The Procrastination Equation (23 page)
Read The Procrastination Equation Online
Authors: Piers Steel
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The graph includes two-thirds of the courses students, excluding those who dropped the course or had finished the entire course work more than four days before the deadline and couldn’t be potentially procrastinating in this part of their lives. See also, the following articles that find procrastination almost perfectly fits a hyperbolic curve.
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Chapter Three
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As William James, the godfather of psychology, puts it when discussing the economic theory of behavior: “Not one man in a billion, when taking his dinner, ever thinks of utility. He eats because the food tastes good and makes him want more.”
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As Adam Gifford puts it:
Evolution cannot discard existing designs and start over from scratch, it can only build the new on top of the old—the old higher biology-based time preference mechanisms are still built into the human brain. These mechanisms must be overridden in decision making by the inhibition process, which is significantly enhanced in humans by language. It is this divergence between the cultural and biological rates of time preference that creates a potential internal nature versus nurture conflict leading to self-control problems [like procrastination]. The higher level prefrontal working memory system allows the agent to consider possible events in the extended future and to discount those events at a rate appropriate to the individual’s current environment. The lower level [limbic system] does not have access to events not yet experienced, and as a result, ignores these purely abstract events; it also incorporates the high level discount rate similar to that used by non-human primates and some other mammals that is a product of natural selection.
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Knoch, D., & Fehr, E. (2007). Resisting the power of temptations: The right prefrontal cortex and self-control. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1104, 123–134.
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Bechara, A. (2005). Decision making, impulse control and loss of willpower to resist drugs: A neurocognitive perspective. Nature Neuroscience, 8, 1458–1463.
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Reyna, V. F., & Farley, F. (2006). Risk and rationality in adolescent decision making: Implications for theory, practice, and public policy. Psychological Science in the Public Interest 7(1), 1–44.
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