Deciding what to do: Observations from a psycho-motor laboratory, including the discovery of pre-crastination

Highlights

• Pre-crastination is the tendency to hasten tasks even at the expense of extra energy.

• It is manifested in a vast range of behaviors, such as answering emails too soon, or submitting articles before they are ready.

• More significant examples are convicting others quickly to get cases over and done with or going to war prematurely.

• Pre-crastination was discovered in a study of psycho-motor performance. The focus of that study was biomechanical factors affecting task choices.

• Psycho-motor research brings up principles of behavioral choice which help make sense of pre-crastination even though the discovery of pre-crastination was unexpected at first.

• Pre-crastination appears to be due mainly to the desire to reduce the load on working memory, to keep one’s mental to-do-list as short as possible.

Abstract

A great deal of research has concerned choices of goods or services with different values receivable at various times. Temporal discounting – the magnification of values that can be obtained sooner rather than later – has proven to be immensely important in this regard. In the present article, we shift the focus from the receipt of goods or services to the performance of tasks. We show that temporal discounting also applies to task choices. Pre-crastination, the phenomenon we point to, was discovered by Rosenbaum, Gong, and Potts (2014) and is the tendency to hasten tasks even at the expense of extra energy. Pre-crastination was discovered in a study of psycho-motor performance, where the focus was on biomechanical factors affecting task choices. In the present article, we review that research, showing how the tendency found in the initial experiments are in fact illustrative of a more general motor-control tendency to inhibit easy forms of movement for the sake of later performance goals. Such inhibitory control may also be the basis for pre-crastination, provided one assumes that pre-crastination keeps working memory as clear as possible. A wide range of behavioral choices fit under the rubric of pre-crastination, such as answering emails too soon, submitting articles before they are ready, judging others before they should be judged, convicting others to get cases over with, and, in the worst case, going to war prematurely. Lack of temperance in these choices may seem to arise from impulsivity, but we argue against that view. The desire to “clear the decks” to be prepared for new challenges is, we suggest, a more apt account of pre-crastination.

Introduction

Charles Darwin showed that a simple mechanism can explain the proliferation of species: Species that pass on traits that happen to be adaptive are more likely to survive than species that pass on traits that happen to be less adaptive. B. F. Skinner extended this idea to shorter time scales. He showed that behaviors with adaptive features are more likely to recur than behaviors with less adaptive features.

Both in the Skinnerian short-term and in the Darwinian long-term, behaviors must be chosen. Consequences of those behaviors can come immediately or be delayed within and over lifetimes. Given the centrality of behavioral choice in both contexts, researchers who hope to understand the processes at play need to understand how behaviors are chosen. What, indeed, is the nature of those behavioral (or behavioural) processes?

It is common in studies of short-term behavioral choice to define distinct behavioral outcomes and then assess their probabilities given various reinforcement contingencies. The most familiar example is pressing one lever or another in a Skinner box. The actual implementation of behavior is seldom all-or-none, however. From the perspective of neuromuscular control, an immense number of variables must be specified by the neuro-motor system. A behavior may be defined externally with respect to some coding or categorization scheme such as “press lever A” or “press lever B,” but the act itself, carried out neuro-muscularly, has no a priori categorical identity. Giving a label to a behavior – calling the behavior A or B – is a descriptive or prescriptive overlay at best, a mental construct, as it were. Skinner knew this, of course, which is why he said that he studied instrumental or operant conditioning. Important to Skinner was the instrumental effect of the neuromuscular activity on the environment (how physical acts operated on the world), not the details of the movements themselves.

It does not follow from this perspective, however, that bodily movements should not been analyzed, and no one, Skinner least of all, ever claimed otherwise. The question, if one cares about bodily expression itself, is what to look for. What aspects of bodily behavior should be considered?

Consider the simple act of choosing one of two buckets to be carried to a location to get a reward. If different rewards are given for the two buckets, the bucket that will be chosen will probably be the one that brings the greater reward. If a huge financial reward is offered to carry a very heavy bucket over a long distance and a small financial reward is offered to carry a very light bucket over a short distance, there is a good chance the heavy-bucket-long-distance behavior will be favored. One could vary the distances, bucket weights, and rewards to arrive at a recipe for predicting which bucket will be chosen when. Still, one’s description of the choice would be incomplete, for a wildcard would beset the enterprise. Beneath the choice would be the actor’s sense of the physical effort to be expended. But this term effort … what is that exactly? Its nature, both physical and mental, would remain elusive. How could it be measured? How could the existence and identity of effort be nailed down, except circularly – that is, as whatever it is that somehow causes some behaviors to require much reward to appear, or heaps of punishment to remain on the sidelines?