Procrastination: the art of unnecessarily delaying important tasks or activities. Also known as ‘intentional delay’, procrastination is a concept that students especially are well acquainted with. Although the instant gratification that accompanies procrastination momentarily can be tempting, ultimately procrastination does more harm than good, often referred to as a method of self-sabotage.
The question begs an answer: why exactly do we do it? Is it laziness? Or perhaps the fear of failure? Maybe the presence of stress and anxiety? This is what comes to mind when we ponder on the motivations behind procrastination. But research conducted by Dr. Hershfield in 2011, on the topic of ‘future self-continuity’, offers an interesting take that can provide further perspective as to why humans choose to engage in seemingly counterproductive behavior.
In his study, Hershfield et al measured the degree to which college undergraduates felt similar to their future selves, and the phenomenon of temporal discounting, which is the idea that people value future outcomes less than they care about present ones. They developed a laboratory task, in which participants participated in trials where they had smaller but immediate rewards, or a larger but delayed reward, using a psychometric as an objective measure of self-other similarity. They hypothesized and found that those who felt more similar to their future selves, chose the larger delayed reward while those who felt a smaller degree of similarity prioritized the immediate reward. These results replicated in a real world context, where they surveyed the working population in the San Francisco Bay area who accumulated a larger number of assets if they had a higher perceived similarity to their future self.
Interestingly, the study also involved the investigation of the neurological basis of future self-similarity. Through the use of brain imaging techniques, Hershfield details how parts of the brain associated with thinking about other people, including the medial prefrontal cortex and the rostral anterior cingulate, were activated when thinking about future selves.
In simple terms, they concluded that our conceptions of our future selves can impact our decision making. The implications that research on future self continuity has on our understanding of procrastination and how humans make choices is profound. It suggests that it is more than just our self-esteem, anxiety, or mood that can fuel procrastination, but also how we cognitively position ourselves in relation to our future selves. Paired with the phenomenon of temporal discounting, how needs of the present often overwhelm the needs of the future, people can think of their current self as being dissimilar from their future self which in turn can increase the tendency for procrastination: the scope for instant relief that comes with being free from working on a task is valued more than the future reward of getting those tasks done in the present.
Source
Hershfield H. E. (2011). Future self-continuity: how conceptions of the future self transform intertemporal choice. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1235, 30–43. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-6632.2011.06201.x
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