Commitment devices
People bind their future selves in advance because they expect to weaken later.
A commitment device is a choice made now that restricts or penalises a choice later, taken because the person expects their future preferences to conflict with their current ones. They range from soft, like a public declaration, to hard, like money placed at risk. They work on people who know they will waver, which is a minority of any audience.
How it shows up in software
Annual plans, savings goals with locked funds, scheduled sends, focus modes that block apps, and publicly declared targets all pre-commit the user against a later impulse. The design question is who holds the key and how costly it is to break the commitment. Anything unbreakable becomes a support problem.
Using it well
- Offer commitment as an option the user opts into, never as the default, since it only helps people who expect to waver.
- Let the user set the stake and the escape terms at the moment they commit, while they are thinking clearly.
- Always provide an exit, with friction proportional to the stake, and make the exit visible before they commit.
- Show the commitment terms again at the moment they bite, so a person under pressure is not surprised by rules they set months ago.
Where it turns manipulative
- Lock-in sold as commitment is the standard abuse. An annual contract with no cancellation path is a business term, and calling it a commitment device launders it.
- Financial stakes on health goals fall hardest on people who can least afford to lose them, and failure in those schemes adds a money loss to a health setback.
- Public declarations that the product broadcasts on the user's behalf turn a private commitment into a reputational risk they did not choose.
Where you have seen it
Freedom
Locked mode blocks sites for a set period with no way to end the session early from the device.
Monzo
Savings pots can be set with a fixed withdrawal date, separating goal money from spendable balance.
What the research says
- Thaler and Benartzi, 2004Well evidenced
Save More Tomorrow let employees commit future pay rises to retirement saving in advance, and participants' saving rates rose substantially over several rises.
A field programme with real money. Effects depend on automatic escalation continuing, which is a default effect as much as a commitment one.
- Ashraf, Karlan and Yin, 2006Well evidenced
A savings account in the Philippines that restricted withdrawal until a goal was met raised balances for those who took it up.
Take-up was a minority of those offered, which is the pattern across this literature.
- Giné, Karlan and Zinman, 2010Mixed evidence
Smokers who deposited their own money forfeitable on a failed urine test were more likely to be abstinent at six months.
Again a small share accepted the contract. Commitment devices help the self-aware; they do not convert the unwilling.
Grades are a judgement about the evidence, not about how useful the idea is. Plenty of contested effects are still worth knowing, as long as you do not cite them as settled.