The reason a public commitment is harder to abandon
Once a position is stated in front of witnesses, reversing it costs more than the position is worth. What is being defended is consistency, not the claim.
Intuition test — answer before you read on
A publicly announced deadline survives evidence that a privately noted one would not. What is the mechanism?
A manager announces a deadline in a company meeting. Two weeks later the evidence for moving it is overwhelming and cheap to act on. The deadline does not move. Had the same manager written the date privately in a notebook, it would have moved within a day, and nothing about the evidence would have differed.
What everyone sees
The refusal is read as stubbornness, ego or poor judgement. Colleagues assume the manager cannot see the evidence, and the manager assumes the colleagues are underweighting the cost of appearing changeable. Both are describing the same asymmetry from different sides, and neither is describing the deadline.
What is actually happening
Deutsch and Gerard showed that publicly stated judgements resist revision far more than privately recorded ones. Commitment and consistency, as documented by Cialdini and by Kiesler, operate through identity: a stated position becomes a claim about the kind of person who stated it, and reversing it appears to concede unreliability. Cognitive dissonance research adds that the discomfort is reduced by revising the evidence rather than the position.
Why it stays hidden
The identity cost hides because it cannot be entered in the decision. No minute records that the deadline held in order to protect the manager’s standing, and the manager does not experience it that way either. Dissonance reduction supplies a genuine-feeling substantive argument for holding firm, so the real reason arrives already disguised as a reason about the deadline.
A stated position becomes a claim about the speaker. Revising it costs standing, so the evidence gets revised instead.
A stated position becomes a claim about the speaker. Revising it costs standing, so the evidence gets revised instead.
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A stated position becomes a claim about the speaker. Revising it costs standing, so the evidence gets revised instead.
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Sources & further reading 3
- Deutsch & Gerard, "A Study of Normative and Informational Social Influences upon Individual Judgment", Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 1955
- Kiesler, "The Psychology of Commitment", 1971
- Festinger, "A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance", 1957
Cross-references
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