Postponing an onerous task may seem like a universal trait, but new research suggests that people whose negative attitudes tend to dictate their behavior in a variety of situations are more likely to delay completing the task at hand.
The psychological term to describe this mental process is called valence-weighting bias, which describes people’s tendency to adapt to new circumstances based more strongly on their positive or negative attitudes or, in the context of tackling an unpleasant task, either negative or negative. Positive internal “signals” have the most weight in guiding final behavior.
“And the question is, who wins that battle? If, in fact, there are elements of both positivity and negativity?” said Russell Fazio, lead author and professor of psychology at Ohio State University.
In a series of studies, Fazio and first author Javier Granados Samayoa, a former graduate student at Ohio State, found links between a more negative attitude and procrastination. They also found that it is possible to shift strong procrastinators’ weighting bias toward neutrality and reverse their tendency to delay a task.
“We’re looking at this consideration of the positives and negatives that exist when people make decisions, and how valence-weighting bias determines the path that people take,” Granados Samayoa said.
The research was recently published in the journal Personality and individual differences.
The first of three studies tested a real-world scenario: preparing a federal tax return.
“The idea is that people, at least for a brief moment, ask themselves, ‘Do I want to do this now?'” Fazio said. “And there are actually both positive and negative signals: ‘I certainly don’t want to do that. It’s an aversive task.’ That’s the negative signal. But there’s also a positive signal: ‘I have to do it and I’ll feel good if I do it well.'” .
A sample of 232 participants reported whether they routinely filed early or late returns during tax season. With that data in hand, Fazio and Granados Samayoa used a research tool to measure the extent to which participants weighed positive or negative cues more strongly when encountering something new.
Their analysis showed an association between a more negative weighting bias and a delay in filing a tax return.
“What we found is that people whose negative attitudes generalize more strongly tend to unnecessarily delay tasks to a greater extent,” Granados Samayoa said.
The second study involved 147 college students in a program that allowed them to earn academic credits in exchange for participating in research.
In addition to measuring students’ weighting bias, the study explored whether measures of student self-control influenced task-related behavior: How did students characterize their level of motivation or ability to reflect on their initial thoughts about the task? research program, and how did they do it? What influences whether students begin participating in research early or postpone it?
Results showed that the combination of negative weighting bias and low self-reported motivation or emotional energy for effective self-control was related to students postponing participation in the research program and starting later in the semester.
“The first study established the basic effect of negative weighting bias, but the second study provides some nuances,” said Granados Samayoa, now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. “For people who don’t think about it too much or can’t think about it too much, their valence-weighting tendencies guide their behavior in a simple way. But if someone is more motivated and able to think about it more, that might bring other considerations that buffer the influence of the valence-weighting bias.”
Study three was designed to look for a causal effect of valence weighting bias on completing or delaying a task. For the study, students from the credit-bearing research program who were self-reported procrastinators and who scored high on negative weight bias were recruited for the study. The researchers then manipulated the valence-weighting bias tool for one group in a way that led participants to weigh positive and negative cues in a more balanced way. This shift toward neutrality changed students’ behavior: They accumulated credit hours more quickly than the control group, whose negative weighting bias and low self-control reliably predicted their delay in earning additional credit.
Negative weighting bias can also have a positive effect on behavior. These researchers have also found evidence that a negative weighting bias can help people be more realistic when asking themselves, for example, “Have I studied enough for this test?” A positive weighting bias can lead people to convince themselves that they are prepared when they are not.
“It’s better to be objectively balanced than to be at either extreme,” Fazio said. “But the situation in which a particular valence-weighting bias is likely to be problematic will vary.”
This work was supported by the John Templeton Foundation and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.