The Developmental Origins of Commitment

As adults, we are quite proficient in generating commitments, and in identifying, keeping track of, and responding appropriately to our own and others’ commitments. This proficiency is fundamentally important for uniquely human forms of sociality. By illuminating the cognitive processes underpinning commitments, we may therefore gain insight into the ways in which human cognition is unique, and into the ways in which it is shared with other species. In pursuing this aim, one valuable strategy is to investigate the emergence of an understanding of commitment in ontogeny, i.e. to isolate distinct components of this proficiency as they emerge, and to learn how they relate to each other, which are the most basic, etc. Our aim in this paper is to contribute to this project by articulating a theoretical framework to structure research on the emergence of an understanding of commitment in childhood.