Three Roads to Commitment: A Trimodal Theory of Decision Making

Three Roads to Commitment: A Trimodal Theory of Decision Making 5
and across time. 1
Intentions, because they are dispositions to act in future, can be thought of as implicitly conditional, i.e., an
intention to do A if C. Both actions A and conditions C may be fuzzy and even somewhat indeterminate (for
example, a vague commitment to the value of helping others whenever the opportunity arises), and need not be
easily articulated. Both the acts and the conditions for acting may vary in specificity and in temporal scope. For
example, the activity of being a doctor is significantly more general and slightly more extended than the activity of
practicing a particular medical specialty. Both of these, in turn, are more general than the action of using treatment
method A, whose temporal scope is distributed among discrete events whose occurrence is conditioned on specific
intervals (e.g., while the doctor is in charge of a patient with condition X). This intention, in turn, is more general
than the action of using a customized variant of treatment method A, which begins and ends within the single short
interval of care for a single patient. Specificity and temporal scope need not be negatively related. An intention may
include parts that are also intentions, e.g., a plan may include a series of treatments for a particular patient
contingent on results at each stage, which is both more specific and more temporally extended than a plan for a
single treatment. An action may also be an intended aspect or feature of another action. For example, Dr. House
might intend to minimize unnecessary tests and interventions throughout his medical practice. Intentions such as
these can spread either formally or informally, becoming medical protocols or standards to be followed throughout a
profession. Cultural traditions and norms evolve over longer periods of time and spread even more widely. In more
uncharted and non-traditional regions of practical decision making, however, specificity and scope do tend to trade
off: The larger the temporal scope of an intended activity, and the more general or temporally extensive its
1 This implies empirically testable claims: that commitment induces characteristics (a) through (e), and that, as a
result, these characteristics co-occur. These predictions can be tested, for example, by methods developed in
research on prospective memory (McDaniel & Einstein, 2007; Kliegel, McDaniel, & Einstein, 2009). Prospective
memory is defined by Goschke & Kuhl (1996) as the representation of an action to which the decision maker is
committed and that plays a causal role in performance of the action. They developed an experimental paradigm in
which participants learn two scripts under exactly the same conditions; they are then told which one of the two they
will have to act on. When tested after intent formation but before execution, memory is better for the script
corresponding to the active intention, despite equal exposure, learning incentives, and distractions. Moreover, the
advantage disappears when memory for the two scripts is compared after the intended script has been implemented.
To test item (b) above, the paradigm could be modified to test recognition of new information that is relevant to two
plans, one intended and one not, rather than verbatim script text. For item (c), the competence and completeness of
spelling out plans, e.g., for contingencies, could be compared for two tasks, one intended for execution and one not.
To test resistance to revision (a), willingness to change a plan in light of disconfirming information could be
compared in the two cases.