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Get it over with, or procrastinate? New research explores our decision-making process:
New research from the UBC Sauder School of Business may have figured out why. The study, published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, reveals key insights into how excitement, anticipation and dread factor into people's decision-making.
"This stems from the phenomenon known as 'the sign effect'," says the study's author and UBC Sauder assistant professor, David Hardisty. "A person's desire to get positive things right away is stronger than their desire to put off negative ones. However, the timing of when a person wants to handle negative things is less obvious."
Hardisty and his team found that when people look toward positive events in the future, such as an upcoming vacation, they experience pleasure, but also impatience, which makes for a mixed emotional experience.
When it comes to upcoming losses, however, the emotion tends to be all bad -- even if that root canal is far away and life at this moment is good. So rather than postpone those negative events, many prefer to get them out of the way as soon as possible.
"When you're booking a vacation, you're vicariously enjoying the vacation, which is great, but you're also contrasting it with your current situation, which is bad. So you have that mix," says Hardisty. "And for losses, it's more of a unidimensional bad feeling. When you have a dentist's appointment coming up, you don't like thinking about the pain in the dental chair."
Journal Reference
David J. Hardisty, Elke U. Weber. Impatience and Savoring vs. Dread: Asymmetries in Anticipation Explain Consumer Time Preferences for Positive vs. Negative Events, Journal of Consumer Psychology (DOI: 10.1002/jcpy.1169)
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Saturday June 06 2020, @04:02PM
Sometimes procrastination pays off much later too.
Years (decades) ago there was a software co where the owner would bring change requests /bug fixes printed on paper for the old products, that were legacy even then, they would be handed to the relevant devs to action.
One guy would assess them and "file" some, maybe most, of them in a (largeish) stack on his desk. Every so often a new request would generate a flurry of activity searching the stack, zeroing in (rapidly) on a particular existing request, extracting it and checking against the new one followed by tearing both in half and filing in the round filing cabinet under the desk, with a satisfied grunt.
Being new, I didn't get it until it was explained to me - the stack of change requests on the desk were those that he considered a bad idea, rather than put the effort in to argue that "change X to Y" was a bad idea, he would simply accept the request and wait for a matching request of "change Y back to X it was a bad idea". It is just possible this guy was very good at his job - new releases of the legacy stuff were very rare, change requests were frequent, and yet the size of the stack remained fairly constant...