Contemporary research on human evolution traces the ecological success of our species to sophisticated capacities for cooperation and culture (Richerson & Boyd, Reference Richerson and Boyd2005; Henrich, Reference Henrich2015) and a suite of underlying psychological mechanisms selected to increase the efficacy with which humans interact with and learn from each other (Chudek & Henrich, Reference Chudek and Henrich2011; Laland, Reference Laland2017; Mathew & Perreault, Reference Mathew and Perreault2015; Sterelny, Reference Sterelny2012). This indicates that many distinctive forms of human cognition are fundamentally social (Kelly & Hoburg, Reference Kelly and Hoburg2017).

Such capacities may be social even when they pretheoretically appear otherwise. For example, Mercier and Sperber (Reference Mercier and Sperber2011, Reference Mercier and Sperber2017) argue against an orthodox view according to which reasoning initially evolved to enable individuals to deliberate and make better decisions, and only afterward acquired social functions for, for example, facilitating interpersonal interactions and collective negotiations. Their “argumentative theory” offers an alternative picture, according to which reasoning is primarily social, and the mechanisms that underpin it initially evolved to perform the public functions of persuading others and assessing their attempts to persuade. Only once they emerged and established their social-oriented functions were those psychological mechanisms able to be turned back on the self, allowing reason to acquire the more private dimension that accompanied its new, interior, individual-oriented functions. Their theory also compels a shift from an individual to a socially-oriented evaluative perspective that reveals the mechanisms that guide reasoning as often performing their original public functions well, rather than merely being riddled with maladaptive biases causing them to do private reasoning poorly. Following Sterelny (Reference Sterelny2018), we will call this an instance of outside-in explanation.

Outside-in explanation is, if not widespread, becoming more common. Carruthers (Reference Carruthers2009, Reference Carruthers2011) argues that our capacity to know the contents of our own minds is, perhaps counterintuitively, parasitic on mechanisms that originally evolved to know the minds of others. Introspection is a derivative, private usage of mindreading machinery that is primarily other-oriented, then reflexively turned back on oneself. McAdams and colleagues (McAdams, Reference McAdams2018; McAdams & McLean, Reference McAdams and McLean2013; McLean, Pasupathi, & Pals, Reference McLean, Pasupathi and Pals2007) develop a similarly outside-in explanation of narrative identity. It sees an individual's creation and maintenance of their own narrative identity as a by-product of social mechanisms for mindreading, language, and storytelling. Others argue that features of human cognition like confirmation bias (Peters, Reference Peters2020) and over-imitation (Hoehl et al., Reference Hoehl, Keupp, Schleihauf, McGuigan, Buttelmann and Whiten2019) that look like design flaws from the perspective of individual rationality are actually adaptations selected to perform important social functions. Under headings such as “relational” and “dialogical,” philosophers from a range of backgrounds continue exploring outside-in-type explanations of gender (Haslanger, Reference Haslanger2000; Witt, Reference Witt2011), personal identity (Carr, Reference Carr2021; Lindemann, Reference Lindemann2014), and the collaborative character of human agency (Doris, Reference Doris2015) and autonomy (Stoljar, Reference Stoljar and Zalta2015).

Is resolve, as Ainslie depicts it, amenable to outside-in explanation? The prospects are promising (cf. Shea et al., Reference Shea, Boldt, Bang, Yeung, Heyes and Frith2014). Many of Ainslie's key ideas and theoretical resources – perspective taking, bargaining, prisoner's dilemmas, credibility, excuses – are most at home in discussions of sociality. Even mental time travel, foresight, and the general expansion of the time horizons to which human minds are sensitive has been linked to selection pressures generated by the demands of increasing social complexity (Donald, Reference Donald1991, 2006; Suddendorf & Corballis, Reference Suddendorf and Corballis2007).

Assuming this connection is not accidental, what might a more specific outside-in explanation of resolve look like? Here is one possible trajectory. The human species arrives and thrives on the strength of hypertrophied capacities for cooperation and culture, central to which are enhanced mechanisms for reputation tracking (Santos, Rankin, & Wedekind, Reference Santos, Rankin and Wedekind2011), social prediction (Frith & Frith, Reference Frith and Frith2006), and normative forms of conformity and enforcement (Kelly & Setman, Reference Kelly, Setman and Zalta2020; Wu, Balliet, Peperkoorn, Romano, & Lange, Reference Wu, Balliet, Peperkoorn, Romano and Lange2019). These initially outward-oriented social mechanisms – some of which may themselves have culturally evolved and been socially acquired (Heyes, Reference Heyes2018) – are reoriented inward and turned back onto oneself, repurposed to help solve personal intertemporal dilemmas. When an individual learns the trick, they become capable of the self-directed and self-regulating (cf. McGeer & Pettit, Reference McGeer and Pettit2002) form of prediction and enforcement Ainslie calls resolve.

Ainslie notes the affinity with oath taking (21), another manifestly social practice. Resolve and its (hypothesized) transition from outer to inner might be further illuminated by considering its similarities to avowal (cf. Kelly, Reference Kelly, Vargas and Dorisforthcoming). This suggestion sees the dynamics of resolve as a mostly private, internalized mimicking of dynamics whose original form is found in public acts of endorsement. An individual can publicly affirm a norm they have adopted, or announce to others an intention to behave in a certain way, as a means to help themselves abide by it. With such acts of social signaling, they attempt (whether or not they explicitly understand what they are doing in these terms (21)) to realign others' expectations of them and thereby summon a special kind of social influence onto themselves. More specifically, they create new reputational stakes that are tied to the credibility and status they have among people whose good opinion they value or need.

Public avowal can thus reorganize incentives, much like resolve does on Ainslie's account. With avowal, however, an individual attempts to manage their own behavior by actually changing something external to their own mind, namely the kind of person others see them as, and the expectations others have of how they will act. In succeeding to change those expectations, they change their actual incentives, thereby exerting a socially-directed form of ecological control over their own behavior (Clark, Reference Clark, Spurrett, Ross, Kincaid and Stephens2007; Holroyd & Kelly, Reference Holroyd, Kelly, Masala and Webber2016). With resolve, a person changes not the external social world but their own internal perspective, broadening the incentives taken into consideration and bundling them in ways that change how they bear on an immediate choice via how that choice bears on their ability to continue seeing themself as the kind of person they want to be. More of the process is internal, but the strategy and elements are suggestively similar.

Remaining steadfast and resolute, especially in the face of temptation, is often an intensely personal, internal struggle. Nevertheless, we think it plausible that the inner resources one draws on, both to make resolutions and to abide by them, have an external, social provenance.