Precommitment: Why Future You Should Sometimes Lose the Vote.
Precommitment settles a choice before the impulse that would overturn it; field trials show that offering it changes behaviour, and that in smoking and savings trials most people decline its binding forms. Here is what the science actually says, and what to do with it.
01Opening
The Opening
The Evidence at a Glance · 04 Findings · 54 Sources
What the Research Actually Found
Four numbers from trials and meta-analyses: how many people accept a binding contract, what an advance plan does, what the fuel account of willpower failed to show, and what a known consequence achieves.
01 · Take-up · RCT. 13.7% In a registered smoking-cessation trial with 2,538 participants, 13.7% of those assigned to a deposit programme, which put their own money at stake, accepted it, against 90.0% of those assigned to a reward programme.[1]
02 · If-then plans · Meta-analysis. d = 0.65 Across 94 tests, plans of the form "if situation Y arises, I will do X" raised goal attainment by d = 0.65, a pooled estimate that mixes laboratory and field tests, carries a risk of publication bias, and measures plans rather than commitment contracts.[2]
03 · Willpower as fuel · Multilab replication. d = 0.04 A preregistered replication in 23 laboratories with 2,141 participants found an ego-depletion effect of d = 0.04 (95% CI -0.07 to 0.15), which did not support the account of self-control as a fuel that runs down with use.[3]
04 · Known consequence · Meta-analysis. g = 0.70 In open-label randomised trials, disulfiram, a drug that makes drinking cause a sharp physical reaction, outperformed controls in treating alcohol dependence (g = 0.70; g = 0.58 across all 22 studies), while blinded trials showed no efficacy. The authors attribute the effect to patients knowing the consequence is in place; reading that as precommitment is an interpretation the trials did not test.[4]
Field trials, laboratory imaging and meta-analyses agree that a choice fixed in advance changes later behaviour, and the smoking and savings trials agree that only a minority accept the binding forms.
Offers of precommitment change behaviour even where few accept, so the practical problem is designing a commitment that more people will sign.
The usual picture of self-control places it at the moment the temptation is present. The alternative is to decide earlier and lock the decision in: a choice made in advance that removes, penalises or pre-scripts a later option is called precommitment. It has value for anyone whose preferences shift as a reward draws near: such a person can rationally prefer to restrict their own future choices, and economic models show why that restriction is worth paying for.[5]
The shift itself has a name. People who prefer a larger, later reward when both options are distant often switch to the smaller, sooner one as it arrives, a reversal called time inconsistency.[6] Temptation of this kind is ordinary. In an experience sampling study, which prompts people several times a day to report what they feel, 205 adults reported 7,827 desires over one week; most desires were unproblematic, and those that conflicted with a goal were resisted unevenly.[7]
A firm intention does not close the distance between plan and action. A meta-analysis of 47 experimental tests found that a medium-to-large change in intention (d = 0.66) produced a smaller change in behaviour (d = 0.36).[8] This shortfall is the intention-behaviour gap. Precommitment targets it from the other side: it leaves the intention alone and changes the situation the intention will meet.
Changing an intention changes behaviour by less; precommitment acts on the later situation, where the gap opens.Editorial pause
Where the idea comes from. Economists formalised precommitment as the rational response of a planner who expects their own tastes to change.[9] Laboratory work with animals found the behaviour itself: pigeons given an early chance to remove a smaller, sooner reward from a later choice will do so.[10][11]
The common account of self-control rests on two claims: that it is a stable trait formed in childhood, and that it is a resource spent by use. The evidence for each is weaker than the account assumes. A conceptual replication of a classic preschool test of delay of gratification found an association with later outcomes about half the size of the original, and controls for family background cut it by two thirds.[12] A cohort of about 1,000 people followed to age 32 did find that childhood self-control predicted adult health, wealth and public safety, and the gradient held within sibling pairs.[13]
The resource claim fared worse. Ego depletion, the idea that self-control draws on a limited store emptied by use, was not supported by a large preregistered replication run across many laboratories.[3] Two lines of work describe what people with high self-control do instead. Across six studies with 2,274 participants, beneficial habits statistically mediated the link between trait self-control and positive life outcomes.[14] In four studies, people pursuing goals they wanted, rather than goals they felt obliged to pursue, regulated themselves better because they experienced fewer temptations, not because they exerted more self-control.[15]
In these studies, self-control travelled with habits and with fewer felt temptations, not with more effortful resistance.Editorial pause
Precommitment takes several forms. An arrangement a person enters voluntarily that makes a future lapse costly or impossible is a commitment device.[16] It can remove the option, as when a gambler asks to be barred from a casino; it can put money at stake, as in a commitment contract, an agreement under which a lapse costs the person money, often a deposit of their own; or it can fix the response in advance, as in an if-then plan.
The test of the idea is whether people accept it when it is offered. In the largest trial of its kind, most smokers offered a contract backed by their own money declined it, although among people who would accept either programme it produced more quitting than a reward did.[1] For the wider willpower literature, see the science of willpower.
Offers of precommitment change behaviour, and in smoking and savings trials most people offered its binding forms decline them.Section verdict
02The Mechanism
How Precommitment Works in the Brain
In the laboratory, precommitment beat willpower, and it helped most in the most impulsive people.from the text; evidence at [24]
In brief. Precommitment moves the decision from effortful control at the moment of temptation to an earlier choice, and in the laboratory that earlier choice engages a different brain region.
The mechanism starts with how the brain prices delay. The value of a reward falls as the reward recedes in time, a process called delay discounting. If value fell at a constant rate, a person who preferred the larger, later reward a month ahead would still prefer it on the day. It falls steeply over short delays and gently over long ones, a curve called hyperbolic discounting, and that shape makes preferences reverse as a reward approaches.[6][5]
Economic models give the reversal a parameter. Present bias is the extra weight a person gives to rewards available now over all later rewards, and a model built on it shows why restricting one's own future options has value.[5] Restriction is worth something only because the later self will choose differently from the earlier one.
The steepness of discounting can also be changed from inside the decision. In two experiments, imagining specific future events while choosing lowered discounting, through stronger interaction between prefrontal and medial temporal regions.[17] That is a second route to the same goal: make the later reward weigh more at the moment of choice, rather than remove the sooner one.
Value falls steeply as a reward nears, so the preference held at a distance loses to the one formed up close unless something fixes it first.Editorial pause
Brain imaging locates the two sides of the choice. In one study, limbic regions responded more to rewards available immediately, while lateral prefrontal and parietal regions were active across all choices between sooner and later rewards.[18] Another found that the ventral striatum, medial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate cortex tracked the subjective value of delayed rewards.[19]
Self-control, on this account, modulates value. In dieters choosing foods, activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) modulated the value signal in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC).[20] Disrupting the left lateral prefrontal cortex with repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) increased choices of immediate rewards without changing how people rated those rewards, which places control rather than valuation in that region.[21]
Craving follows the same pattern. When smokers deliberately regulated their craving, DLPFC activity rose and ventral striatum activity fell.[22] A review of self-regulation failure describes the balance as prefrontal top-down control set against subcortical reward responses, with failure when the balance tips toward reward.[23]
In dieters choosing food, self-control appeared as prefrontal modulation of a value signal at the moment of choice.Editorial pause
Precommitment route. Plan: decide while calm; lateral frontopolar cortex active at the decision. Lock: remove, reprice or pre-script the option. Temptation window: the sooner option grows more tempting as it nears. Option already removed: no decision needed. Willpower route. Resist the sooner option in the moment: DLPFC engaged in one laboratory task; it ends at either the larger, later reward or a lapse. r = 0.62: benefit of precommitment over willpower rises with impulsivity (laboratory, 58 men).[24] The sequence is a synthesis of the cited studies; no single study has tested it end to end.
The decision is made before the impulse peaks. One review proposes that impulses strengthen as they unfold, which is its reason for acting before they do.
Precommitment recruits a separate region. In one imaging study, the lateral frontopolar cortex was active when people chose to bind themselves and coupled with the regions willpower uses.
The willpower route can fail at the last step. Without a lock, the sooner option has to be resisted on the spot; in one laboratory task, that resistance engaged the DLPFC.
One laboratory study compared the two strategies directly. Healthy men aged 18 to 35 chose between a smaller reward available sooner and a larger one later. In one condition they had to hold out against the sooner option while it stayed available; in another they could remove it in advance. Precommitment raised choices of the larger, later reward compared with willpower in both studies, with 58 men analysed in the first and 20 in the second, imaging study.[24]
The two strategies used different circuitry. Willpower engaged the DLPFC, the posterior parietal cortex and the inferior frontal gyrus. Precommitment engaged the lateral frontopolar cortex, a region at the front of the brain, which coupled with those willpower regions when people chose to bind themselves.[24]
The evidence for this split comes from one study. Its samples were 58 and 20 men, drawn from two laboratories, and no later study in this evidence base has repeated the imaging result. It is consistent with the earlier findings on prefrontal control of value,[20][21] which is not the same as a replication.
In the laboratory, precommitment is a different operation from willpower, run by a different region, not a stronger version of the same effort.Editorial pause
0.62 r correlation between a person's impulsivity and the extra benefit precommitment gave them over willpowerBig stat · Laboratory choice experiment, study 1 of 2, 58 men analysed [24]
The correlation means precommitment helped most where willpower had the most work to do. The pattern held in the smaller second study (r = 0.50).[24] People also misjudge which group they belong to. In four studies, people who overestimated their impulse control exposed themselves to more temptation, and among recovering smokers this overconfidence predicted relapse at a 4-month follow-up, a pattern called restraint bias.[25]
One review places the case for an early decision in timing. It argued that impulses grow stronger as they unfold and proposed that situational strategies, which change the situation before the impulse forms, are especially effective at preventing unwanted action; it did not test them against later strategies.[26]
None of this depends on self-control running out. The preregistered multilab test of that idea found d = 0.04 (95% CI -0.07 to 0.15).[3] The result did not support the strength model of self-control, and it tested one laboratory paradigm, so it does not show that self-control is unlimited. Precommitment works on either view, because it reduces how often the control system is called on.
In these studies, the most impulsive gained most from precommitment, and the most overconfident exposed themselves to temptation instead.Section verdict
03Evidence
What the Field Trials Show About Precommitment
01The ranking
Pre-hierarchy context
Field trials first, and one study left out.
The strongest evidence for precommitment comes from field trials in which people put real money or real options at stake, and the ranking below favours them. A laboratory study can isolate a mechanism; a field trial shows whether people accept a commitment and whether it changes behaviour outside the laboratory. Trials report two quantities separately: the effect on everyone offered a commitment, called the intention-to-treat estimate, and the effect on those who accept it, which a trial can estimate by using random assignment as an instrumental variable.
The ranking leaves out a study that once anchored this topic. A widely cited experiment on self-imposed deadlines has been retracted,[27] and a replication found that changing deadlines had a negligible effect on performance.[28] No finding in this article rests on it.
The five studies below are ranked, not scored. The order weighs design quality first, then measurement precision, causal clarity, replication value and the weight each study carries in the argument. A randomised controlled trial ranks highest on design; a meta-analysis, which pools many studies, offers the largest evidence base. Effect sizes such as d and g express a difference between groups in standard-deviation units.
A field trial measures two things a laboratory cannot: whether people accept the commitment and whether it changes behaviour where they live.Editorial pause
02The criteria
Evidence hierarchy
Ranked, not scored.
Ranked by design quality first, then measurement precision, causal clarity, replication value and the weight each study carries in the argument. The order is a ranking; no points score was assigned.
1. Design quality. Controlled human data rank above observational data, which rank above animal models.
2. Measurement precision. Objective outcomes, such as biochemical or neural measures, rank above self-report.
3. Causal clarity. Designs that need less interpretation to support a causal reading rank higher.
4. Replication value. Findings reproduced by independent work rank higher.
5. Argument value. Studies that carry a part of the argument no other study carries rank higher.
Together, these five studies show that a commitment fixed in advance changes behaviour; of the three that measure take-up, two found a minority accepting and the gym trial found high take-up.
Rank order
03Take-up
Post-hierarchy commentary
Take-up sets the ceiling.
Low take-up recurs across the smoking trials. In one smoking-cessation trial, 11% of smokers offered a commitment contract took it up, and the offer raised quitting on a 6-month test by 3 percentage points, an effect that persisted at 12 months.[32] The proportion who accept, called take-up, sets the ceiling on what any commitment can achieve across a population.
A trial in Thailand followed results for longer. Of 2,055 smokers, 215 (10.5%) enrolled in the trial, and 201 were then randomised to counselling alone or to counselling plus an offer that bundled a commitment contract with team incentives and text messages. Verified abstinence at 6 months was 44.3% with the offer against 18.8% without it; self-reported abstinence at 14 months was 42.0% against 24.6%.[33] The two time points use different measures, and the offer combined three ingredients, so the trial cannot isolate the contract. Commitment can also extend an effect that would otherwise fade: in a workplace study, four weeks of payment for gym visits left little lasting change, while adding a commitment contract produced significant long-run changes detectable years later.[34]
In two smoking trials, 11% to 13.7% of those offered a binding contract accepted it; offers still raised quitting, and among likely accepters deposits beat rewards.Editorial pause
Most people offered the deposit contract declined it. Among those who would accept either programme, it beat a reward.from the text; evidence at [1]
04Who accepts
Post-hierarchy commentary
Who accepts, and why.
Some people seek commitment even when it costs them. In a year-long field experiment, data-entry workers chose a dominated contract, one that penalised low output and paid nothing extra for high output, and their output rose; effort also rose as paydays approached.[35] In a real-effort experiment, people showed little present bias for money and considerably more for effort, and present bias in effort predicted demand for a binding commitment.[36]
Who accepts is the harder question. The gym-contract evidence shows that people do not sort cleanly by need: a person can want commitment in both directions at once, and choices reflect noisy valuation and mistaken beliefs.[31] A precommitment that relies on the person to judge when they need it inherits those errors.
Precommitment also has a clinical form. In a randomised trial with 469 people with severe mental illness, a facilitated session led 61% to complete a psychiatric advance directive, written instructions for their own treatment in a future crisis, or to authorise a proxy decision maker, against 3% of controls.[37] The trial measured completion of these documents; it did not measure later crises.
Offers of precommitment change behaviour; who accepts them, and why, is the question the evidence answers least well.Section verdict
The 5 Strongest Studies on Precommitment
Evidence Hierarchy · Ranked by methodological weight · Editorial judgment: The five studies show that a commitment fixed in advance changes behaviour in the laboratory, in smoking, in savings and in exercise. Take-up varies: a minority accepted in the smoking and savings trials, and take-up was high in the gym trial, where choices reflected noisy valuation and mistaken beliefs.
01Anchor
A registered five-arm randomised trial of reward and deposit programmes for quitting smoking, 2,538 participants
13.7% of people assigned to a deposit programme accepted it, against 90.0% assigned to a reward programme. Employees of one company and their relatives and friends were randomised to usual care or to one of four programmes: individual or group rewards, or individual or group deposits that put participants' own money at stake. On an intention-to-treat basis, sustained abstinence through 6 months was 9.4% to 16.0% across the four incentive arms against 6.0% with usual care, and rewards beat deposits (15.7% vs 10.2%). Among people estimated to accept either programme, the deposit programme produced 13.2 percentage points more sustained abstinence than the reward programme (95% CI 3.1 to 22.8), an instrumental-variable estimate. [1]
What this shows: A deposit contract can outperform a reward among people who would accept either, while most people decline it.
Why it ranks first: It has the largest sample in the set, a biochemically verified outcome and a registered protocol, and it is the largest of the three studies here that measure both the effect and the refusal.
Limitation: The deposit advantage applies only to people who would accept either programme; across everyone assigned, rewards did better.
Rubric breakdown
The order is a ranking; no points score was assigned.
Ranked by methodological weight.
The order is a ranking; no points score was assigned.
02
A meta-analysis of 94 tests of if-then plans and goal achievement [2]
Plans of the form "if situation Y arises, I will do X" raised goal attainment with a pooled effect of d = 0.65, an estimate that pools laboratory and field tests and carries a risk of publication bias. A later meta-analysis of a related method, which pairs such plans with a mental-contrasting exercise, found a smaller pooled effect (g = 0.34) and detected publication bias.[29]
Shows: a decision fixed in advance and tied to a cue changes later behaviour across many settings.
Why ranked here: It has the largest evidence base in the set; it ranks second because a plan restricts no option and because its pooled effect carries a publication-bias risk.
0.65 d · Meta-Analysis · Laboratory and Field
Not scored
03
A laboratory choice experiment with brain imaging comparing precommitment with willpower, 58 and 20 men analysed [24]
Precommitment raised choices of the larger, later reward compared with willpower in both studies (t(57) = 5.26 and t(19) = 3.58), and the benefit rose with impulsivity. Precommitment engaged the lateral frontopolar cortex; willpower engaged the DLPFC, posterior parietal cortex and inferior frontal gyrus.
Shows: in the laboratory, precommitment and willpower are distinct operations, and precommitment helps the most impulsive people most.
Why ranked here: It has the most precise measurement in the set; it ranks third because each sample is under 60 people, all male and from a single laboratory.
0.62 r · Controlled Human Data · Mechanism
Not scored
04
A randomised field trial of a commitment savings account offered by a bank in the Philippines, 710 clients offered [30]
Of 710 clients offered an account that restricted their own access to their savings, 202 (28.4%) took it. After 12 months, the study's abstract reports average savings balances 81 percentage points higher in the treatment group than in the control group; among women, measures of present bias predicted who took the account.
Shows: when a bank offers a voluntary lock on savings, a minority take it, and average balances in the group offered it end up higher than in the control group.
Why ranked here: It is a strong field trial with real money; it ranks fourth because its headline figure comes from the abstract with an unclear unit, and its outcome is savings rather than health.
28.4 % · Field Trial · Controlled Human Data
Not scored
05
A field experiment on gym-attendance contracts with measures of actual and perceived time inconsistency, 1,248 participants [31]
Take-up of contracts for more gym attendance was high, and the contracts produced significant increases in exercise. About half of those who chose a contract to attend more also chose one to attend less, and take-up was influenced by noisy valuation and by incorrect beliefs about time inconsistency.
Shows: commitment contracts raise attendance, and decisions to take them reflect noisy valuation and mistaken beliefs about one's own time inconsistency.
Why ranked here: It is a large field experiment that tests who selects commitment; it ranks last because it speaks to targeting more than to the size of the effect.
About half of contract takers · Field Trial · Controlled Human Data
Not scored
04Stakes
The gap between plan and action costs money, health and attention.
What Goes Wrong Without a Commitment. Most of the studies below are observational. They show where the gap opens; they do not show that precommitment would close it in each case.
The four domains share a structure: a choice that looks easy at a distance becomes hard at the moment of action, the reversal that hyperbolic discounting describes.[6] For the addiction side of this pattern in practical terms, see how to break addiction.
One of these findings is a default, not a precommitment, and the difference matters. Automatic enrolment is chosen by an employer. A meta-analysis of such choice architecture interventions reported d = 0.45,[45] while a reanalysis that corrected for publication bias found no evidence of an effect.[46] A precommitment is chosen by the person it binds, which is why take-up limits it.
The addiction evidence shows the design trade-off most clearly. Self-exclusion and disulfiram both remove or reprice an option in advance, and both rest on narrow evidence: the self-exclusion studies have no control groups.[43] The disulfiram effect appears only in open-label trials, which the authors attribute to patients knowing the consequence is in place; the samples were about 89% male, with high heterogeneity.[4]
The costs of acting in the moment appear in money, health and attention; direct tests of precommitment are concentrated in smoking, savings and exercise.Editorial pause
Money
At one firm, 86% of employees hired under automatic enrolment in a retirement savings plan participated, against 37% of an earlier hire cohort observed at similar tenure; that is a default effect set by the employer, not a self-chosen commitment.[38] Gym members on flat monthly fees of over $70 averaged 4.3 visits a month, paying over $17 per expected visit when a $10 pass was available.[39]
What it feels like · I will start saving next month, the membership will pay for itself, the plan I meant to use
Health
In a cohort of about 1,000 people followed to age 32, lower childhood self-control predicted poorer adult health.[13] A meta-analysis of 691 correlations found impulsiveness, task aversiveness and low self-efficacy among the strongest predictors of procrastination.[40] A survey of 177 adults introduced bedtime procrastination, going to bed later than intended when nothing external prevents it, as a distinct pattern.[41]
What it feels like · one more episode, the early night I planned, starting the task tomorrow
Substances and gambling
Steeper discounting of delayed rewards is associated with addictive behaviour, with a modest but robust correlation of r = 0.14.[42] In 19 naturalistic studies of self-exclusion, a ban gamblers request on their own entry to venues, the share meeting criteria for pathological gambling was 61% to 95% before exclusion and 13% to 26% after, with no control groups.[43] Open-label disulfiram outperformed controls, and blinded disulfiram did not.[4]
What it feels like · I can be near it and not use, one bet to win it back, I will stop after this one
Attention
A model fitted to a field experiment attributes about 31% of social media use to self-control problems.[44] In the same study, a tool that let people set limits on their own use reduced it.[44]
What it feels like · I only meant to check one message, the hour gone on a feed, opening the app without deciding to
05Protocol
A Four-Step Precommitment Protocol
Translation Layer · Four Steps. The four steps are a synthesis of the cited studies; no study has tested them as a set. Each step moves one decision away from the moment of temptation to a calmer moment before it.
The protocol, as a sequence.
Before the window → When you sign → When you plan → At a landmark
Remove the option
Remove or relocate the tempting option before the moment you expect to face it.
One review proposes that changing the situation early is especially effective,[26] and in one laboratory task precommitment outperformed willpower, most in the most impulsive people.[24]
Trusting yourself to resist in the moment: people who overestimate their restraint expose themselves to more temptation.[25]
Put a stake on it
Attach a cost to the lapse, and start with a version you will accept.
Among people who would accept either programme, a deposit produced more quitting than a reward, but most people offered it refused it.[1] In another trial, 11% took up a commitment contract, and the offer raised quitting by 3 percentage points across everyone offered it.[32] On one online platform, contracts with money at stake were associated with more weekly weight loss than contracts without, in a retrospective, self-selected sample with self-reported weight.[47]
Designing a contract so harsh that you never sign it, which leaves no commitment at all.
Write the if-then plan
Write the plan as "if this situation arises, then I will do this," with a date, a time and a place.
Plans of this form, called implementation intentions, raised goal attainment across many tests.[2] In a field trial, prompting people to write down the date and time of a flu vaccination raised the vaccination rate by 4.2 percentage points over a control rate of 33.1%.[48]
Stating the goal without the when and where: a change in intention produces a smaller change in behaviour.[8]
Schedule the escalation
Start at a natural fresh start, and commit the next increase in advance.
In three archival field studies, aspirational activities increased after temporal landmarks such as the start of a week or month.[49] At one firm, employees who committed in advance to raise their savings at each future pay rise increased their savings rate from 3.5% to 13.6% by the fourth rise, an automatic escalation design.[50]
Expecting automaticity in 21 days: in one study, habits took around 66 days to form, ranging from 18 to 254 days among people whose data fit the model.[51]
06Verdict
The verdict.
Bottom line
The evidence supports deciding before the impulse arrives, in a form you will accept, for the moments you already know are hard.
Precommitment changes behaviour by settling a choice before the impulse that would overturn it. In the laboratory it outperformed willpower, most in the most impulsive people; in field trials, offering it raised quitting, saving and exercise across the people offered it, and among people who would accept either programme a deposit produced more quitting than a reward; and plans fixed in advance to a cue raised goal attainment across many tests. The same trials show that in smoking and savings most people decline the binding versions, and that the people who choose commitment do so for noisy and partly mistaken reasons. The practical task is to design a commitment a person will accept, and to make it before the moment it is needed.
Decide before the temptation, choose a commitment you will sign, and remove the option where you can.Summary line
The evidence is strongest over months, not years. Most of the trials followed people for 6 to 14 months; within that window one effect declined over time[54] and one persisted to 12 months.[32] One workplace study found that adding a commitment to a short incentive produced changes still detectable years later, which makes durability a design target rather than a given.[34]
Self-knowledge is the weak link. People overestimate their restraint,[25] choose commitment for noisy reasons,[31] and decline the strongest versions.[1] A soft commitment, one that raises the cost of a lapse without removing the option, can be applied as a routine to known weak points, so that no judgement about need is required each time.
The approach extends past personal habits. Employees can commit future pay rises to savings,[50] patients can write instructions for their own future crises,[37] and gamblers can bar their own entry.[43] In each case, the person who decides is the person who will later be bound, which is what separates precommitment from a rule imposed by someone else.
Offers of precommitment change behaviour; the design problem is acceptance.
Decide early
Precommitment changed behaviour in laboratory and field trials by settling the choice before temptation.[24][1] In the laboratory, it helped most where impulse was strongest.[24]
The refusal problem
In the smoking trials, most people declined binding contracts, and in a gym trial those who accepted did not sort cleanly by need.[1][31] Without a commitment, inertia and present bias make the decision.[38][5]
Sign what you will keep
Choose a commitment you will sign. A hard commitment, one that removes the option, suits the moments you can predict; a modest stake or an if-then plan covers the rest.[26][2]
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doi: 10.1177/09567976261488042
Retraction: Procrastination, deadlines, and performance: Self-control by precommitment
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28
Journal
doi: 10.1177/09567976261460772
Replication of "Procrastination, deadlines, and performance: Self-control by precommitment."
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29
Meta
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.565202
A meta-analysis of the effects of mental contrasting with implementation intentions on goal attainment
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30
RCT
doi: 10.1162/qjec.2006.121.2.635
Tying Odysseus to the mast: Evidence from a commitment savings product in the Philippines
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31
Journal
doi: 10.1093/restud/rdab056
Who chooses commitment? Evidence and welfare implications
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32
Journal
doi: 10.1257/app.2.4.213
Put your money where your butt is: A commitment contract for smoking cessation
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33
RCT
doi: 10.1016/j.amepre.2013.06.020
Commitment contracts and team incentives: A randomized controlled trial for smoking cessation in Thailand
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34
Journal
doi: 10.1257/app.20130327
Incentives, commitments, and habit formation in exercise: Evidence from a field experiment with workers at a Fortune-500 company
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35
Journal
doi: 10.1086/683822
Self-control at work
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36
Journal
doi: 10.1093/qje/qjv020
Working over time: Dynamic inconsistency in real effort tasks
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37
RCT
doi: 10.1176/ajp.2006.163.11.1943
Facilitated psychiatric advance directives: A randomized trial of an intervention to foster advance treatment planning among persons with severe mental illness
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38
Journal
doi: 10.1162/003355301753265543
The power of suggestion: Inertia in 401(k) participation and savings behavior
Participation figures cited from the working-paper version: National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 7682, https://doi.org/10.3386/w7682
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39
Journal
doi: 10.1257/aer.96.3.694
Paying not to go to the gym
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40
Meta
doi: 10.1037/0033-2909.133.1.65
The nature of procrastination: A meta-analytic and theoretical review of quintessential self-regulatory failure
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41
Journal
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00611
Bedtime procrastination: Introducing a new area of procrastination
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42
Meta
doi: 10.1111/add.13535
Steep delay discounting and addictive behavior: A meta-analysis of continuous associations
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43
Review
doi: 10.1007/s10899-018-9777-8
A systematic review of land-based self-exclusion programs: Demographics, gambling behavior, gambling problems, mental symptoms, and mental health
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44
Journal
doi: 10.1257/aer.20210867
Digital addiction
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45
Meta
doi: 10.1073/pnas.2107346118
The effectiveness of nudging: A meta-analysis of choice architecture interventions across behavioral domains
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46
Journal
doi: 10.1073/pnas.2200300119
No evidence for nudging after adjusting for publication bias
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47
Journal
doi: 10.1177/0890117116661157
Association between monetary deposits and weight loss in online commitment contracts
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48
Journal
doi: 10.1073/pnas.1103170108
Using implementation intentions prompts to enhance influenza vaccination rates
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49
Journal
doi: 10.1287/mnsc.2014.1901
The fresh start effect: Temporal landmarks motivate aspirational behavior
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50
Journal
doi: 10.1086/380085
Save More Tomorrow: Using behavioral economics to increase employee saving
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51
Journal
doi: 10.1002/ejsp.674
How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world
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52
Journal
doi: 10.1177/0956797609359326
Do you have a voting plan? Implementation intentions, voter turnout, and organic plan making
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53
Meta
doi: 10.3390/healthcare12232488
Time to form a habit: A systematic review and meta-analysis of health behaviour habit formation and its determinants
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54
Journal
doi: 10.1287/mnsc.2013.1784
Holding the Hunger Games hostage at the gym: An evaluation of temptation bundling
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