We are pleased to announce that the ERC review panels have favorably reviewed Dr John Michael's proposal entitled: " An Integrative Framework for Modeling the Sense of Commitment". The ERC Starting Independent Research Grant from the European Research Council: Seventh Framework Ideas Programme (FP7) provides 1,4 million euros and will help John to continue his research on the highest possible level, and to achieve ground-breaking results. The project is expected to start in July 2016.
We warmly congratulate John on this success!
The phenomenon of commitment is a cornerstone of human social life. Commitments make individuals’ behavior predictable in the face of fluctuations in their desires and interests, thereby facilitating the planning and coordination of joint actions involving multiple agents. Moreover, commitments make people willing to perform actions that they would not otherwise perform. Despite the crucial importance of commitment for characteristically human forms of sociality, it is not well understood how people identify and assess the level of their own and others’ commitments. The SENSE OF COMMITMENT will develop a theoretical framework for research on commitment, and create a suite of experimental paradigms for testing predictions generated by the theoretical framework. By focusing on joint actions involving pairs of agents, it will illuminate the fundamental mechanisms underlying large-scale human social phenomena