teem, and experimental research evidence by Joseph Ferrari (DePaul University) indicates that chronic procrastinators in particular prefer not to have feedback about self if they have the choice. Of course, delay of this sort has begged the question of whether this is truly procrastination at all, because it can be seen as a strategic use of delay, but it is worth including here just to acknowledge that we can end up delaying our tasks for reasons that may not at first seem apparent.
Preferring Tomorrow over Today
Here is an example of a relation that we all understand:
If B is greater than A, and C is greater than B, then we can assume that C is also greater than A. This is known as a transitive relation.
What about this example? Imagine a task is due on Friday. It is now Monday morning. It is preferable to work on this task Tuesday as opposed to Monday. In other words, the preference for Tuesday is greater than the preference for Monday. Tuesday arrives. Ah, it's preferable to work on this on Wednesday as opposed to Tuesday. Wednesday arrives. Again, it's preferable to work on this Thursday instead of Wednesday. So far, so good; these are transitive relations. Then, Thursday arrives. Oops, we think, it is now preferable that we had begun on Monday. This is known as an intransitive preference. Chrisoula Andreou, a philosopher at the University of Utah, has argued that when it comes to procrastination, this is a common problem with our thinking.
Certainly, many health behaviors and retirement savings plans suffer from this problem with our reasoning. It comes to a point where tomorrow is not only less preferred, but that an earlier date is actually the preferred date (and it is now too late to act) .
Many of us know this relation from experience. Studies from our research group also bear this out. We get a reversal of our preferences that makes for an intransitive preference structure. The problem is that the intransitive nature of this preference structure works ag
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