When I was growing up, the US Army had recruiting
commercials that showed active soldiers going through a series of difficult
physical activities along with the ad tag line, “We do more before 9am than most
people do all day.” And if you know
anyone who is a habitual procrastinator, that phrase could easily become “…than
some people do in a whole month.”
As a college professor, I see differences among students in
their amount of procrastination all the time.
Some students come to my office hours all semester asking questions and
keeping up with all of the reading.
Others start big projects a few days before they are due only to
discover that the project requires more time than they have left to complete it.
There are many causes for procrastination, of course. An interesting paper in the December, 2011
issue of the Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology by Antonio Pierro, Mauro Giacomantonio, Gennaro Pica,
Arie Kruglanski, and Tory Higgins explored an important motivational factor.
In previous work, Kruglanski and Higgins have identified two
distinction motivational modes that they call the locomotion and assessment
orientations. The locomotion mode is
related to action. When you are in that
mode, you are driven to do things in the world.
The assessment mode is related to thinking about and evaluating aspects
of your life. When you are in that mode,
you are focused on whether you are dong the right thing.
For example, a shopper in locomotion mode who is looking at
the wall of blenders in a big box store will size up the assortment quickly and
will grab one and move on. A shopper in
assessment mode will spend a long time comparing the various options before
reaching a decision.
In a variety of studies, the authors used questionnaires to
assess whether people are typically in a locomotor mode or an assessment
mode. Locomotor questions were items
like “By the time I accomplish a task, I already have the next one in
mind.” Assessment questions were items
like “I spend a great deal of time taking inventory of my positive and negative
characteristics.”
The authors assessed procrastination either using
questionnaires about how often people think they procrastinate or by using
actual tasks in which the researchers examined when people performed a task
relative to a deadline. In all six of
the reported studies, the more that people reported having a locomotor
orientation, the less they procrastinated.
The more that people reported having an assessment orientation, the more
they procrastinated.
In a few studies, the authors also examined potential
reasons for procrastination. They found
that the stronger people’s locomotor motivation, the less distracted they were by other tasks that might get in the way of
completing a goal task. So, the
locomotor orientation is really associated with getting things done.
The assessment orientation is related to perfectionism. The stronger people’s assessment motivation,
the more likely they were to be concerned that they might have made a
mistake. That concern could lead people
to avoid completing a task.
The studies in this paper were focused on differences
between people in whether they generally have a locomotor or an assessment
orientation.
It is also possible to create situations that affect these
orientations. Time pressure, for
example, often shifts people into a locomotor mode, which is why students with
a tendency to procrastinate often start projects as a deadline looms.
Highlighting the way that projects will be evaluated can
shift people into an assessment mode.
That mode can create anxiety.
Researchers have used instructions that people’s performance will be watched
and evaluated by experts as a way of inducing stress.
Future research should explore whether situations that bias
people toward a locomotor or assessment mode can influence procrastination.
