Procrastination and personality, performance, and mood

Procrastination research has generated conflicting results, partly due to the reliance on contaminated self-report measures. This study addressed this situation by creating scales based on both observed behaviors and atheoretical self-reports, and using these scales to determine procrastination’s performance, mood, and personality correlates. One-hundred and fifty-two undergraduates were measured at six time periods during an 11-week introductory psychology course. The course consisted of a computer-administered personalized system of instruction, a system noted for susceptibility to procrastination. Results show that procrastination is an excellent predictor of performance, though some final-hour catching-up is possible. Efforts to clarify its causes were mixed. Procrastination does reflect an excessive discrepancy between work intentions and work actions, as procrastinators tend to have a larger than average intention-action gap, especially at the beginning of the course. On the other hand, procrastination’s correlations with mood (i.e., state and trait affect) and personality (i.e., neuroticism, self-esteem, locus of control, extraversion, psychoticism, dominance, and self-monitoring) are uncertain as results diverge depending upon whether observed or self-report procrastination criteria are used. This dichotomy indicates that self-report procrastination likely reflects a self-assessment influenced by actual behavior but also significantly contaminated by self-concept.