RETRACTED: Procrastination, Deadlines, and Performance: Self-Control by Precommitment

“Procrastination as a counterproductive behavior negatively affects the well-being of employees, and employees with high levels of PAW also have low levels of organizational commitment (Wertenbroch, 2002) and are more likely to leave the organization.”

“Precommitment has been demonstrated to motivate behavior change [32,33].”

“In addition, naïveté may be more empirically relevant than sophistication, as suggested by Ariely and Wertenbroch (2002) and Della Vigna and Malmendier (2006) .”

“Precommitment originally refers to a mechanism wherein people set up goals that might have costly consequences if unreached (Ariely and Wertenbroch 2002).”

“It should be noted that a single deadline that is months away does not motivate students to work (Malott, 2005; Michael, 1991); students’ study behavior is better paced by frequent deadlines (Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002; Malott, 2005).”

“In such models (1)Ashraf, Karlan, and Yin (2006), Kaur, Kremer, and Mullainathan (2010), Ariely and Wertenbroch (2002) consider commitment in the field, Houser, Schunk, Winter, and Xiao (2010) considers commitment in the lab. Bryan, Karlan, and Nelson (2010) survey the existing research. (2)Work such as Hare, Camerer,…”

“Other studies rank deadlines according to their origin, distinguishing between internal deadlines, chosen by the individual, external causes and particularly “societal” ones suggested by the environment (Miyazaki, 1993; Gross, 1994; Aggarwal and Vaidyanathan, 2003; Abendroth and Diehl, 2006; Brannon and Brock, 2001; A…”

“We used a deadline to help minimize procrastination, which could lead participants to forget about or lose the voucher (Ariely and Wertenbroch 2002, O'Donoghue and Rabin 1999).”

“Not all courses had the same number of classes that required preparation, which was taken into account in analysis.”

“Naturally, in cases where courses do not have explicit deadlines, attendees can self-impose deadlines for themselves, although such deadlines are not as efficient for time management or controlling procrastination as compared to evenly spaced deadlines imposed by others [1].”

“…of increasing relative study motivation and is in line with previous research on the distribution of study activities close to exams or deadlines (e.g., Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002; Dewitte & Schouwenburg, 2002; Gjesme, 1975; 1 3 Howell et al., 2006; König & Kleinmann, 2005; Taraban et al., 1999).”

“” There is growing empirical evidence that commitment devices (especially associated with “monetary penalty”) were shown to be efective in diverse realms of behavior changes such as mitigating procrastination [4], saving money [93], and increasing exercise [26, 75].”

“In this view, self-regulation and self-control tendencies are important variables for evaluating behavioral procrastination [13].”

“Tutors communicated that students procrastinated [67] as somewhat expected in group work, reporting that it was not unusual to see developers still coding during the sprint review meeting to maybe still fix a bug or finish a user story.”

“Postponing tasks not only leads to a significant decrease in performance level (e.g. Ariely and Wertenbroch, 2002) but also affects the satisfaction with achievements and the quality of life (see Steel, 2007).”

“” Unlike the negative connotation in the common usage of the word, procrastination does not necessarily lead to worse outcomes (Ferrari et al.(1995)).”

“Research results also show that self-control is a significant predictor of academic procrastination (Ariely and Wertenbroch, 2002; Kim et al., 2017; Przepiórka et al., 2019).”

“Without sufficiently strong commitments, people often fail to realize their goals (Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002; Webb & Sheeran, 2006).”

“However, studies evaluating these interventions are scarce and findings have been inconsistent, with recent examples producing mixed success in reducing procrastination (Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002; Delaval et al., 2015).”

“Precommitment strategies have been shown successful in a variety of contexts, from helping students avoid procrastination (Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002) to relationship satisfaction (Rusbult & Buunk, 1993).”

“Academic procrastination is often described as “student syndrome” as many students often begin to engage themselves in a task just before deadline [6].”

“Conversely, planning promotes more rational behavior in future affect‐rich contexts (e.g., Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002; Taylor, Pham, Rivkin, & Armor, 1998).”

“Using strategies such as counteractive self-control, guilt, or other complex incentive schemes (Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002; Fishbach, Dhar, & T hi s do cu m en t is co py ri gh te d by th e A m er ic an Ps yc ho lo gi ca l A ss oc ia tio n or on e of its al lie d pu bl is he rs .”

“For example, people cut up their credit cards or embrace withdrawal penalties on their savings account to avoid overspending and undersaving in the future (Beshears et al., 2015; Bryan et al., 2010) or request nearby deadlines for their work to preempt procrastination (Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002).”

“β̃ is close to 1), we would expect to observe little to no difference in bidding behavior based upon when the bidder would receive the prize.(6) If people anticipate that others heavily discount the future, we should observe bids that are lower when one’s opponent is receiving the prize in the future as compared to wh…”

“They purchase costly precommitment devices like small packages of junk food even when the unit price is lower for larger packages (Wertenbroch 1998) or self-impose costly deadlines to overcome procras-tination (Ariely and Wertenbroch 2002).”

“However, self-imposed deadlines are less effective in time management and procrastination mitigation than systematically spaced deadlines mandated externally [2].”

“In the literature, Ariely and Wertenbroch (2002) experimentally show that some people are (partially) aware of their self-control problem and are willing to take costly commitment tools.”

“Quathani et al., 2016). Yet, other psychology evidence suggests that overly slack deadlines leave room to procrastination, distractions and fatigue that may deteriorate choice performance (see, e.g., Ariely and Wertenbroch, 2002). 31Indeed, u (a )> u b ()˜ t p t a;b> p 0 ) =) s b;a t . 17 In view of this result,…”

“GENERAL DISCUSSION Restricting one’s access to temptations is an effective strategy to protect against impulse control failure (Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002; Bryan et al., 2010; Ladouceur et al., 2012; Schwartz et al., 2014).”

“…that intentions per se should be maintained, due to the selection of the energy-efficient product on the marketplace representing a pre-commitment (Ariely and Wertenbroch 2002) to buy energy-efficient, and a desire to avoid subsequent cognitive dissonance (Festinger 1954) that may occur through…”

“28 This relates to the point made in Ariely and Wertenbroch (2002) and O’Donoghue and Rabin (2003) that even when commitment devices are available, partial naives may not be using them optimally.”

“Optimizing strategies in study habits involves teaching students to set short- to medium-term objectives for their academic work, together with reasonable expectations concerning the amount of effort required to complete a given task [39, 40].”

“Self-set deadlines are not necessarily optimal (Ariely and Wertenbroch 2002), and willpower is not strong enough (Kuchler and Pagel 2021).”

“Second, to help improve motivation in music practice, we propose the application of interventions successfully applied in other domains of self-control, such as episodic future thinking and precommitment devices (e.g., Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002; Koffarnus et al., 2013).”

“Lack of self-control can result in aggression (Ayduk, Rodriguez, Mischel, Shoda, & Wright, 2007) or procrastination (Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002).”

“It is nonstationarity that is theoretically linked to self-control (Thaler and Shefrin, 1981; Ariely and Wertenbroch, 2002); a person who is impatient but stationary, such as a person who always says they prefer watching TV to exercising (rather than first saying they prefer exercising and then…”

“…on one’s future choices such as goal clarification, self-evaluation, and deadline setting, is a strategic attempt to reduce this conflict (Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002; Lee & Hanna, 2015; Peetz & Buehler, 2009) and known to enhance consistency and regularity in dealing with tasks by…”

“Ariely and Wertenbroch (2002) demonstrated the beneficial effect of subgoals in the context of proofreading essays.”

“…and under-invest in their own human capital (Steel, 2007), while sophisticated individuals may use commitment devices to help them achieve their long-term goals (e.g., Alan and Ertac, 2015; Ariely and Wertenbroch, 2002; Ashraf et al., 2006; Gineé et al., 2010; Kaur et al., 2015; Schilbach, 2019).”

“Previous behavioral and neuroimaging studies have suggested that procrastination behavior is generally caused by a failure of self-regulation or by avoidance coping strategies (Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002; C. Q. Li et al., 2022).”

“Due to a lack of self-control, people behave in non-optimal ways (Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002; Fudenberg & Levine, 2006).”

“Psychological experiments have shown that aggressive intermediate deadlines increase overall outcome quality and individual time management [14].”

“It has been shown that commitment devices are effective in improving performance in school (Ariely and Wertenbroch 2002), in saving money (Ashraf et al. 2006; Benartzi and Thaler 2004), in the context of addictions (Bernheim and Rangel 2004), etc. Prepayment metering is an interesting case to study…”

“On the other hand, the use of exogenous deadlines has been proven to be more useful when agents suffer from procrastination (Ariely and Wertenbroch, 2002).”

“In fact, successful self-control has many facets that are unrelated to impulse inhibition (Fujita, 2011), such as pre-commitment to desired behaviour (Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002) or the substitution of external control with self-control (Fishbach & Trope, 2005).”

“Experimental research shows that students who are given well-planned deadlines get better grades and earn more money than peers who are allowed to set deadlines for themselves (Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002).”

“(Ariely y Wertenbroch, 2002; Calvete y Estévez, 2009; Domjam, 2003; Monterosso y Ainslie, 1999; Rachlin, 1972; Read, Loewenstein y Kalyanamaran, 1999; Verdejo, López-Torrecillas, Orozco y Pérez, 2002).”

“…precommitment entail the investment of savings for retirement in accessible funds (Laibson et al., 1998), setting costly deadlines for classwork (Ariely and Wertenbroch, 2002), or therapeutic interventions in substance dependence where the access to the desired substance is restricted (Bell,…”

“Thus, social networks can boost commitment and encourage customers to act (Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002).”

“18,19 Second, every Monday, the participant received 70 points (10 for each day of the week) which leverages the “fresh start effect”—the tendency for aspirational behavior around temporal landmarks such as the beginning of the year, month, or week.”