Soft commitment: self-control achieved by response persistence.
Help clients build self-control by chaining early acts to later ones so the long-term payoff finally gets reached.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The authors built a new idea called soft commitment.
Instead of fighting each urge, you set up a chain of small acts that keeps you on track.
They showed the idea with a quit-smoking plan where early steps lock you into later healthy moves.
What they found
The paper is theory only, so no new data are given.
The point: self-control grows when your early responses make it easier to stay with long-term pay-offs.
How this fits with other research
Taras et al. (1993) also work in theory land. They talk about delay-reduction: make tokens or praise signal a shorter wait to the real prize.
Soft commitment flips the lens. It does not speed up the reward; it ties today’s action to tomorrow’s bigger win.
Sulzer-Azaroff (1981) asks who will actually use a new behavior tool. Soft commitment is simple and visible, two of B’s ten adoption keys, so it may travel from lab to life more easily.
Why it matters
You can weave soft commitment into self-management plans for teens or adults. Link the first easy task to a second task that makes backing out a hassle. Over time the whole chain meets the long-range goal without daily will-power battles.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Complex ambivalence refers to situations in which high-valued temporally extended and abstract patterns of acts (such as healthy behavior) are opposed to high-valued particular acts (such as smoking a cigarette). In such situations, a self-controlled act differs from an impulsive act not by virtue of the source of control (inside versus outside the organism) but by virtue of the temporal extent of the contingencies controlling the behavior (extended versus constricted contingencies). Soft commitment is another name for patterning behavior over time so that it may come into contact with temporally distant or extended contingencies. Behavioral methods of establishing self-control typically target particular impulsive acts. The present article suggests that self-control in situations of complex ambivalence also may be achieved by focusing not on reducing the impulsive act itself but on the establishment of patterns (soft commitment) so that behavior comes into contact with the extended contingencies. As an illustration of how this may be accomplished, a specific self-control program is outlined for smoking.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1995 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1995.64-117