Reneging Prosocially
By: Duncan A Sabien
Tags: Relationships, Communication, Lesswrong, Rationality, Sociology

How to renege in a prosocial manner

A lot of this may seem painstakingly obvious, but I want to write it all out anyway, since (in my experience) something like 99% of people fail to reliably avoid all of the pitfalls.

0. Actually notice agreements; actually notice reneging.

This deserves an entire series of essays on its own; please don’t take the lack of words spilled here as lack of import. All sorts of things go wrong when one person doesn’t notice that they’ve said words which would reasonably cause someone else to start shifting their resources; all sorts of things go wrong when one person starts acting as if something has been agreed to when it hasn’t. This is one of the reasons why I absolutely hate the fact that, when someone uses Google to invite me to an event, me clicking a button that says “maybe” results in them receiving a notification that I have “tentatively accepted.”

1. Loop the renegee in as soon as possible.

It’s well-known that most humans have a strong tendency to postpone bad news, even when the postponement will clearly make things worse [citation needed]. If you and I have established an agreement and I’m thinking of reneging, then every hour that I avoid having to put myself through an awkward conversation, you are burning more resources under false assumptions and losing runway for reorienting.

Rapidly informing you stems the flow of resource investment, capping your losses. It leaves you with the maximum time to prepare for the blow of losing the previously-expected value, and/or to try to change your own planning to recapture that value in some other fashion.

On the social level, you’re already making a Bayesian update against plans being the-sort-of-thing-that-works; rapidly informing you prevents you from having to make a second, separate update about whether information that could be valuable to you will in fact find its way to you via social channels. Similarly, you’re already making an update about whether I am a reliable predictor of my own future actions; rapidly informing you prevents you from having to make a separate update about something like my willingness to impose costs on you for my own benefit, or how much you can count on me to funnel relevant information to you when I have it (including the skill of noticing in the first place that you would probably consider the information to be relevant).

2. Postpone the renege.

It’s often astonishing to me what sorts of wildly dangerous shenanigans people will pull in traffic — crossing four lanes to get to an exit that’s 100 meters up the road, or going in reverse to get out of a turn lane — just to avoid a small delay from carrying on a little further and then turning around. It seems to me to be an example of hyperbolic discounting gone wild, as if those drivers are so tunnel-visioned on the “correct” path that they don’t even consider whether risking life and limb is actually worth it.

There’s an analogous effect that I see in many agreement/renege situations. Certainly there are some people who should straightforwardly ignore this point (because they have the opposite problem of never prioritizing their own needs), but most people, in my experience, jump too quickly to the option of breaking their agreements, to the detriment of the social fabric.

If I loan you an item ostensibly for a month, and regret it, I will do significantly less damage asking you to return it in a week than asking you to return it immediately.

If I’ve admitted you to my exclusive club and on reflection don’t think it’s working out, I will do significantly less damage if I let you taper off your participation than if I just instantly ban you (especially if there’s not some other critical damage occurring to the people who were there first).

It’s like severance packages, or alimony—a norm of delaying the moment at which the agreement breaks off (with notice; if this doesn’t come along with informing them as soon as possible then you’re just tying their shoelaces together) gives people time to reorient and replan and reshuffle their resources while living in the world where all the scaffolding is still scaffolding.

This almost always comes with costs to the reneger, but in some ways, that’s the point. You can either renege immediately, as soon as you realize that’s a more convenient plan, and leave the renegee to pay all of the costs, or you can do your best to split the costs between you—in this case, by living in the now-acknowledged-to-be-sub-optimal universe a little while longer, while the other person reorients.

For some reason, many people seem to get so caught up in the “aaaaahhhhfixitfixitfixit” panic that they forget that triaging a situation doesn’t always mean straightforwardly cutting your losses ASAP.

3. Recalibrate, validate, and (sometimes) recommit.

This one comes up for me most often with very small commitments (such as “I’ll spend an hour reading over this this weekend” or “I’ll meet you for dinner on Friday” or “I know I said I’d see the movie with you, but Joe’s coming and you and Joe are incompatible, so…uh…”).

It’s important, when such small predictions go wrong, to first learn the lesson. If I’ve had to cancel on you more than once for something on this order of magnitude, that’s a sign that I am doing something wrong. And that mistake isn’t just affecting me; it’s radiating outward and imposing costs on the people around me.

So the first step is to do some introspection, and see if I can’t dethread the problem. Perhaps I’m agreeing to things too quickly, or not giving myself enough time to rest, or failing to acknowledge that no, it’s not just a bad week, this is just the new normal, at least for this month or this year.

If I can’t be confident that I’ve nailed the problem down, the next step is simply to increase my error bars. Make fewer commitments in general, through a top-down conscious effort, or make each individual commitment looser, giving people more notice that I might bail or flake.

Separate from all of that, I give my social partner the bad news, and validate the damage. It’s important to explicitly acknowledge that I told them one thing and am doing another, and that I recognize the degree to which this imposes costs (and forces them to make a negative update on my reliability).

What follows then is either a cutting-of-losses with accompanying make-it-up-to-you efforts (more on that below), or a concrete and credible commitment that includes increased prioritization. As the saying goes, “if they wanted to, they would.” When looking at the world from the black box perspective, I’m choosing whether to let them solidify a prediction that I won’t, or to try to overcome evidence that I’ve given them with stronger evidence in the other direction.

So at that point, I’ll say something like “…and I really will be there this Friday; this is my top priority, where I admit before I was putting [work/rest/hobby/ other person] ahead of you.” And then I’ll make it happen.

4. Make the other person whole.

“Make whole” is a technical, legal term that I am probably misusing somewhat, but I like it because it solidly captures the feel of the thing.

If I renege on you, I’ve caused you to lose your invested value, and likely your expected value as well, so that I can avoid losing value myself. One way for me to salvage the social utility that I’m putting at risk (your faith, my reputation, the fabric in general) is to do my best to make you whole—to cover the losses you’ve suffered, to the best of my ability, returning you to the state you were in prior to our agreement.

One place where this goes astray is that the reneger and the renegee frequently estimate the debt differently (and, depressingly, in perfect accordance with what you’d expect if both people were allowing their incentives to bias them). My personal stance is that things will go better in the aggregate if the reneger adopts a policy of trusting the renegee to accurately report the types and magnitudes of damage, but thereafter using their own judgment to determine appropriate action in response. This is in line with the game design advice “trust your audience to identify flaws, but don’t trust them to propose solutions,” and it avoids the problem of putting the injurer in charge of diagnosing how bad the injury is.

(Two wrinkles in this: if the renegee later claims that the recompense was insufficient, I do think you ought to believe them, as a matter of policy—but that doesn’t always mean providing additional value, because otherwise you open yourself up to being mugged or extorted by something like deliberate catastrophizing. More on what to do in that situation later.)

Once again, I don’t have room to spend a proportionate amount words on this section. Suffice it to say that both figuring out what value has been lost, and figuring out how to repay it, are often difficult and extremely complicated tasks, but I generally think they’re worth an actual effort.

5. Put the remaining damage on your account.

This is the last piece of advice, but really it’s the heart and soul of the recommendation. This is, largely, how one goes about “taking on the costs of reneging.”

In essence, the idea is to put as few barriers between yourself and social consequence as possible. As sort of hinted at in the language of recommitment above, I try my best to be open and candid about my prediction of their prediction of my future behavior.

I’ve proven myself to be flaky? I acknowledge that there is justification for that update, and that indeed I expect people to be correspondingly wary or unwilling to trust my promises in the future, and that I hold no bitterness about this because the failing was indeed mine.

I’ve imposed costs on you, for what ultimately proved to be my own benefit? I admit that I’ve done it, and honestly explain whether it was done out of selfishness or carelessness or insufficiently-guarded-against accident. If I have failed to make it up to you according to your standard, I admit that, too. I accept the reputational hit that comes with my actions, and do not kick off a round of escalating revenge.

Note that this is not the same as hitting myself so they won’t hit me. Most of us have had the experience at one time or another of being on the receiving end of some big, ostentatious, self-flagellating apology, and feeling somewhat cheated about that, too, because to onlookers it appears that the debt has been paid and any continued grudge on your part looks uncharitable and thus there’s no way to pursue further justice.

Instead, this is more straightforward and matter-of-fact. It’s an attempt to be open, not an attempt to pre-empt. It’s an explicit willingness to validate and accept the consequences of what’s happened, in the game of black boxes interfacing with each other, separate from any claims about whether our actions were justified or well-intentioned or whatever. It’s a simple acknowledgement that causes have effects, and a taking of responsibility for the causes which were under my nominal control.

Sometimes, this is all you can do. Sometimes you can’t inform, and you can’t postpone, and you can’t retry, and you can’t make whole, and all you have left is to say “I know that I did this to you, and that it was shitty.”

But it’s absolutely crucial that you do at least that, if you can. That you do so openly, and publicly, taking your lumps where everyone who might want to update on this knowledge gets to see. That you don’t hide the outputs of your black box, so that others’ future predictions of you will skew more positively than they ought. Another way to say this is that in order to renege prosocially, you must stay in contact with, and subject to, the social web. The more you insulate yourself from its vibrations, the less you can credibly claim that its maintenance was important to you.