ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Behav. Econ.
Sec. Culture and Ethics
Volume 4 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/frbhe.2025.1631806
This article is part of the Research TopicImage Concerns in Economic BehaviorView all articles
Promises, Image Concerns, and Excuses - An Experimental Investigation
Provisionally accepted
- School of Business, Economics and Information Systems, University of Passau, Passau, Bavaria, Germany
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This paper tests the robustness of promise keeping in economic interactions using a laboratory experiment. Our design allows us to examine the roles of both social-and self-image concerns, and to investigate whether these concerns are diminished when participants are provided with responsibility-diffusing excuses. When the responsibility for a broken promise is undeniable, promise keeping is high. However, when plausible excuses are available that allow participants to preserve their social image, a significant number choose to break their promises. Yet, cooperation remains higher compared to treatments without a communication stage, and we find no evidence of participants engaging in self-deception to evade their promise-induced commitments. These findings suggest that while some individuals keep their promises reluctantly, others exhibit stable preferences for promise keeping that are not easily eroded by moral wiggle room.
Keywords: Communication, Promises, Image concerns, Excuses, Moral wiggle room
Received: 20 May 2025; Accepted: 21 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Grubiak. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Kevin P. Grubiak, School of Business, Economics and Information Systems, University of Passau, Passau, 94032, Bavaria, Germany
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