Exploring the role of social influence in promise beliefs and information acquisition among newcomers

This study investigates the role of social influence in newcomer promise beliefs and promise-related information by co-workers. During their first month on the job, 85 new recruits completed both a one-shot questionnaire and a diary booklet for 10 consecutive workdays. We examined two information sources: contract makers (e.g., managers) and facilitators (e.g., senior colleagues). Two information-gathering processes that newcomers use were also assessed: direct communications and monitoring. Newcomer's reciprocation ideologies (creditor ideology and reciprocation wariness) were also assessed. Participants reported daily the promises received along with their sources and the information-gathering processes involved. A total of 601 promissory interactions were assessed. Analysis using multilevel random coefficient modelling demonstrated the importance of line managers and direct communication in promise beliefs. Both reciprocation ideologies related negatively to employer promises. Implications for theory, research, and practice are discussed.     

Responses to broken promises: Does personality matter?

This paper examined the effects of personality traits on individuals' reactions to broken promises. We studied the effects of Neuroticism and Agreeableness on emotive and cognitive responses to breach and investigated whether these effects varied across different types (economic vs. social) and severity (high vs. low) of breach. We collected data from a scenario-based experiment with 119 undergraduate participants. Neuroticism was found to influence emotive and cognitive responses, whereas Agreeableness influenced emotive responses. Agreeableness also interacted with the type and severity of breach to differentially predict individuals' responses to breach.     

Promises beyond assurance

Breaking a promise is generally taken to involve committing a certain kind of moral wrong, but what (if anything) explains this wrong? According to one influential theory that has been championed most recently by Scanlon, the wrong involved in breaking a promise is a matter of violating an obligation that one incurs to a promisee in virtue of giving her assurance that one will perform or refrain from performing certain acts. In this paper, we argue that the “Assurance View”, as we call it, is susceptible to two kinds of counterexamples. The first show that giving assurance is not sufficient for incurring the kind of obligation of fulfillment that one violates in breaking a promise. The second show that giving assurance is not necessary. Having shown that the Assurance View fails in these ways, we then very briefly sketch the outline of what we take to be a better view—a view that we claim is not only attractive in its own right and that avoids the earlier counterexamples, but that also affords us a deeper explanation of why the Assurance View seems initially plausible, yet nonetheless turns out to be ultimately inadequate.     

Living up to one's commitments: Agency, strategies and trust

In human social interaction, the notions of commitment and trust are strongly interrelated. A formal model for this interrelation will enable artificial agents to benefit from the associated reduction of complexity and improved possibilities for cooperation. We argue that the notion of living up to one's commitments, rather than actual fulfillment, plays the key role in the trust–commitment interrelation, and we propose a formal analysis of that notion in the framework of agents and strategies in branching time. The main technical innovation is a stringency ordering on an agent's strategies that allows one to classify what an agent does as more or less appropriate with respect to a given commitment, leading to a fine-grained assessment of trustworthiness.