#47 - Procrastination from a Behavioral Perspective w/ Dr. Zach Bird

Before that, we should probably do a quick little conceptual relations about what is procrastination? That's not a behavior analytic term.

I've known about term procrastination forever, and I'm sure most people have.

So you wanna break that down for us? When we talk about procrastination, what are we actually talking about?

Yeah, procrastination is not a behavior.

it is behavior no i mean it's a pattern of behavior right and so it's a pattern of responding

like someone won't respond on the the

behavior of interest for a while and then all of a sudden they start oh like they start uh behaving a lot And most of the time, although not always, it's related to a deadline.

So as the deadline approaches, you just see a bunch of behavior right before the deadline.

So it'd be kind of like a scalloped effect.

Right.

So like the scalloping effect, which is typically you'll see with a fixed interval schedule of reinforcement, right? Is it different? When we talk about procrastination, are we talking about like reinforcement or we think we're talking about something different? What do you

think? Yeah, it's a little bit different because oftentimes deadlines are associated with negative reinforcement.

Whereas like a fixed interval schedule reinforcement, I think would be like someone's responding to access a reinforcer after the interval ends, right? So you get the same like scalloping effect, but I think it's for different reasons.

Yeah, that makes sense.

So we're

like, oh, shoot, if I don't get this done, something not great is going to happen.

Yes.

I better like get on it.

Yeah.

I

got to get this paper submitted.

Otherwise, my grade is going to be like an F or something.

That's

right.

And Jack Michael sort of talked about it in terms of establishing operations.