PhronesisThe capacity to make and honour commitments is a foundational feature of a trustworthy agent. In its calibrated form — Calibrated Trustworthy Commitment, denoted S^0_ CTC — the person accurately assesses their future capacity before agreeing, commits selectively to what they can reliably deliver, and builds a track record that sustains relational and professional trust over time.
Chronic overpromising is formally reconceptualised here within the Displacement Framework as a wrong attractor W_ COP in the landscape of commitment behaviour: a local energy minimum characterised by systematic commitment-inflation, in which the agent's announced obligations C(t) chronically exceed their delivery capacity D(t), and the resulting delivery deficit (t) = C(t) - D(t) > 0 erodes trust T(t) in a manner that accumulates irreversibly across interaction episodes.
The paper formalises the Overpromiser's Paradox: chronic overpromising is architected to produce immediate approval, connection, and relational warmth, yet systematically generates the precise relational damage — eroded trust, disappointed counterparties, damaged reputation — that it was designed to prevent. Three sustaining mechanisms are identified and formally characterised: (1) present-moment approval addiction, in which saying yes produces an immediate reward signal that temporally discounts the future cost of non-delivery, making the moment of promising experientially decoupled from the moment of reckoning; (2) optimism bias about future capacity, in which the planning fallacy and hot-cold empathy gap cause the agent to systematically underestimate how constrained their future self will be when delivery is due; and (3) generosity-as-identity, in which the self-concept of being a helpful, agreeable, generous person is maintained by agreement and threatened by refusal, making every no a self-betrayal rather than a calibration.
Nine propositions formalise these mechanisms, the dynamics of the delivery-deficit basin, the trust-erosion accumulation function, the structural paradox of approval-seeking strategies, and the return paths through capacity-honest assessment, selective commitment, and track-record repair. The paper draws on Kahneman and Tversky's planning fallacy, Sharot's optimism bias, Loewenstein's hot-cold empathy gap, Ariely's predictably irrational framework, Cialdini's commitment and consistency research, Baumeister's self-regulation depletion, and temporal discounting models to ground the formal treatment in established empirical literature.