Colleagues from Grant MacEwan College (Edmonton, Alberta) published a paper that reveals something interesting about procrastinators. They're not really very different than non-procrastinators in how they discount future rewards.

Actually, this isn't really new to procrastination researchers. A decade ago, a colleague and friend, Henri Schouwenburg (retired, University of Groningen, The Netherlands), noted that a certain amount of procrastination belongs to what we understand as normal behavior. In other words, we all seem to submit assignments close to the deadline.

In the study by Andrew Howell and colleagues, they found the same thing in a student sample. These students submitted seven small assignments over the course of the term near the deadline. The pattern of submission models that which Skinner would have expected; Action near the reward. Behavioral economists call this hyperbolic or temporal discounting. We discount future rewards and only act when the reward is near. When we graph this pattern of behavior, we get a hyperbolic curve (depicted in the diagram above).

Hyperbolic or temporal discounting was first offered up as an explanation of procrastination by Schouwenburg & Groenewoud in 2001, although my students and I had addressed the notion of temporal discounting and specious rewards in some of our earlier work as well. Schouwenburg proposed a "procrastination equation" of y = c/(1 + kx) + constant. In the study by Howell et al., they defined the terms as: ‘‘y'' is the number of students submitting their assignments, ‘‘c'' is the number of submissions when x = 0, ‘‘k'' is the rate of acceleration of ‘‘c'', and ‘‘x'' is number of hours prior to the submission deadline.

Not surprisingly, Howell and colleagues found that this function accounted for approximately 89% of the variance in the students' submissions. In other words, the hyperbolic discounting function models the delay of assignment submissions.

Most interesting is that when these researchers separated those students who scored high on self-report measures of procrastination from those who scored low, the submissions of the "low procrastination" group was still modeled by the discounting function (explaining 69% of the variation). Again, as Schouwenberg astutely noted some time ago, a certain amount of procrastination is normal.

Actually, I think Schouewenberg doesn't actually say that correctly. It's not that a certain amount of "procrastination" is normal, but that delay is. Although we all might delay tasks, particularly relatively simple tasks that are not that important (as were the assignments assessed in this study), fewer of us actually procrastinate. That is, fewer of us engage in that particular kind of delay known as procrastination, which means voluntarily delaying action on an intention despite knowing that we may be worse off for the delay.

The key point is that whereas a hyperbolic function may model our delay very well, it doesn't ultimately explain procrastination at all. Fortunately, Howell et al.'s study does offer a clear idea of just what does explain procrastination - a lack of a say-do correspondence.

The results of their study revealed that the 3 measures of procrastination they used all correlated significantly with the say-do correspondence. Say-do correspondence is captured by items like, "To what extent do you keep your promises to yourself even if later on you don't feel like doing what you had promised yourself to do?"

As the authors write, "This suggests that those who report a tendency to procrastinate also have a generalized tendency not to do what they said they will do" (p. 1727). In other words, procrastination is a problem of or a problem of bridging the intention-action gap. As I've written in a previous blog post, it is in this gap that the self must operate, and the self who does not do what he or she intends is, by definition, a procrastinator.

Interestingly, the say-do correspondence did not correlate with the behavioral measure of postponement (late assignment submissions), and the authors speculate that this is because some students promise themselves to do the assignment just hours before it's due. They call this planned postponement "pseudo-procrastination" and argue that this would detract from an overall association between the observed submission delay (modeled as the hyperbolic discounting function) and say-do correspondence.

I think this is where the authors, and many other researchers, miss the point. Well, two points, actually. First, planned postponement is not "pseudo" procrastination. It's not procrastination at all. It's delay, and I would argue it could be considered not only rationale but sagacious. Small, easy assignments might be best completed just before the deadline when there are many other things to do first. Planned delay is not procrastination.

Second, and most important, there is no reason to believe that say-do correspondence should be associated with hyperbolic discounting, because we all delay. Remember, as Schouwenburg noted, a certain amount of delay is normal.

The message from this study for me is clear. Where hyperbolic discounting or temporal discounting as a "procrastination equation" may model how we all delay task engagement, procrastination itself is not explained by this discounting. Procrastination is the intention-action gap that must be bridged by the self with self-regulatory strategies captured by such things as this "say-do correspondence."

I think the authors of this study offer us a great deal by demonstrating the clear relation of self-regulation as say-do correspondence with procrastination. Do you do what you say you'll do? If not, it's an issue of self-regulatory failure, and something that must be understood in terms of this irreducible notion of self, not some external contingencies that will somehow (even magically) cause you to act without the exertion of will.

References

Howell, A.J., Watson, D.C., Powell, R.A., & Buro, K. (2006). Academic procrastination: The pattern and correlates of behavioural postponement. and Individual Differences, 40, 1519-1530.

Pychyl, T. A., Lee, J. M., Thibodeau, R., & Blunt, A. (2000). Five days of emotion: An experience sampling study of undergraduate student procrastination. Journal of Social Behavior and Personality, 15, 239-254.

Schouwenburg, H. C., & Groenewoud, J. T. (2001). Study under social temptation: effects of trait procrastination. Personality and Individual Differences, 30, 229-240.