temporal discounting predicts procrastination in a real-world task

Abstract

Humans procrastinate, but why? One long-standing hypothesis is that temporal discounting drives procrastination: in a task with a distant future reward, the discounted future reward fails to provide sufficient motivation to initiate work early. However, empirical evidence for this hypothesis is lacking. Here, we used a long-term real-world task to measure procrastination; critically, we measured the entire time course of work progress instead of only completion time, allowing us to compute a fine-grained metric of procrastination. We found a positive correlation between individuals' degree of future reward discounting and their level of procrastination, suggesting that temporal discounting is a cognitive mechanism underlying procrastination.