By Nicole Findlay
Many of us have been guilty of postponing an unsavoury chore only to castigate ourselves later as we rush to complete it.
Shannon Bennett is recasting her own bad habit into a prospective career. Under the guidance of Tim Pychyl, the honours student is researching our tendency to procrastinate.
“When I took Professor Pychyl’s 2nd year Personality Psychology course, and we learned about procrastination, it sparked my interest as a potential area of research,” said Bennett.
Pychyl, an associate professor in the Department of Psychology, developed an interest in procrastination during his 1995 doctoral research. Initially interested in how our well-being is linked to the attainment of the goals we set for ourselves, Pychyl eventually turned his focus to the things we say we’ll do, and never get around to actually doing.
“Why do we become our own worst enemy with this self-defeating delay?” said Pychyl. “The answer to the question, ‘why do we procrastinate?’ is a very complex interaction of person and situation variables.”
Over the next decade, his pursuit of the answers to this illusive behaviour led him to form the Procrastination Research Group (link to www.procrastination.ca). The Group comprises graduate and undergraduate students, such as Bennett, who conduct their thesis research on procrastination.
Bennett is researching the relationship between procrastination, shame and guilt.
“Essentially, I wanted to know whether shame and guilt played a role in procrastination, and gain some idea of what that role might be,” said Bennett.
When she began her research, Bennett expected to find that we all experience both guilt and shame when we procrastinate.
She was surprised to discover that guilt affected men and women differently. She found that procrastination was related to negative emotions and lower self-esteem for women but not men, but that both genders experienced a lot of guilt when they procrastinated. So, while we tend to feel guilty about our habits, we are not particularly motivated by shame to change them.
Pychyl and Bennett’s research has stuck a chord among slackers nation-wide.
Pychyl is recently featured in the March/April edition of Psychology Today and has been recently interviewed for an article in the Globe and Mail and New York City’s Village Voice. Bennett will present her work at the Canadian Psychological Association conference this June. A reformed procrastinator, she has been awarded a SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarship and will pursue her MA in the fall.