Genetic Relations Among Procrastination, Impulsivity, and Goal-Management Ability

https://pdf.yt/d/D_56sQA2ad-fIZeL

by gwern • 12 years ago

55 37 12 years ago

pdf.yt

md2be2• 12 years ago

I'll post a comment later.

socceroos• 12 years ago

I think your joke was lost on many people.

gwern• 12 years ago

Maybe they're just tired of it. I'm personally a little sick of how every single article I post on willpower or procrastination to Reddit or HN or anywhere else will attract the same damn joke. Like, do you really think anyone hasn't seen that before? Or that everyone doesn't think of it in the first second? (By this point, I've come to see it not as a genuine attempt at humor, but basically like posting 'First!' or pissing on a wall - it's just doing something to mark your existence.)

ChrisNorstrom2• 12 years ago

Little by little the evidence is starting to show that people's problems aren't always a system, a government, an ideology, or another group of people, but rather themselves.

Hopefully one day "blame culture" can be ended altogether.

tokenadult• 12 years ago

Do you think we are done with the natural experiment of people moving into places with different systems or different cultures and finding out their own prospects, or the prospects of their children, change?

nooron• 12 years ago

Thank you for framing this in the way you did. There are so many ways to arrange human affairs. Some people thrive in certain environments and despair in others. Genetics plays a role in how we respond to different stimuli, but we're not finding out as many immutable facts of psychological character via genetics as your parent commenter thinks we do.

_delirium• 12 years ago

You don't even necessarily have to move to find that, just move in time (granted, past a certain number of years that becomes impractical, given lifespans). It's particularly striking here in Scandinavia, which has had relatively stable genetics over an extended period, yet extremely variable societies resulting, with different traits rewarded or discouraged at different times. It was (to generalize) once a warrior culture, then a hierarchical aristocratic culture, and is now a peaceful egalitarian culture, all with roughly the same genes involved.

Xcelerate• 12 years ago

This is an interesting point, and brings up a kind of weird philosophical issue I've often wondered about.

Suppose that genetically, someone is predisposed to have very high motivation and discipline. Born into whatever environment, they have the aptitude to improving their life. Now imagine someone who, genetically, is predisposed to very low motivation and discipline. Born into a poor, or low-class environment, they are going to have a hard time moving up. However, someone with little natural discipline born into a high-class environment may still do okay in life (not great), by sheer virtue of the fact that they were born into fortunate circumstances.

Similarly, what if we find that most criminal behaviors have a genetic component? What distinguishes mental illness from "evil"? A serial killer is clearly not right in the head; do we lock them up or treat it as an illness? Is the distinction simply based on the whims of the majority at a particular point in history? (Note the history of homosexuality.)

A lot of times, people will complain about "lazy, uneducated people" and that if they'd just work harder, there wouldn't be any problems, but that's easy to say when you have an innate ability to work hard. (Ignoring, of course, all variables other than "hard work".)

In another vein, it's easy to be a good, moral person if being a good, moral person is easy. That's a tautology, but I think it really highlights my point. Similarly, losing weight is easy for some people but much harder for others. Everyone projects their natural aptitudes and weaknesses on everyone else, and then makes political decisions on the basis of that projection.

Anyway, I don't know what the correct answer is. But these thoughts bother me.

sah88• 12 years ago

"Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills."

One of the oldest questions in philosophy to which I don't think there has every really been a good answer. Or at least I haven't read one.

ChrisNorstrom2• 12 years ago

What if you could give criminals a pill that will erase their memories permanently. Then re-educate them and release them. Will they end up in a similar path as before? Was it their genetic induced impulses or their environment that caused their criminal situation? Or a combination of both? Should you heal them? If you do, will they end up living normal lives and have kids? If they have kids will they pass on their genetic impulses to their children and create a future problem?

nraynaud• 12 years ago

hum, saying someone is a procrastinator is still a blame culture, it's just blaming them. Moreover if it's really genetic, then you'll need a system around them, probably managed by a government to compensate for the deficient genetic trait.

I see you where looking for confirmation for some kind of ideology, but I don't think I would blame short people for being short, but try to identify in which areas height is a issue and route around in various ways (climbing on stuff, abandoning some activities, or finding taller surrogates to do them).

JamesArgo• 12 years ago

Scott S. Alexander wrote a great blog post about this called Society Is Fixed, Biology Is Mutable: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/10/society-is-fixed-biolog...

mindvirus• 12 years ago

A little bit off topic: Setting goals is something that I'm pretty bad at - at work, I set obvious goals like "finish project X by Y.", but other than that, I have a hard time setting goals in my life. I have some higher level goals - eat healthy, exercise, read a technical book every quarter, but barely anything approaching SMART goals. Because of this, I feel like I lack ambition sometimes. How do you identify goals? What do your goals look like? How do you measure yourself against them?

drcross• 12 years ago

Like this. Reading a technical book is of little value. Using the knowledge contained in the book to give you the skills you need to get you where you want your life to go is of great value. So the first step is visualising (important) where you see yourself and your future career and then retrospectively determining the skills you need to get there. It's a process I think of like dragging yourself up by your bootstraps. If you can visualise yourself as a successful person, making the intermediate steps to equip yourself for that eventuality is easier.

huherto• 12 years ago

The first thing I do in the morning at work is to set goals for the day. Very small concrete goals. 1 to 5 things that you can do in a day.

As long as you work on the right things and make constant progress, you should be ok.

cottonseed3• 12 years ago

Make a timeline for the next 10 years. Where are you trying to go? What are you doing to get there? Try to be specific about your plans and actions and how they will realize your goals. This is not an easy exercise. Making a timeline of your past can be helpful for getting perspective. I'm relatively planful, but I have trouble planning more than about 3-5 years out, although a few times I've had pretty clear 8 year plans (some of which actually came to pass). A friend with ADHD got this exercise from his therapist. I think this is a great exercise for anyone.

ohquu2• 12 years ago

That sounds terrifying. Can you give some examples of ten year goals? I don't even know where I want to be a year from now.

JoeAltmaier3• 12 years ago

I didn't see where they separate 'nature vs nurture' in their twins study. Was that done? Is it hasty to label these correlations as 'genetic'?

icegreentea3• 12 years ago

They compare the degree of correlation between their identical and non-identical twins. If in both groups, twins show on average the same level of procrastination/whatever trait, you can infer that the trait is not strongly genetically linked. If the identical twin group shows more correlation between siblings than the non-identical twin group, then you can infer that the trait is strongly genetically linked. You can read more under the first few paragraphs of their data analysis section.

legacyfruit• 12 years ago

Just thinking out loud here, but if identical twins were much closer in, for example, appearance, couldn't this induce more similarity in other traits. That is, if being identical made twins have closer relationships, might that not result in higher correlations in certain traits, which weren't due to genetics.

Do people tend to know if they are identical or non-identical twins?

iribe• 12 years ago

I wonder if this lack of being able to set / keep goals correlates to math which often involves goal setting then working backwards to find the right steps to reach a solution. Are procrastinators worse at math?

jacobolus• 12 years ago

Anecdotally: I’m one of the worst procrastinators I know, and also one of the best mathematical problem solvers. Some of the most organized and diligent people I know are terrible at logical/mathematical reasoning.

I don’t think there’s a strong relationship. If anything, mathematical problem solving requires a lot of drifting around in the problem space and doodling that can be difficult for someone who approaches work/problem solving in a start-working-now-and-work-until-it’s-done kind of way.

jrapdx3• 12 years ago

As a clinician not surprising that procrastination, impulsivity and poor goal-direction could be genetically linked. Combinations of such behavioral attributes (along with other manifestations) are associated with certain behavioral disorders, for example, these behaviors are common among adults with attentional disorders.

Of course, just having those traits is not sufficient to establish any specific diagnosis. Digesting the article more thoroughly will take me some time. However, it does seem to show these traits appear to have common genetic roots, but the traits also cut across nominal diagnostic categories.

That last point has merit. Behavior has to be considered along with its complex context in order to determine the significance of the behavior. It's difficult to figure out connections among the many contextual variables, far too many to glean quickly. "Explanations" whether applied to self or others bear risk of being wrong.

OTOH, procrastination or impulsive action may have non-trivial consequences. If these really are causing problems finding solutions is imperative. If self-help doesn't solve it, seek professional help. Most places, it's not hard to find, and it can make a big difference. If you need it, go get it.

Houshalter• 12 years ago

I have bad ADHD. Every day is a battle against myself that I usually lose. It's definitely genetic; my dad is pretty much the same as I am.

goblin892• 12 years ago

“Procrastination” is such a weasel term when used without an object. Whenever you do anything you’re procrastinating everything else you could’ve been doing instead.

Doing your job may mean procrastinating asking for a raise, looking for a better position at another company, starting your own business and many other things.

icegreentea3• 12 years ago

One of the scales used to measure procrastination in this study is linked here: http://www.yorku.ca/rokada/psyctest/prcrasts.pdf (The study did not use any of the star marked questions). Basically, they found that there is a strong link between your genetics and how you will answer this questionnaire.

The questions tend to cluster around things with firm deadlines, or otherwise of more or less known time components to it, and which furthermore have more or less the same costs to you. In your examples, things being put off have unknown time components and a relatively large degree of risk. Putting off those actions is in many ways the result of a pretty rational calculation.

In contrast, typical things that we 'procrastinate' about (like returning a library book, or washing the dishes, or doing some assignment) are things with little or know risk, as well as relatively well known time and effort (or we believe to be well known) costs.

goblin892• 12 years ago

Thanks for linking to the document. I can’t argue with the evidence regarding genetics, and I agree that real procrastination likely indicates troubles with goal management, but I strongly disagree that what these questions indicate is in fact tendency to procrastinate (by Wikipedia’s definition[0] and my own understanding of the word).

My main objection is that what appears as procrastination to an outsider may not necessarily be procrastination per individual’s plan.

Moreover, I think the common attitude to this is unfortunate, because avoiding externally perceived procrastination may actually go against individual’s own interests. Such conflict could be enough to induce actual procrastination in those sensitive to public pressure but not willing to fully cave in[1].

Meanwhile, the majority of questions in the document judge the procrastination by this “external” standard.

[0] “Procrastination is the practice of carrying out less urgent tasks in preference to more urgent ones, or doing more pleasurable things in place of less pleasurable ones, and thus putting off impending tasks to a later time…”

[1] “I want to go freelancing (fire my client, etc.) but when I lurk and read up on this topic (polish my resume, etc.) I feel like I’m procrastinating, so I’m writing Hacker News comments instead” is roughly how I imagine this.

Genetic Relations Among Procrastination, Impulsivity, and Goal-Management Ability

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