Human procrastination: effects of response requirements

Abstract

Two experiments were conducted to evaluate the effects of response requirements on human procrastination. Each study involved 12 undergraduate students who were exposed to a within-subject design in which they had to solve tasks consisting of visual estimation exercises (contrasting the number of green circles and blue circles on a computer screen). In Experiment 1, they were exposed to a task with 100 or 200 exercises, and in Experiment 2 they were exposed to five sub-tasks with 20 or 40 exercises. Simultaneously, participants had immediate access to distractors to instigate procrastination. No systematic effects of the response requirement were found in the first experiment (d = .20) but an increase in total minutes of procrastination was observed in the second experiment with task segmentation. However, idiosyncratic behavioral patterns emerged independent of response requirement, which suggests that procrastination may be accounted for in the context of the experimental analysis of personality.