It is an attempt to manage emotions and behaviors that fails. Postponement is associated with incomplete control of impulsivity. Those who implement it know that it is not the best choice but it does it anyway
There are people with a strong tendency to postpone what they should do. For procrastination, the behavior of who lingers and postponesa psychological phenomenon in which everyone falls from time to time, since within certain limits a natural inclination.
Not surprisingly absolute referral champions are the students: in some social psychology research it emerged that procrastination comes to afflict us up to 70%, while among adults the phenomenon is present in a consistent manner in about 20%. It is not known why, but the percentage of those who admit to feeling distressed by the propensity to postpone quadrupled between 1978 and 2002, a period during which the phenomenon was studied by Piers Steel of the University of Calgary (Canada).
Failure of self-regulation
According to a group of British and Italian psychologists and psychiatrists led by Bruce Fernie, of the Department of Psychology at King’s College London, who published a study on Journal of affective disordersthe tendency to postpone would be a kind of failure of self-regulation, an attempt to manage emotions and behaviors which however results in psycho-social maladaptation outcomes. For example, procrastinating students are known to have lower grades, just as postponing adults perform less well at work. But not all procrastinators are the same. They can postpone in different ways and psychologists have divided them into intentional and unintentional, active and passive. Intentionals are aware of their referral behavior, while non-intentionals are less aware of it; the active are convinced that the postponement of their task is not only necessary, but also useful, because it will serve to achieve a better result; the passives do not make any specific reasoning or have a strategy: they simply find themselves close to the deadline and only then decide to roll up their sleeves, with often unsatisfactory results.
The case of the Nobel laureate George Akerlof
Among the champions of procrastination there was also a Nobel laureate, the American economist George Akerlof. After continuing to postpone for eight months the shipment of a package that he had to return to a colleague, he began to question himself seriously about his behavior, also because he always felt on the verge of shipping and thought every time he would do it. day after. Eventually that expedition was made by a friend of his, but he continued to wonder about the tendency to procrastinate, coming to the conclusion that it must be more than just a bad habit. As the magazine told New Yorker, Akerlof studies the tendency to postpone even within his specialty, behavioral economics, suggesting that this tendency reveals something important about the limits of rational human thinking. From a psychological point of view, procrastination strongly marked by irrationality.
The theory of the divided S
It constitutes a kind of logical contortion: you know that a certain thing has to be done, but you don’t do it. Research conducted on students showed that 65% of them were aware of postponing the study in view of the exam, and that in doing so they would most likely go wrong and be unhappy. Yet they continued to postpone. as if within them there were two distinct persons, and indeed the theory of the divided self has been advanced, according to which a part of self guided by short-term interests, such as having fun and being with friendswhile the other is interested in longer distance goals. The postponement motivated not only by the pleasant choice of the immediate, but also by the more or less conscious conviction that tomorrow there will be no distractions today, which is almost never true. An experiment conducted by Dan Ariely, now professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University, demonstrates that among students there is a clear perception that they cannot trust their will to do.
Experiment with the students
A group of students from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) were given three assignments to complete within the next semester, giving them the choice of delivering them with three different deadlines during the six months, or all together at the end of the semester. The tasks would all have been assessed anyway at the end of the semester, but there would have been a reduction in the vote for those who, having chosen deliveries at different deadlines, had not respected them. Well, most of the students chose the staggered presentation of the assignment, knowing full well their tendency to procrastination. Obviously the rational choice would have been the presentation at the end of the semester, which in any case would not have prevented from working on the three tasks one after the other, and would not have exposed the risk of a reduction in the vote for missing the deadline.
Personal activities in the office
There is also a procrastination of their work duties: many employees spend about an hour and twenty of their time in the office for personal activities, such as sending e-mails to friends, surfing the Internet, paying bills through the online bank, managing private appointments. The phenomenon is called presentism, because it is a form of absenteeism while showing up in the workplace.
Safe from distractions
temptation is one of the main causes of continuous postponement, and in fact from a psychological point of view postponement is associated with incomplete control of impulsivity. And the temptation becomes very strong when the universe of the Internet and social networks is at hand. For anyone who can’t hold back from the urge to continually interrupt what they’re doing for go to social networks or surf the Internetlaying the foundation for one potentially infinite procrastinationthere are drastic solutions, such as software that allow time control or prevent Internet access.
September 2, 2022 (change September 2, 2022 | 11:16)
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