An Affirmation Puzzle
When you take out a loan, you promise to pay it back, and when you get married, you make wedding vows. Both types of promises are understood as continuing to bind you until you explicitly repudiate them. That is, if you don’t default on your loans, or ask for a divorce, you implicitly continue to promise to pay your loan or stay married.
What if we required people to explicitly affirm once a year that they intend keep paying back their loan, or to continue with their marriage, interpreting a refuse to do so as a declaration of intent to default or divorce? The signal space is still the same: there’s only two possible signals, one that means stay committed and the other that means break the commitment. So in game theory terms it is exactly the same game.
Even so, people seem to believe that behavior would change under the explicit annual re-affirmation regime, to less commitment. 30% of those who have an opinion say fewer loans would be repaid, and at a ten to one ratio, poll respondents oppose explicit annual reaffirmation of marriage, with the main argument given being that more marriages would end.
At five to one ratios, respondents also oppose requiring annual affirmation of allegiance to their nation, or to humanity as a whole, apparently also expecting such regimes to reduce rates of allegiance.
Now this could make sense if people often just forgot to consider whether to default or divorce under the current regime, but would not similarly forget under an explicit affirmation regime. But I find it hard to believe we are that forgetful.
Hmm...I've been watching your TwiX quizzes ...
I think you're doing the "alien looking in" thing without really checking the lived experience.
There is a different human emotional response and very different behavior betwee:
(A) I commit for the long term to do this thing (and I admit to being a bit of a bad person/failure if I don't)
vs.
(B) I check if I want to continue each year.
In the case of consent being assumed, and socially pressured, you get different results than if attention is re-directed annually to "do you wish to continue consenting"
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The first approach is better for encouraging long-term consistency in human animals.
You have created a new game. Every argument now becomes wait untill affirmation day. You have raised the salience of the defect choice. It was always there, but obscured. It's like gambling is legal if you go to vegas. New law you must now go to vegas once a year. In which case does the average person gamble more? It used to be easy to avoid gambling, now I have to decide not to gamble each year. You have made both choices have even friction. Whereas before the cooperate choice had status quo bias on its side. There is alien looking in, and I'm bad at itterated games, this seems to be case of the latter. Let's play poker.