Promises and promise keeping play an important role in our daily life as well as in various economic situations, but maybe not all promises are voluntary and spontaneous. We examine experimentally the impact of elicited promises on trust and cooperation using the trust game. We find that, in general, elicited promises have no significant influence on the trust and trustworthy behavior. When subjects are classified into different social preference types, we find that promises can increase the amount returned by selfish types and decrease the amount returned by reciprocal types. Moreover, we analyze promise keeping and its influence factors. The results show that elicited promises are not very credible. When we exclude the observations where trustees receive nothing, about 41% of trustees break their promises. Promise keeping is also relevant to subjects’ social preferences.

承诺和遵守诺言在我们的日常生活以及各种经济情况中发挥着重要作用，但也许并非所有的承诺都是自愿和自发的。我们使用信任游戏实验性地检查了引发的承诺对信任和合作的影响。我们发现，一般来说，引出承诺对信任和值得信赖的行为没有显着影响。当受试者被归入不同的社会偏好类型时，我们发现承诺可以增加自私类型的回报量，减少互惠类型的回报量。此外，我们分析了守信及其影响因素。结果表明，引出的承诺不是很可信。当我们排除受托人一无所获的观察结果时，大约 41% 的受托人违背了他们的承诺。