Perceiving commitments: When we both know that you are counting on me

Can commitments be generated without promises or gestures conventionally interpreted as such? We hypothesized that people believe are in place when one agent has led a recipient to rely on her do something, even commissive speech act any action conventionalized such, and this is mutual knowledge. To probe this, we presented participants with online vignettes describing everyday situations which recipient's expectations were frustrated by one's behavior. Our results show moral judgments differed significantly according whether the reliance was mutually known, irrespective of verbally acknowledged.