Human motivations sometimes change. A travel lover stops flying to distant places in the face of climate change. A politician begins to seek power instead of justice. Sometimes changing preferences seems to be a good thing; at other times, it appears regrettable. How we evaluate such changes is an important question. Of equal importance, we must understand how preference change comes about in the first place. Why do one person’s preferences change in response to a given situation when the preferences of another person – in a similar situation – do not? When is it rational to change one’s preferences? Despite its strengths, standard decision theory cannot answer these questions. That is, it cannot describe fundamental preference changes. Moreover, emerging new theoretical models of preference change are still scarce and remain underdeveloped. In particular, existing approaches often overlook the fact that some preferences are more resistant to change—or “stickier”—than others. In this paper, we propose a commitment-based theory of preference change. This theory explains how and why certain preferences endure while others shift when confronted with experiences.