Procrastination and Task Avoidance

Abstract

and Associates with a Foreword by Norman A. Milgram Discusses the historical origins, definition, and measurement of procrastination, as well as exploring its relationship with academic tasks, agitation, perfectionism, depression, passiveaggression, and obsessions-compulsions. Features previously unpublished data from the pioneering studies of Lay, Flett, Hewitt, and Schouwenburg. A volume in the Plenum Series in Social/Clinical Psychology

Cross-cultural exploration of the Indecisiveness Scale: A comparison of Chinese and American men and women

“…Across cultural and sex groups, the scale was reliable at alpha levels from .80 to .90, consistent with past work (Frost & Gross, 1993;Frost & Shows, 1993;Gayton et al, 1994). The results provide further evidence for the inter-item reliability of this scale for American men and women, and new evidence for Chinese men and women.…”

“…This construct has received considerable research attention (Ferrari, Johnson, & McCown, 1995), and has been found to predict many resource-intensive decision tendencies in the general population. Individuals high on indecisiveness take more time to choose among alternatives (Frost & Shows, 1993), use less-exhaustive decision strategies (Ferrari & Dovidio, 2000, require greater cognitive effort to make decisions (Ferrari & Dovidio, 2001), are more threatened by ambiguous situations (Rassin & Muris, 2005b), and are more likely to postpone decisions (Rassin & Muris, 2005a), compared to those low on indecisiveness.…”

“…These include self-esteem (Burka & Yuen, 1983;Ferrari, 1991), neuroticism (Jackson, Furnham, & Lawty-Jones, 1999), behavioral procrastination (Beswick, Rothblum, & Mann, 1988;Effert & Ferrari, 1989;Ferrari, 1992), obsessive-compulsive tendencies (Frost & Shows, 1993;Gayton et al, 1994), hoarding behavior (Frost & Gross, 1993;Frost & Shows, 1993), perfectionism (Frost & Shows, 1993;Gayton et al, 1994), and distractibility (Harriott, Ferrari, & Dovidio, 1996). Because of its challenging behavioral consequences, as well as the extent to which it is associated with and compounded by a wide range of negative tendencies, indecisiveness merits further exploration.…”

“…Responses are typically elicited on a Likert scale ranging from 1 (Highly agree) to 5 (Highly disagree), with positive statements reverse coded so that low scores indicate high indecisiveness. With American college-student samples, the internal reliability of the scale is high (alpha range = .80-.90; Frost & Gross, 1993;Frost & Shows, 1993;Gayton et al, 1994). This scale has been cited in nearly 100 articles in personality, clinical, educational, industrial and consumer psychology.…”

Holding on for too long? An experimental study on inertia in entrepreneurs’ and non-entrepreneurs’ disinvestment choices

“…Moreover, in addition to the already mentioned sunk cost fallacy (Ross and Staw, 1993) and escalation of commitment (Staw, 1981), there are numerous other behavioral phenomena that might influence the intuitive choice of a disinvestment trigger towards postponement of this irreversible decision such as status-quo bias (Samuelson and Zeckhauser, 1988;Kahneman et al, 1991), resistance to change (Grabitz, 1971), inaction inertia (Tykocinski and Pitman, 1998), inaction or omission bias (Ritov and Baron, 1992), decision avoidance (Anderson, 2003), and procrastination (O'Donogue and Rabin, 1999;2001;Ferrari et al, 1995 In the present study, we call this behavior 'psychological inertia' to contrast this type of inertia with the 'options-based' type of inertia postulated in Propositions 1-3.…”