Does Gender Affect Procrastination Rates?

Does Gender Affect Procrastination Rates?

Psychologists have spent several decades attempting to determine many specific things about human behavior using case studies, surveys, and other experiments. The Big 5 model of personality is a popular model among behaviorists. This theory model is broken down into individual classifications like Open, Extraverted, Conscientious, Stable, and Agreeable. The survey I chose for my final project was Lay's General Procrastination Scale (GPS) which falls into the personality trait Conscientious, according to the Association for Psychological Science (Jaffe).

“Chronic procrastinators have perpetual problems finishing tasks, while situational ones delay based on the task itself. A perfect storm of procrastination occurs when an unpleasant task meets a person who’s high in impulsivity and low in self-discipline. (The behavior is strongly linked with the Big Five personality trait of conscientiousness.) Most delayers betray a tendency for self-defeat, but they can arrive at this point from either a negative state (fear of failure, for instance, or perfectionism) or a positive one (the joy of temptation). All told, these qualities have led researchers to call procrastination the “quintessential” breakdown of self-control (Jaffe).”

The experiments findings were presented as a published study originally titled “At last, My Research Article on Procrastination”. The scale was used in at least three different experiments measuring aspects of procrastination rates specific to college students. It was published in the December 1986 edition of the Journal of Research in Personality. “Procrastination was positively related to measures of disorganization and independent of need-achievement, energy level, and self-esteem” (Lay,