In Study 2, it was shown that a population that is prone to procrastination tended to disambiguate the Next Wednesday’s meeting question in line with the Moving Ego perspective (responding Friday). This tendency is reflected in the definition of the term procrastination:
To defer action, delay; to postpone until another day; to defer; to put off; to be dilatory. Often with the sense of deferring through indecision, when early action would have been preferable. (OED 2007)
By contrast, a population that tends to prioritise, rather than procrastinate, were more likely to disambiguate the Next Wednesday’s meeting question in line with the Moving Time perspective (responding Monday). Taken together, these observations give rise to the question of how a tendency to procrastinate, or resist procrastination, might influence how people reason about events in time.
Personality research suggests that procrastinators tend to avoid, delay or postpone action (Milgram et al. 1998; Milgram and Tenne 2000). In contrast, conscientious individuals tend to prioritise action (Back et al. 2006; John and Srivastava 1999). That is, whereas the deferment associated with procrastination entails the movement
of tasks ‘forward’ into the future, in a direction concordant with the ego’s
movement through time (in line with the Moving Ego perspective), the prioritisation associated with conscientiousness entails the movement of tasks ‘forward’ towards the present, ergo towards the ego (in line with the Moving Time perspective). As such, if the habitual movement of tasks plays a role in influencing how people think about events in time, this should be reflected by responses to the Next Wednesday’s
meeting question, with procrastinators showing a preference for deferment, moving forward the meeting later in time, to Friday and conscientious individuals showing a preference for prioritisation, moving forward the meeting earlier in time, to
Monday.
In addition to this, personality research proposes that our personalities are made up of both higher-order and more general personality factors—such as the Big Five:
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conscientiousness, neuroticism, extroversion, agreeableness and openness—and lower-order and more specific traits, such as procrastination (e.g. Eysenck 1947; Allport 1963; Comrey 1988). Of particular interest to the current study is the negative correlation between procrastination and conscientiousness: researchers have shown than task avoidance procrastination and dilatory behaviour might be attributed to lack of conscientiousness (Milgram and Tenne 2000; Schouwenburg and Lay 1995). This negative correlation provides an additional means by which to strengthen the relation between procrastination and metaphorical perspectives of time: because procrastination tends to operate in parallel to (lack of) conscientiousness in predicting behaviour, the relation between procrastination and dilatory behaviour should be matched by an inverse relation between conscientiousness and dilatory behaviour (cf. Johnson and Bloom 1995; Lay 1997; Schouwenburg and Lay 1995), which would be reflected through temporal reasoning.
To this end, the aim of Study 3 is to examine further the role that individual differences play in influencing how people reason about events in time by investigating whether individual differences in conscientiousness (John 1990) and procrastination (Lay 1986) contribute to their conceptualisation of time and resulting resolution of the ambiguous Next Wednesday’s meeting question. It is predicted that people who adopt the Moving Ego perspective (answering Friday) will report higher procrastination scores, as well as lower conscientiousness scores, whereas participants who adopt the Moving Time perspective (answering Monday) will report higher conscientiousness scores, as well as lower procrastination scores.
4.4.1. Study 3: Procrastination and conscientiousness
4.4.1.1. Participants
28 full-time undergraduate students from Northumbria University participated in this study, with an age range of 18 to 27 years and a mean age of 20 years. 8 participants were male and 20 were female. All participants were native speakers of English from the UK.
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4.4.1.2. Materials and procedure
A two-part questionnaire was distributed to a first year English literature class. Following informed consent, participants completed the study using a pen while sitting down at a table. To begin with, participants provided demographical information (age, gender, native language and nationality) before undertaking the questionnaire. For Part 1 of the questionnaire, procrastination was measured using the Student Procrastination Scale (Lay 1986) and conscientiousness was measured using the Big Five Inventory (BFI; John 1990). Sample items included: I generally delay before starting on work I have to do (procrastination) and I see myself as someone who does things efficiently (conscientiousness). A five-point Likert scale
was used with “Very true” anchoring the left-hand side of the scale, “Neutral” in the middle and “Very untrue” anchoring the right-hand side of the scale. For Part 2 of
the questionnaire, participants then provided a response to the ambiguous temporal question: Next Wednesday’s meeting has been moved forward two days. What day has the meeting been rescheduled to?
4.4.1.3. Results and discussion
The average procrastination score for each participant was calculated by using the Student Procrastination Scale Key (Lay 1986). The scale ranged from 1–5, with 1 representing a low procrastination score and 5 representing a high procrastination score. Mean procrastination scores for each participant were calculated by adding the scores for each statement and dividing by the total number of statements, i.e. 20. The results showed that, consistent with the predictions, participants who adopted the Moving Ego perspective (answering Friday) reported significantly higher procrastination scores (M = 3.541; SD = 0.337) in comparison to participants who adopted the Moving Time perspective (answering Monday) (M = 2.978; SD = 0.499), t(26) = 3.446, p = 0.002, d = 1.322. Next, the average conscientiousness score for each participant was calculated by using the BFI Scoring Key (John and Srivastava 1999). The scale ranged from 1–5, with 1 representing a low conscientiousness score and 5 representing a high conscientiousness score. Mean conscientiousness scores for each participant were calculated by adding the scores for each statement and dividing by the total number of statements, i.e. 9. In line with the predictions, the findings revealed that participants who adopted the Moving Time perspective (responding Monday) averaged higher conscientiousness scores
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(M = 3.695; SD = 0.552) compared to participants who adopted the Moving Ego perspective (responding Friday) (M = 3.153; SD = 0.697), t(26) = 2.299, p = 0.030,
d = 0.862. Moreover, in line with earlier research, which indicates that procrastination operates in parallel to (lack of) conscientiousness in predicting behaviour (Johnson and Bloom 1995; Lay 1997; Schouwenburg and Lay 1995), there was a significant inverse correlation between self-reported conscientiousness
and procrastination (Spearman’s rho = 0.801, p < 0.0001).
In sum, Study 3 provides converging evidence that individual differences in personality play a role in influencing how people reason about the movement of events in time. Specifically, in line with the predictions, participants who adopted the Moving Ego perspective (answering Friday) averaged higher procrastination scores and lower conscientiousness scores in comparison to participants who adopted the Moving Time perspective (answering Monday). The findings, however, raise further questions. Although recent research has shown that individual differences in personality may influence the ways in which comprehenders resolve temporal ambiguities, all of these studies, to date, have relied on participants’ self- reported assessments of personality variables (e.g. Hauser et al. 2009; Richmond et al. 2012). While most personality inventories encompass a range of items for tapping behaviours, feelings and thoughts and have been shown to provide a valid means of assessing personality (Roberts et al. 2007), one question that remains unanswered is whether these relationships have force in real life. To test this, three studies were conducted to examine whether, in addition to self-reported
conscientiousness and procrastination, there is a relationship between conscientious and procrastinating behaviours and temporal perspective. Across three studies, the resolution of temporal ambiguity was compared against three measures of real life conscientious and procrastinating behaviours: the extent to which a worker was on schedule for work (Study 4); how close to the deadline a student submitted their assignment (Study 5); and the time at which a person arrived for a scheduled appointment (Study 6).
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