People often try to complete tasks as soon as possible, even at the expense of extra effort—a phenomenon called precrastination (Rosenbaum et al., 2014). Because precrastination is so widespread—as in answering emails too quickly, submitting papers before they have been polished, or, on larger scales, convicting people in the rush to judgment, or even going to war in the rush for revenge—it is important to understand its basis. Building on previous work on this phenomenon, we focused on two plausible accounts of it. According to the behavioral account, there is a desire to act for the sake of acting itself. According to the cognitive account, there is a desire to shorten one’s mental to-do list so cognitive resources can be directed to other things. We invented a new task to distinguish between these hypotheses. Our participants made yes-no decisions under the requirement that they always respond twice per trial. We found that participants took longer for the first choice than the second and rarely changed their minds, even when second response accuracy was emphasized. This outcome went against the behavioral account, which predicted shorter first-response times than second-response times and lower (near chance) first-response accuracies than second-response accuracies. Instead, the data clearly showed that participants did all or most of their decision-making up front. The double-response reaction time task provides a new tool for studying decision dynamics.

Background: In this opinion we consider the roles of physical and cognitive effort in choosing between actions that make different physical and cognitive demands. View of the past: In choosing between a less or more demanding physical task, the cognitive effort of each was not expected to have a large effect. Current state: However, people are willing to expend extra physical effort to clear their minds (to avoid cognitive effort), a phenomenon called pre-crastination. Future perspective: Because pre-crastination can lead to premature decisions, a new priority is to understand the tradeoffs between physical and mental effort.