Procrastination and counterfactual thinking: Avoiding what might have been
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The possible negative consequences of counterfactuals were explored in the current study by examining the relationship between counterfactual direction and trait procrastination, a self-defeating behavioural style. Eighty participants generated counterfactuals in response to two experimental anxiety inductions. Trait procrastination was overall related to avoiding thoughts about how things could have been better (making more downward and relatively fewer upward counterfactuals) in response to the two anxiety-provoking scenarios, suggesting the involvement of a self-enhancement motive (mood repair). Evidence for the involvement of this self-motive in procrastinating behaviour also emerged, as procrastination was more related to making more downward counterfactuals for a delay-specific anxiety scenario than for a general anxiety scenario. The pattern of results supports the proposal that downward counterfactuals may be associated with negative behavioural styles such as procrastination and implicates self-enhancement motives in this relationship. The behavioural and motivational consequences of downward counterfactuals are discussed and possible connections between downward counterfactuals and other self-defeating behaviours are presented.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".