Toward a computational cognitive science of procrastination

People often put off unpleasant tasks and responsibilities for far too long, a phenomenon known as procrastination. In addition to its detrimental effects on individuals' health, wealth, relationships, education, and well-being, procrastination costs the U.S. economy about $10,000 per employee every year. How do people decide when to start working on a task or project?

Why do they procrastinate more in some settings than in others? What makes some of us more susceptible to procrastination than others? And what are the most effective strategies to overcome procrastination?

This project answers these interrelated fundamental research questions, with the eventual goal of translating these research insights into practical application in educational and professional settings.

People who procrastinate are repeatedly confronted with the decision of whether to work on a task they have been putting off or do something else. This project combines behavioral experiments with mathematical modeling to achieve two main goals. The first goal is to understand how people make these decisions.

The second goal is to devise and test potential solutions to the problem of procrastination. One series of experiments investigates the effectiveness of different ways to incentivize people to complete a series of repetitive tasks on time. A second series of experiments investigates which goal-setting strategies are most effective at helping people overcome procrastination and how well people understand the benefits of goal-setting.

The third part of the project uses advanced computational models of decision-making, questionnaires, and behavioral experiments to identify different types of procrastinators and understand how and why they differ from each other. This project strengthens the scientific foundation for preventing and reducing procrastination in professional and educational settings through strategies such as goal-setting and creating incentives that motivate people.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.