Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

An agent decides against her preferences, if she considersan option x better than another option y but neverthe-less decides to do y. A central tenet of rational choi-ce theory states that individuals do not decide againsttheir preferences, whereby we find two kinds of potentialcounterexamples in the literature: akrasia, also known asweak-willed decisions, and decisions based on so-calleddeontic constraints such as obligations or commitments.While there is some empirical evidence that weak-willedchoices are a real phenomenon, leading scholars in phi-losophy of economics debate whether choices based oncommitments can be counter-preferential. As far as weknow, however, nobody so far has tried to settle this de-bate empirically. This paper contributes to both debatessince we present some empirical evidence that (i) akrasiacan also be strong-willed and (ii) choices made on the ba-sis of commitments can indeed be counter-preferential.We will conclude that people can decide against theirpreferences without being unreasonable.