Self-handicapping by procrastinators: Protecting self-esteem, social-esteem, or both?

https://doi.org/10.1016/0092-6566(91)90018-LGet rights and content

Abstract

Procrastinators have reported experiencing low self-esteem and high social anxiety. The present study explored whether these characteristics promoted the choice of an environmental performance obstacle more by procrastinators than nonprocrastinators as an attempt to protect social and self-esteems. Female procrastinators (n = 57) self-reported significantly lower self-esteem but not abstract for verbal thinking abilities than female nonprocrastinators (n = 63). Participants then were assigned randomly to one of four conditions, in which they could choose the presence of a distracting, debilitating noise when their performance on either a (bogus) diagnostic or nondiagnostic task was public or private to a female experimenter. Procrastinators (49.1%) were more likely than nonprocrastinators (30.2%) to self-handicap. Most procrastinators handicapped in public when the task was nondiagnostic of ability (69.2%) or in private when the task was diagnostic of ability (73.3%), as opposed to public-diagnostic (35.7%) or private-nondiagnostic (20.0%) conditions. There was no significant tendency across conditions to self-handicap by nonprocrastinators. Results were explained by self- and social-esteem protection motives employed by procrastinators.

References (29)

  • C.H. Lay

    At last, my research article on procrastination

    Journal of Research in Personality

    (1986)
  • R.M. Arkin et al.

    Self-handicapping

  • R.M. Arkin et al.

    The role of social anxiety in self-presentational self-handicapping

    (1988)
  • S. Berglas et al.

    Drug choice as a self-handicapping strategy in response to noncontingent success

    Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

    (1978)
  • G. Beswick et al.

    Psychological antecedents of student procrastination

    Australian Psychologist

    (1988)
  • E.J. Bordini et al.

    Alcohol consumption as a self-handicapping strategy in women

    Journal of Abnormal Psychology

    (1986)
  • J.B. Burka et al.

    Procrastination: Why you do it and what to do about it

    (1983)
  • C.E. DeGree et al.

    Adler's psychology (of use) today: Personal history of traumatic life events as a self-handicapping strategy

    Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

    (1985)
  • B. Effert et al.

    Decisional procrastination: Examining personality correlates

    Journal of Social Behavior and Personality

    (1989)
  • A. Ellis et al.

    Overcoming procrastination

    (1977)
  • A. Fenigstein et al.

    Public and private self-consciousness: Assessment and theory

    Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology

    (1975)
  • J.R. Ferrari

    Reliability of academic and dispositional measures of procrastination

    Psychological Reports

    (1989)
  • Ferrari, J. R. (in press). A preference for a favorable public impression by procrastinators: Selecting among cognitive...
  • J.R. Ferrari

    Compulsive procrastination: Some self-reported characteristics

    Psychological Reports

    (1991)
  • Cited by (129)

    • Factors related to the resilience of Tibetan adolescent survivors ten years after the Yushu earthquake

      2021, International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction
      Citation Excerpt :

      The mean score of academic procrastination and its negative correlation with resilience (β = −0.096) were similar to previous studies among Chinese adolescents [64,65]. This may because low resilience adolescents are short of confidence to accomplish academic tasks, fear failure or others’ judgment, and tend to procrastinate undesirable learning situation [66], while high resilience adolescents are confident in completing academic tasks, and have lower tendency to procrastinate [48]. Tibetan adolescents who were in senior three, with high economic pressure and poor academic performance had significantly higher academic procrastination.

    • The neural substrates of procrastination: A voxel-based morphometry study

      2018, Brain and Cognition
      Citation Excerpt :

      Miller and Cohen (2001) found that when upset, the individuals might indulge immediate impulses to make themselves feel better, which amounted to giving short-term affect regulation priority over other self-regulatory goals. And it was reported by procrastinators that working on a difficult task made them feel anxious and worried, and that they would avoid this negative mood if they procrastinated (Ferrari, 1991). A study found that procrastinators focused on short-term mood repair and had a temporal bias towards the present and away from the future which was due in part to their current negative mood states (Sirois, 2004).

    • The Art of Procrastination

      2024, Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery
    • The Mediating Role of Mindfulness on Social Anxiety and Procrastination

      2023, International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction
    View all citing articles on Scopus

    Portions of this paper were presented at the annual meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association (1990; April), Philadelphia, PA.

    View full text