What experimental game theorists may have demonstrated is not that people are systematically irrational but that human rationality is heavily scaffolded. Remove the scaffolding, and we do not do very well. People are able to get on because they “offload” an enormous amount of practical reasoning onto their environment. As a result, when they are put in novel or unfamiliar environments, they perform very poorly, even on apparently simple tasks. -/- This observation is supported by recent empirically informed shifts in (...) philosophy of mind toward a view of cognition as (to cite the current slogan) “embodied, embedded, enactive, extended.” Andy Clark and others have made a very plausible case for the idea that a proper assessment of human cognitive competence must include environmental components. To limit our attention to what lies within the skin-skull boundary is, in effect, to miss the big story on human rationality. Insofar as we are rational, it is often because of our ingenuity at developing “work-arounds” to the glitches in the fast-and-frugal heuristic problem-solving capabilities that natural selection has equipped us with. And these work-arounds often involve a detour through the environment (so-called offloading of cognitive burdens). -/- When it comes to practical rationality, things are no different. Yet in many discussions of “the will,” there is still a tendency to put too much emphasis on what goes on inside the agent’s head. Our objective in this chapter is to articulate this conception of “the extended will” more clearly, using the strategies that people employ to overcome procrastination for the central set of examples. Procrastination, in our view, constitutes a particular type of self-control problem, one that is particularly amenable to philosophical reflection, not only because of the high volume of psychological research on the subject but also because of the large quantity of “self-help” literature in circulationa literature that provides an invaluable perspective on the everyday strategies that people use in order to defeat (or, better yet, circumvent) this type of self-defeating behavior pattern. In general, what we find is that the internalist bias that permeates discussions of the will gives rise to a set of practical recommendations that overemphasize changing the way one thinks about a task, while ignoring the much richer set of strategies that are available in the realm of environmental scaffolding. In the concluding section, we highlight some of the policy implications of this, particularly regarding social trends involving the dismantling of support structures. (shrink)

Procrastination is frustrating. Because the procrastinator's frustration is self-imposed, procrastination can also be quite puzzling. I consider attempts at explaining, or explaining away, what appear to be genuine cases of procrastination. According to the position that I propose and defend, genuine procrastination exists and is supported by preference loops, which can be either stable or evanescent.

This study investigates the impact of stress, anxiety, and amotivation on procrastination and academic dishonesty among undergraduate business students. It further explores how amotivation and procrastination mediate the relationships between negative emotions—specifically stress and anxiety—and academic dishonesty. Adopting a cross-sectional survey design, data were collected from 179 undergraduate students enrolled in private universities in Malaysia using a snowball sampling method. The data were analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling. The results indicate that stress and anxiety significantly (...) predict both amotivation and procrastination. Procrastination, in turn, has a notable effect on academic dishonesty. Amotivation fully mediates the relationship between stress, anxiety, and academic dishonesty, and partially mediates the relationship between stress, anxiety, and procrastination. This study uniquely integrates emotion regulation theory and temporal motivation theory to examine the roles of stress, anxiety, and amotivation as antecedents of procrastination, and ultimately academic dishonesty—an area that has received limited attention in prior research. The identified chain of relationship—spanning stress, anxiety, amotivation, procrastination, and academic dishonesty—offers novel insights into the dynamics of academic misconduct. By emphasizing the mediating roles of amotivation and procrastination, this study provides practical recommendations for mitigating academic dishonesty and promoting academic integrity among students. (shrink)

Procrastination as putting off until tomorrow what one had intended to do today is well-known tendency in everyday life. In an attempt to understand the character of procrastination in different life-domains, a large body of research has been accumulated over the last decades. This article was aimed to evaluate a specific decisional procrastination of school-to-work transition (SWT) that is treated as maturity postponement. Two studies are reported examining SWT procrastination defined as career indecision among Polish students (...) graduating universities. In Study 1 (N=366), attitudinal and identity statuses were analyzed as correlates of career procrastination. A path analysis conducted for the model, which was aimed to explain the influence of career self-efficacy and occupational commitment on career indecision (dependent variable), revealed its very good fitness (RMSEA=.000). Those two independent variables explain 10% of career indecision variance. Stepwise multiple regression analyses conducted to ascertain relationship of five identity statuses (Brzezińska, Piotrowski, 2010) to procrastination measure (career indecision) showed that Commitment Making and Ruminative Exploration are strongest predictor variables. In study 2 (N=157), the stepwise multiple regression analyses conducted to ascertain the independent relationship of each of Big Five personality factor revealed that Neuroticism and Extraversion accounts of the most of explained variance of school-to-work transition procrastination. (shrink)

Procrastination is addressed from the perspective of the psychology of goals, looking at how people may procrastinate with respect to the typical tasks people need to tackle in pursuit of goals. Moreover, a strategy to overcome such procrastination is suggested, namely, the formation of specific _if-then_ plans (implementation intentions): when, where, and how one intends to initiate a goal-directed action that one is at risk of putting off. After explaining how implementation-intention effects come about and examining several moderators (...) that might limit their effectiveness, research on implementation intentions relevant to the problem of procrastination is discussed, including evidence from critical populations and contexts. Finally, interventions to improve motivation are suggested as a way of enhancing the effectiveness of implementation. (shrink)

Procrastination results from a temporary preference to defer costs and is thus a species of impulse. Whereas many impulses entail an immediate thrill, suggesting at first glance that conditioned reward could be the mechanism of impulsiveness, procrastination can win out just because the prospect of effort or deprivation feels better if deferred. This is a basic example of the overvaluation of an imminent option just because its payoff comes before its cost, implying hyperbolic discounting of prospective experience. Many (...) impulses can be controlled by interpreting current behavior as a test of the credibility of future intentions—“If not now, when?” an example of intertemporal bargaining, arguably the mechanism of willpower. However, much procrastination involves deferring the less rewarding components of mental activities, including the fallow periods that restore capacity for emotional reward. The pervasiveness and lack of boundaries that characterize this kind of procrastination limit the capability of willpower to control it. (shrink)

Procrastination refers to voluntarily postponing an intended course of action despite expecting to be worse off for this delay, and students are considered to be especially negatively affected. According to estimates in the literature, at least half of the students believe procrastination impacts their academic achievements and well-being. As of yet, evidence-based ideas on how to differentiate severe from less severe cases of procrastination in this population do not exist, but are important in order to identify those (...) students in need of support. The current study recruited participants from different universities in Sweden to participate in an anonymous online survey investigating self-rated levels of procrastination, impulsivity, perfectionism, anxiety, depression, stress, and quality of life. Furthermore, diagnostic criteria for pathological delay as well as self-report items and open-ended questions were used to determine the severity of their procrastination and its associated physical and psychological issues. In total, 732 participants completed the survey. A median-split on the Pure Procrastination Scale and the responses to the PDC were used to differentiate two groups; “less severe procrastination”, and “severe procrastination”. For participants in the severe group, 96–97% considered procrastination to a problem, compared to 42–48% in the less severe group. The two groups also differed with regard to considering seeking help for procrastination, 35–38% compared to 5–7%. Participants in the severe group also reported more problems of procrastination in different life domains, greater symptoms of psychological issues, and lower quality of life. A thematic analysis of the responses on what physical issues were related to procrastination revealed that these were characterized by stress and anxiety, e.g., tension, pain, and sleep and rest, while the psychological issues were related to stress and anxiety, but also depression, e.g., self-criticism, remorse, and self-esteem. The current study recommends the PPS to be used as an initial screening tool, while the PDC can more accurately determine the severity level of procrastination for a specific individual. (shrink)

This chapter develops a model of repeated procrastination that can be used to examine the efficacy of legal rules. The model yields the following counterintuitive result: if the immediate costs of committing a crime are sufficiently great, a subset of people who, from a long-term perspective, believe that violating the law is economically worthwhile will nonetheless repeatedly procrastinate about following through. This phenomenon of “time-inconsistent obedience” helps explain an important puzzle in criminal law: the fact that people routinely obey (...) the law even though the benefits of misconduct greatly exceed the expected sanctions. The chapter also argues that nonbenevolent lawmakers can engage in “stealth regulation” by exploiting people’s propensity to procrastinate. For example, under the model, even relatively low hurdles for getting abortions, such as a 24-hour waiting period, can have a disproportionate impact in reducing the number of abortions. (shrink)

Economists, psychologists, and philosophers have written extensively on the causes of procrastination. While their work helps us understand why people procrastinate, it does not explain how they can resist the urge to procrastinate. This chapter argues that this is a result of a refusal to acknowledge a faculty of choice, or a will, separate from preferences or desires, which can overwhelm their pull. Based on the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant, as well as contemporary work in volitionism, this chapter (...) applies to procrastination a Kantian-economic model of decision making that emphasizes strength of character and willpower, which can serve as alternatives to the coping strategies offered elsewhere in the literature. (shrink)

Redish et al. suggest that their failures-in-decision-making framework for understanding addiction can also contribute to improving our understanding of a variety of psychiatric disorders. In the spirit of reflecting on the significance and scope of their research, I briefly develop the idea that their framework can also contribute to improving our understanding of the pervasive problem of procrastination.

This chapter defends an aspect of the standard view that procrastination is doing things later in time than you should and does so by accounting for normative aspects of time discounting and preference reversals as a result of time’s passing. The possible wrongness of the procrastination-relevant preference reversals is traced to fundamental issues about rationality and particularly about the consistency of preferences, both at one time and over time. The wrongness is related to the wrongness of preference inconsistency. (...) The chapter, in dealing with these normative questions, also addresses some issues about internal and external reasons, as this is needed to account for the normative rightness of consistency. (shrink)

Our thesis concerns how practical reasoning normally works, and it identifies a problem with a widely shared characterization of it. In this paper, we argue that many ordinary cases of action selection, and not just exceptions involving addiction or weakness of will, exhibit an interesting form of irrationality that stems from a drive to avoid effortfulness. Focusing on two case studies, we argue that the initiation of pointless actions, and procrastination regarding well-justified actions, are often explicable by reference to (...) effort avoidance as opposed to the agent’s explicit judgments or desires. This is so because practical reasoning is sensitive to effortfulness, and influenced by a drive to avoid effortfulness, and this very avoidance is often askew from standard inputs to practical reasoning (such as desires, beliefs, goals, and intentions). Effort avoidance thus plays a powerful and hitherto unnoticed role in many ordinary cases of action selection. As we explain, effort avoidance works subtly, by negatively affectively coloring effortful action options, and silently, without revealing effort anticipation as the source of this coloring. In so doing, effort avoidance can undermine the agent’s control over behavior by undermining the control they exercise in practical reasoning. Still, in some cases agents can bring feelings related to effortfulness into focal awareness, rendering better control over practical reasoning possible. Control is within our reach. It just happens not to be the norm in the way that standard philosophy of action would have us believe. (shrink)

Conclusions: Psychological treatments seem to have small benefits on procrastination, but the studies displayed significant between-study variation. Meanwhile, CBT was associated with a moderate benefit, but consisted of only three studies. Recommendations for future research are provided, including the use of more valid and reliable outcomes and a screening interview at intake.

Philosophers often give procrastination an anemic description—a preference, a confl ict, a case of irrationality. Presumably, this is done in order to make it susceptible to analysis. But if one makes use of ethical theory, particularly one with an accompanying account of moral psychology, no arid depiction of procrastination is necessary. An ethical theory that is robust enough—such as traditional virtue ethics—can meet procrastination head on, unhindered by its complex emotionality and opaque intentionality. It can then place (...) it alongside similarly complex behavior, comparing and contrasting until we have some account of the darker alleyways of our nature and the limits of our self-control.That the term vice is out of favor gives us no reason to deny that procrastination is a moral phenomenon. (shrink)

As common experience confirms, procrastination seems not only possible, but widespread. However, procrastination should not be taken for granted. Often, the procrastinator harms herself knowingly. It thus clearly seems that such a person lacks the self-concern that usually characterises us. After having spelled out what procrastination is, and having explored its main varieties, I consider the relation between procrastination and risk-taking. After this, I discuss the implications of this phenomenon for the debates about personal identity. The (...) upshot, I argue, is that reductionist accounts, according to which identity is a matter of psychological continuity, are in a better position as might have been thought. (shrink)

The aim of this chapter is to understand more precisely what kind of irrationality involved in procrastination. The chapter argues that in order to understand the irrationality of procrastination one needs to understand the possibility and the nature of what I call “top-down independent” policies and long-term actions. A policy or long-term action) is top-down independent if it is possible to act irrationally relative to the adoption of the policy without ever engaging in a momentary action that is (...) per se irrational. involved in procrastination one needs to It argues that procrastination is one of the corresponding vices of an overlooked virtue; namely, “practical judgment.” On this account, procrastination turns out to be a failure of instrumental rationality that can be so characterized without assuming the correctness of any further norms of practical rationality. Thus this account of procrastination also constitutes an important objection to Christine Korsgaard’s claim that a purely instrumental conception of rationality is incoherent. (shrink)

Procrastination is a chronic and widespread problem; however, emerging work raises questions regarding the strength of the relationship between self-reported procrastination and behavioral measures of task engagement. This study assessed the internal reliability, concurrent validity, predictive validity, and psychometric properties of 10 self-report procrastination assessments using responses collected from 242 students. Participants’ scores on each self-report instrument were compared to each other using correlations and cluster analysis. Lasso estimation was used to test the self-report scores’ ability to (...) predict two behavioral measures of delay (days to study completion; pacing style). The self-report instruments exhibited strong internal reliability and moderate levels of concurrent validity. Some self-report measures were predictive of days to study completion. No self-report measures were predictive of deadline action pacing, the pacing style most commonly associated with procrastination. Many of the self-report measures of procrastination exhibited poor fit. These results suggest that researchers should exercise caution in selecting self-report measures and that further study is necessary to determine the factors that drive misalignment between self-reports and behavioral measures of delay. (shrink)

How is what an agent ought to do at time t related to what they ought to do over a period of time that includes t? I revisit an example that sheds light on this question, taking account of issues to do with the agent's intentions and the distinction between subjective and objective obligation.

ABSTRACT Confinement is an experiment in procrastination. It used to be a vice, close to acedia, but we now take it as irrational. But it's not clearly so. Procrastination is indeed vicious when a philosopher delays permanently explaining what his theses are. Derrida is a case in point.

PurposeThe COVID-19 pandemic that began in 2019 has had a significant impact on people’s learning and their lives, including a significant increase in the incidence of academic procrastination and negative emotions. The topic of how negative emotions influences academic procrastination has been long debated, and previous research has revealed a significant relationship between the two. The purpose of this study was to further investigate the mediating and buffering effects of online-shopping addiction on academic procrastination and negative emotions.MethodsThe (...) researchers conducted a correlation analysis followed by a mediation analysis and developed a mediation model. The study used stratified sampling and an online questionnaire as the data collection method. In this study, first, five freshmen students at vocational and technical colleges in Guangdong Province, China, were called to distribute the questionnaire. Second, after communicating with them individually, first-year students of Guangdong origin were selected as participants. Finally, 423 freshman students participated by completing the questionnaire. The questionnaire consisted of 4 parts: demographic information, an online-shopping-addiction scale, an academic-procrastination scale and a negative-emotions scale. A total of 423 students, 118 males and 305 females from 10 vocational and technical colleges in Guangdong were surveyed. SPSS 25.0 was used to process and analyze the data. The data collected were self-reported.ResultsThe results showed that: first, academic procrastination was significantly and positively associated with online-shopping addiction. Second, academic procrastination was significantly and positively associated with negative emotions. Third, online-shopping addiction was significantly and positively associated with negative emotions. In addition, academic procrastination had a significant positive predictive effect on online-shopping addiction. Online-shopping addiction had a significant positive predictive effect on negative emotions.ConclusionThis study explored the relationship between students’ academic procrastination, negative emotions, and online-shopping addiction during the COVID-19 pandemic. The results indicated that students’ level of academic procrastination positively influenced their level of online-shopping addiction and negative emotions, and their level of online-shopping addiction increased their negative emotions. In addition, there was a mediating effect between the degree of participants’ online-shopping addiction and their degree of academic procrastination and negative emotions during the pandemic. In other words, with the mediating effect of online-shopping addiction, the higher the level of a participant’s academic procrastination, the more likely that the participant would have a high score for negative emotions. (shrink)

The special concern we have for our future selves is often seen as making for a problem for psychological continuity theories, such as Derek Parfit's. On the basis of an account of the various kinds of procrastination, and of the ways imprudent procrastination involves harm to future selves, the paper argues that procrastinators often impose an uncompensated burden on their future selves, something that is best explained by a lack of concern for their future selves. Given this, the (...) objections to psychological continuity theories based on the idea of a special concern for our future selves are in serious trouble. (shrink)

This paper focuses on a puzzling but familiar strategy for coping with procrastination that has not yet been analyzed in the literature on that topic. The strategy involves leveraging control. In employing the strategy, we take advantage of the possibility that poor self-control can be a local trait rather than a robust character trait.

Aims: Studies have shown the predictive effects of procrastination and self-regulation on wellbeing. However, little is known about the interactive effect between procrastination and self-regulation. This study explores whether self-regulation moderates the link between procrastination and wellbeing among British and Chinese young adults.Methods: This study adopted self-reported questionnaire survey among two hundred and sixty-five British and four hundred and seventy-five Chinese participants. SPSS and AMOS were used to test the moderation effect. Multi-group path analysis was used to (...) compare the two countries.Results: Data analysis shows that self-regulation was a significant moderator of the relationship between procrastination and life satisfaction in the Chinese sample but not in the British sample. Procrastination predicted low life satisfaction only among the Chinese students with low self-regulation.Discussion: This study indicates that the effects of procrastination on wellbeing could be changed at different levels of self-regulation. Cultural difference can be an important factor when investigating procrastination and its impacts. (shrink)

Recent studies have indicated that trait procrastination as a personality factor could lead to mobile phone addiction, however little is known about the mediating and moderating mechanisms underlying this process. The current study investigated the mediating role of stress in the relationship between trait procrastination and mobile phone addiction, and whether the mediating effect was moderated by gender. A sample including 1,004 Chinese college students completed measurements of trait procrastination, stress, mobile phone addiction, and demographic information. The (...) results showed that trait procrastination was positively related to college students’ mobile phone addiction. Mediation analyses revealed that this relationship was partially mediated by stress. Moderated mediation further indicated that the path between trait procrastination and stress was stronger for male students compared with female students. These findings broadened our knowledge of the underlying mechanisms between trait procrastination and mobile phone addiction, the implications and limitations of this study were discussed. (shrink)

The chapter compares a leading psychological account of procrastination and related phenomena—the picoeconomic framework of George Ainslie—with economic models of self-control lapses generally and procrastination specifically. By “economic,” reference is intended to models that admit of solution by maximizing utility functions and that can be tested econometrically against behavioral or neural processing data. The chapter demonstrates how bargaining games among picoeconomic interests (as Ainslie depicts them) can take two forms. One of these forms corresponds to dual-self models of (...) self-control that have unique Markov Perfect Nash Equilibria as solutions. The other form has yet to be modeled, but promising tools for the job are in place. (shrink)

Academic procrastination – habitually delaying work with academic tasks to the extent that the delays become detrimental to performance, wellbeing, and health – represents a substantial personal, systemic, and societal problem. Still, efforts to prevent and reduce it are surprisingly scarce and often offered as treatment regimens rather than preventive efforts. Based on the principles of functional analysis and a broad examination of factors that are important for academic procrastinatory behaviors, this paper aims to describe a strategy for analyzing (...) individual controlling conditions for procrastination and give parallel advice on how to change those controlling conditions. Both are ideographic, allowing for individual and dynamic analyses of factors responsible for instigating and maintaining procrastination, as well as tailor-made remedies that address controlling conditions in preventive and curative efforts to reduce procrastination. Although functional analysis integrates well with important research findings in the procrastination field, this approach suggests new criteria for identifying procrastinatory behaviors and an alternative model for analyzing their control conditions. We conclude that a functional approach may supplement procrastination research and efforts to prevent and alleviate this detrimental habit. (shrink)

We tend to seek immediate gratification at the expense of long-term reward. In fact, the more distant a reward is from the present moment?the more we tend to discount it. This phenomenon is known as temporal discounting. Engaging in mental time travel plausibly enables subjects to overcome temporal discounting, but it is unclear how, exactly, it does so. In this paper, we develop a framework designed to explain the effects of mental time travel on temporal discounting by showing how the (...) subject?s temporally extended self enables mental time travel to generate appropriate emotions that, in turn, via metacognitive monitoring and control, generate appropriate behaviours. Building on existing approaches we outline an initial framework, involving the concepts of emotion and the temporally extended self, to explain the effects of mental time travel on resisting temptation. We then show that this initial framework has difficulty explaining the effects of mental time travel on a closely related phenomenon, namely, overcoming procrastination. We next argue that, in order to explain these effects, the concept of emotion needs to be refined, and the concept of metacognition needs to be added to the framework: emotions involve an action-readiness component, which, through metacognitive monitoring and control, can enable the subject to resist temptation and overcome procrastination. Finally, we respond to an objection to our account?based on the somatic marker hypothesis?such that metacognition is not necessary to account for the role of emotions in decision-making. (shrink)

Work procrastination is a retreat behavior associated with negative cognitive experience and it results in great losses to individual as well as organizational development. Understanding the antecedents of employees’ work procrastination behavior contributes to lower frequency of its occurrence. This research builds a dual-moderated mediation model from the perspective of cognitive appraisal theory and explored work procrastination behavior of employees subjected to abusive supervision. With 378 valid returned questionnaires, data collected from 32 companies in Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, (...) and Chongqing supports our hypotheses. This result has enriched the understanding of work procrastination behavior and provided practical implications to avoide its negative effects. (shrink)

Chrisoula Andreou says procrastination qua imprudent delay is modeled by Warren Quinn’s self-torturer, who supposedly has intransitive preferences that rank each indulgence in something that delays his global goals over working toward those goals and who finds it vague where best to stop indulging. His pair-wise choices to indulge result in his failing the goals, which he then regrets. This chapter argues, contra the money-pump argument, that it is not irrational to have or choose from intransitive preferences; so the (...) agent’s delays are not imprudent, not instances of procrastination. Moreover, the self-torturer case is intelligible only if there is no vagueness and if the agent’s preferences are transitive. But then he would delay only from ordinary weakness of will. And when it is vague where best to stop indulging, rational agents would use symmetry-breaking techniques; so, again, any procrastination would be explained by standard weakness of will, not vagueness. (shrink)

I argue that procrastination with respect to environmental preservation is in the class of procrastination problems that are particularly difficult to overcome because of the presence of factors that support second-order procrastination. If my reasoning is correct, then second-order procrastination can help explain the distressing fact — assuming it is a fact — that, despite widespread professions of serious concern, the issue of environmental preservation is not getting as much of our attention as it deserves. My (...) reasoning also suggests that improving our situation may require that some of the efforts now focused on promoting concern for environmental preservation be rerouted into tracking procrastination and deploying insights on how to cope with it. (shrink)

One type of procrastination is a result of the surprising temporal structure of some important human goods, whose benefits cannot be accounted for as the sums of benefits of momentary goods. Virtue for such a procrastinator consists in adopting compensating strategies, one of which is artificially imposing instrumental structure on an activity. If many agents are procrastinators and the device is widespread, then one of the deepest motivations for instrumentalism—the evident pervasiveness of instrumentally structured activity—is misleading.

When we fail to achieve our goals, procrastination is often the culprit. But how exactly is procrastination to be understood? This edited volume integrates the problem of procrastination into philosophical inquiry, exploring the relationship of procrastination to agency, rationality, and ethics--topics that philosophy is well-suited to address.

In this paper we examine the relationship between diligence and ethics and the connection between procrastination and ethical misconduct for lawyers. From there we ask the question of whether legal education does enough to teach law students good habits of time management that might minimize the kind of procrastination that so often goes hand in hand with lawyer malfeasance. Far from concluding that legal education addresses these issues adequately we advance the claim that legal education actually teaches (...) class='Hi'>procrastination. Drawing on the work of Neil Fiore and his book: The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play we argue that law students are often susceptible to the psychological factors that lead to procrastination: fear of failure, fear of success and resentment of authority. From there we outline aspects of legal education that feed into rather than combating these vulnerabilities. Finally we outline recommendations for how legal education could begin to take more seriously the relationship between time management and legal ethics and to model and inculcate good time management skills. (shrink)

Much is known about the antecedents and outcomes of procrastination when comparing students to one another. However, little is known about the antecedents and outcomes of procrastination when comparing the courses taken by the students during a semester. In this study, we proposed that examining procrastination at both levels of analysis should improve our understanding of the academic experience of students. At both levels, we examined the mediating role of procrastination in the associations between two dimensions (...) of motivation and indicators of academic achievement and well-being. A sample of 359 university students completed questionnaires measuring their motivation, procrastination, and affect in each of their courses. The official final course grades were obtained at the end of the semester. Multilevel mediation analyses with structural equation modeling were conducted to test our hypotheses. At the between-person level, the indirect effects revealed that higher controlled motivation was significantly associated with worse outcomes via higher levels of procrastination. At the within-person level, the indirect effects revealed that lower autonomous motivation was significantly associated with worse outcomes via higher levels of procrastination. Overall, this study shows that different pathways at each level of analysis may explain how procrastination can be detrimental for the success and well-being of university students. (shrink)

I consider a situation in which workers have present-biased preferences and tend to procrastinate their tasks, but underestimate the degree of self-control problems that they will face in the future. Brocas and Carrillo show that a form of competition always mitigates delay in a setting where agents are perfectly aware of their future self-control problems. However, I show that the introduction of the competition considered in their paper does not necessarily mitigate delay in a setting where agents underestimate the magnitude (...) of their future self-control problems. The intuition is that competition reinforces their belief that they will complete earlier, which undermines their incentive to complete now. This result holds even when there is only one worker who severely underestimates the degree of his or her future self-control problem, suggesting that the mere existence of a single “irrational” agent can undermine the overall performance of organizations. Moreover, the intuition behind my result implies that, to mitigate procrastination, it is important to design schemes in which workers believe that they will not complete early in the future, e.g., reducing competition over time, increasing cost over time, or even enforcing no work day tomorrow. (shrink)

The combination of student Self-Regulation (SR) and the context of Regulatory Teaching (RT), each in varying degree, has recently been demonstrated to have effects on achievement emotions, factors and symptoms of stress, and coping strategies. The aim of the present research study is to verify its possible further effects, on academic behavioral confidence and procrastination. A total of 1193 university students completed validated online questionnaires with regard to specific subjects in their degree program. Using an ex post facto design, (...) multivariate analyses and structural equation modeling (SEM) were carried out in order to test the relationships predicted by the model. SR and RT had a significant joint effect in determining the degree of academic behavioral confidence and of procrastination. Academic behavioral confidence also significantly predicted reasons for procrastinating, and these in turn predicted activities of procrastination. Conclusions are discussed, insisting on the combined weight of the two variables in determining academic behavioral confidence, reasons for procrastinating and activities subject to procrastination, in university students. Implications for guidance and educational support of university students and teachers are analyzed. (shrink)

Inheritance is the principle that deontic `ought' is closed under entailment. This paper is about a tension that arises in connection with Inheritance. More specifically, it is about two observations that pull in opposite directions. One of them raises questions about the validity of Inheritance, while the other appears to provide strong support for it. We argue that existing approaches to deontic modals fail to provide us with an adequate resolution of this tension. In response, we develop a positive analysis, (...) and show that this proposal provides a satisfying account of our intuitions. (shrink)

When discussing the general inertia in climate change mitigation, it is common to approach the analysis either in terms of epistemic obstacles (climate change is too scientifically complex to be fully understood by all in its dramatic nature and/or to find space in the media) and/or moral obstacles (the causal link between polluting actions and social damage is too loose, both geographically and temporally, to allow individuals to understand the consequences of their emissions). In this chapter I maintain that both (...) categories of obstacles now play a secondary role: many people have a clear understanding of the physical and social dynamics involved in climate change. The main reason why so few manage to reduce their ecological footprint is an ethical short-circuit that does not allow most people to reveal their “true” climate-related preferences in their daily choices. This short-circuit manifests itself in two phenomena that can be analysed through the lens of moral psychology. First, as the possibility of anticipated utility approaches, individuals further discount expected future utility and may even reverse their preferences (due to the so-called immediacy multiplier, in addition to the better known and discussed future utility discounting). Second, individuals struggle to order their preferences transitively when presented with the opportunity to obtain small net marginal utilities in the short run. The intertemporal and collective structure of the climate problem creates fertile ground for both phenomena, which means that even those who are sincerely convinced of the need to contribute to climate change mitigation end up trapped in loops of procrastination, both first and second level. If, however, we can understand the origin of these phenomena, then we will be able to devise counteracting solutions that will speed up individual mitigation efforts. I will therefore briefly propose three ethical/public strategies to break the procrastination loop: pre-commitment; increasing the costs of marginal postponements; reducing the disutility of action that is likely to be postponed. (shrink)

The primary purpose of this randomized controlled trial (RCT) was to evaluate the efficacy of an unguided, two-week internet-based training program to overcome procrastination, called ON.TOP. Because adherence is a typical problem among individuals who tend to procrastinate, especially with internet-based interventions, the secondary purpose of the present study was to investigate whether adding SMS support increases subjects’ frequency of engagement in training. In a three-armed RCT (N = 161), the effects of the intervention alone and intervention with daily (...) SMS-support were compared to a waiting list control condition in a sample of students. The primary outcome of interest was procrastination. The secondary outcome of interest was the extent of training behavior. Baseline (T0), immediate post-treatment (T1) and 8-week post-treatment (T2) assessments were conducted. Results indicated that procrastination decreased significantly only with intervention group with daily SMS support, relative to control. Moreover, incorporating SMS support also may enhance extent of training behavior. (shrink)

When mental health professionals or social workers are confronted with a suicidal individual, one approach is to use all means to delay the act of suicide until the desire for death subsides. Encouraging someone to delay suicide while bypassing the individual’s practical reasons for suicide can lead to irrational postponement, which equates to procrastinating suicide. Causing someone to procrastinate in this manner poses a risk of disrespecting the person as a rational agent. However, is it even possible to irrationally delay (...) one’s own act of suicide? Additionally, isn’t it beneficial to do so? The aim of the manuscript is to explore the possibility and value of using procrastination in managing suicidal individuals. First, I will argue that procrastination of a suicide intent is possible, which makes inducing this state of mind in people morally problematic. Second, I will argue that there is no intrinsic value in procrastination, although it does have instrumental value. Procrastination holds instrumental value for individuals who delay an irrational act of suicide. Furthermore, procrastination is valuable for clinical psychology, not by making people irrationally delay suicide but for assessing suicide risk. (shrink)