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By April 12, 2024—three days before the deadline for filing tax returns in the U.S.—more than a quarter of American taxpayers had yet to do so. Procrastination—delaying something despite an awareness of associated negative consequences, leading to discomfort—is a common experience for many. Unfortunately, procrastination tends to carry significant costs. For instance, completing a task when rushing to finish can impact the quality of one’s work. Moreover, procrastination is by its very definition stressful, and naturally, such stress can take its toll. Chronic procrastinators tend to report more symptoms of illness, more visits to the doctor, lower overall well-being, and even greater financial struggles.

So if procrastination is so costly, why do so many people regularly do it? Years of research have provided a reasonably comprehensive list of psychological factors that relate to procrastination. But it’s been unclear what mental processes underlie the decision to start or postpone a task. When faced with an upcoming deadline, how do people decide to initiate a chore or project?

To shed light on this question, we conducted a series of studies examining task delay, the behavioral component of procrastination in which people put off completing something despite lacking any objectively strategic reason to do so. We found that people with a negativity bias tend to delay tasks more, especially if they tend to be poor at self-control.

The central idea guiding our work was that as people pursue their goals, the environment nudges them to make specific assessments that can shape their behavior. For example, once a taxpayer has received all the necessary documentation—typically well before the filing deadline—they may ask themselves, “Do I want to do this now?” This question should bring to mind some positive outcomes (for instance, the satisfaction of completing a chore and, potentially, receiving a tax refund sooner) and some that are negative (such as the tediousness of the task). Ultimately the positives must be weighed against the negatives. Notably, there are individual differences in how people generally weigh positive and negative signals—a characteristic that psychologists call valence weighting bias. Whereas some people tend to give greater weight to the pros, others give greater weight to the cons. We reasoned that those with a more negative weighting bias should be more likely to procrastinate.

Our first study used surveys to identify people who generally expected to receive a tax refund but tended to submit their taxes either early (during the last two weeks of January or early February) or late in tax season (the first two weeks of April).* Some 232 people who met our eligibility criteria participated in a follow-up session, in which we measured their valence weighting bias, using a game affectionately known as “BeanFest.” In this game, people viewed images of beans that varied in shape and number of speckles. Some beans, when selected, yielded points, whereas others led to a loss. We later assessed how participants generalized from these newly learned associations (such as that oblong beans with many speckles were “bad” and that circular beans with few speckles were “good”) to new bean images that had both positive and negative aspects (such as circular beans with many speckles). The people who leaned more heavily on the negative features when assessing the novel beans had a negative valence weighting bias, whereas those who leaned more on the positives had a more positive bias.

The decisions that people make in this game reveal something very fundamental: it turns out that people’s tendencies to generalize either positive or negative associations on this test can serve as a proxy for their general likelihood of weighing pros or cons when making decisions of any sort. Through this process, we found that those people who had reported filing taxes late in the season exhibited a more a more negative valence weighting bias. They apparently felt more preoccupied by the unpleasant aspects of preparing their tax return.

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