Promises
“To be responsible, we keep our promises to others. To be successful, we keep our promises to ourselves.”
Are we making a lot of promises we cannot possibly keep? Everyone has broken a promise or two at some point in their lives. But some people do it more than others. Why do people break their promises? Why commit to something that they can’t do? What is the impact of a broken promise? Why do we make promises?
Promises are the fabric of the human ability to cooperate. They are one of the oldest human-specific psychological mechanisms fostering cooperation and trust. Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to the extent possible.
In ancient times, before modern human societies formed large cooperative infrastructures like laws, courts, and the police to ensure agreements; promises were made and kept. (1) One reason promises are kept is to ensure the future cooperation of potential partners. Promises are also kept in one-shot interactions as we prefer to keep our promises because it feels right. (2) Thus, the two significant motivations behind promise-keeping are first, instrumental promise-keeping to ensure future cooperation, and second, intrinsic promise-keeping for “doing the right thing.”
On the opposite side, neuroscience research on promise-breaking shows increased activation in our brain’s DLPFC, ACC, and amygdala regions, suggesting that dishonesty triggers an emotional conflict or dissonance. Before neuro-scientists could look inside our heads, cognitive dissonance was coined to explain a person holding two contradictory beliefs. Or when a belief does not align with an action the person had chosen freely to perform, like breaking a promise. (3)
In the 1960s, psychologist Carl Rogers suggested that dissonance was an ‘incongruence’ in our state of being. We experience a discrepancy or difference between our experience and the self-picture we developed in response to that experience. (4) According to Rogers, incongruence triggers unpleasant feelings, which neuroscience has finally pinpointed in select regions of our brains.
Our perceived self is how we view ourselves, and the ideal self is how we wish we were. When those two selves overlap, congruence occurs. Look at the graphic below. Research indicates that we can't be wholly overlapped as we always have something we wish about ourselves that is different.
We strive for congruence. But when the distance between the perceived self and the ideal self is too far, we get discomfort, anxiety, stress, and frustration. As we might guess, breaking promises or lying to ourselves manifests a load of negatives in our inner world. It is not only our failure to reach our goals that turn our mood dark but our lack of congruency in breaking our promises to ourselves.
Leon Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory suggests that we have an inner drive to harmonize our attitudes and behavior and avoid disharmony or dissonance. This is known as the principle of cognitive consistency. Neuroscience suggests deceptive people must work hard to suppress truthful actions or responses. It seems that the truth gnaws away at us.
In a day-to-day context, when our outside does not match our inside, one is said to be incongruent. A simple example would be when someone asks, “How are you?” you muster your best plastic smile and reply, “Good.” However, you are having a crappy day and feel like hiding in a hole. We all have a persona, a self that we present to the world. If we continuously drift into a state of incongruence, we lose track of who we are on the inside, our authentic selves. When this occurs, we lose the ability to choose what we express as our identity. We live in a shallower existence, feeling something like being on autopilot.
Rogers believed back in 1947 that incongruence ultimately makes one “feel bad,” and neuroscience suggests that “feel bad” is stress. (5) To avoid persistent stress, humans have an innate drive to become more congruent. This pursuit of congruence is often called self-actualization or the height of healthy human development. Rogers believed that when our perceived and ideal selves align, we experience great peace and clarity.
Beyond peace and clarity flowing from our congruency, promise-making and keeping have an impact researchers can measure. In the graphs below, promise receivers rate their impression of promise makers when they keep and break their word and the impact of promise-keeping on happiness. The effect of breaking a promise is enormous, and our memory of the breach of trust extends well into the future. What if we are both the promise-making and the receiver? The promises we make to ourselves have a compounding effect on our inner world.
Gneezy, A., & Epley, N. (2014). Worth Keeping but Not Exceeding: Asymmetric Consequences of Breaking Versus Exceeding Promises. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 5(7), 796–804. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550614533134
Gneezy, A., & Epley, N. (2014). Worth Keeping but Not Exceeding: Asymmetric Consequences of Breaking Versus Exceeding Promises. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 5(7), 796–804. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550614533134
Promises can be challenging, meaning promise makers should work extremely hard to keep them. Or not make them at all. Especially to ourselves. By our nature, human beings are intentional creatures. We aim at goals. And we are chronically aware that our actions trigger future events. To better our tomorrows, we make promises to ourselves that keep us moving forward. If we have reached a point where we feel stuck and miserable, it is probably because we are setting goals, making promises to ourselves, and breaking them.
Endnotes
1) Fehr, E., Fischbacher, U., and Gachter, S. (2002). Strong reciprocity, human cooperation, and the enforcement of social norms. Hum. Nat. 13, 1–25.
2) Charness, G., and Dufwenberg, M. (2006). Promises and partnership. Econometrica 74, 1579–1601.
3) Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford University Press.
4) Rogers, C. R. (1980). A way of being. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin.
5) Rogers, C. R. (1980). A way of being. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin.
6) Gneezy, A., & Epley, N. (2014). Worth Keeping but Not Exceeding: Asymmetric Consequences of Breaking Versus Exceeding Promises. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 5(7), 796–804. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550614533134
