that are not. These promises are made or received from friends, family members, and colleagues. Some even make promises to themselves, and to non-human entities (e.g., God, our pets).; Despite the prevalence of promises in social interactions, relatively little research looks at the consequences of making and keeping them. This research takes a first step in understanding the way people's judgments and attitudes vary as a function of the extent to which a promise is kept---whether promise makers deliver more, less, or exactly as they promised. We are also interested in the effect that one's role (either as promise maker or receiver) has on the way people account for promise keeping.; This work focuses on a number of important consequences that follow promise keeping. First, we predict an asymmetry in the judgments and evaluations of deviations from a promised level; the receiver evaluates a promise that is exceeded as if it was delivered exactly as promised, while at the same time, falling short of a promise is judged harshly. This prediction is based on past findings that show that negative outcomes dominate positive ones in human judgment.; We also study the discrepancies between the ways promise makers and promise recipients judge promise keeping. We show that promise makers consistently mispredict the effect of their behavior on recipients, and that this error causes them to underestimate these effects. We suggest a few factors that may contribute to this effect: egocentrism and the interpretation of private information, intentions and motivated reasoning, and an underlying difference in the way the two think of the promise. |
