ArticleHuman nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.)2026
Institutionalised Commitment and Its Origins.
Article in Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.), 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Abstract
Schelling (1960) and Frank (1988) famously offered commitment as an explanation of the stability of human cooperation in the face of incentives to cheat. Reputationally-enforced commitments were part of the explanation for human cooperation for much of our history (Khan, 2024, 2025). In this article, I consider the origins and effects of institutionalised commitments. These are commitments which are contractually enforced by third parties, rather than only reputationally enforced. I discuss how these commitment offer advantages for securing cooperation over and above our previous forms of commitment. I then offer an account of their potential origins. I suggest that a change in our cooperative landscape and organisational structure occurring in the Neolithic -- in particular, the rise of agricultural economies and hierarchical society -- opened the door to a new means of enforcement for commitments, affecting the success of our cooperative practices.
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