The Sense of Commitment is an ERC funded project investigating our sense of commitment in everyday social interactions. We ask how and when people make commitments, honour them, and rely on others to honour theirs.

To address these questions, we combine theoretical research with carefully designed lab experiments at the University of Warwick and the Central European University in Budapest. In collaboration with the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa, we have applied our insights, helping to develop autonomous robots that participate in commitments with humans (e.g. in senior citizens’ homes, factory work and rescue operations). By focusing on joint actions involving pairs of agents, our research helps illuminate the fundamental mechanisms underlying large-scale human social phenomena.