Intransitive Preference Structures

[snousle]

From Psychology Today:

The rationalization of the moment's temptation is the procrastinator's mode of being in the world, never facing the freedom that is inherent to make his or her choice now as a true agent... At any given moment when we "don't feel like doing something" and we think "surely this can wait a little longer" we're engaging in self-deception IF WE HAD ORIGINALLY MADE AN INTENTION TO ACT AT THIS TIME BECAUSE WE HAD DECIDED THIS WAS THE BEST TIME TO ACT. This is the heart of procrastination, the gap we create between intention and action.

Comments

[bluebear2.livejournal.com]

I was going to comment on this but I'll do it later.

[kevynjacobs.livejournal.com]

I intend not to act at this time.

[sig-info.livejournal.com]

Is the interpretation of procrastination as self-deception useful? I was hoping the article would describe experiments testing the hypothesis of intransitive preference structures, but no such luck. Let's see some application!

[barbarian-rat.livejournal.com]

rationalization of the moment's temptation

This sounds like the 'impulse aisle' at the supermarket

[bitterlawngnome.livejournal.com]

does that help? to me it just sounds like "procrastination is procrastination".

[snousle.livejournal.com]

No, this shows that procrastination is a special case of a more general family of irrationalities. Time-inconsistency is just one kind of non-transitivity. Identifying it as non-transitivity, and the solution as the restoration of transitivity, suggests routes to resolution that are more specific and compelling than "don't do that". It also more cleanly separates it from cases where delay actually turns out to be rational.

[bitterlawngnome.livejournal.com]

Transitivity? I mean, other than the grammatical use? google is not helping me.

[snousle.livejournal.com]

The idea is that to compare alternatives in a cost- or value-based framework, preference of one thing over another should be a transitive relation. A better than B and B better than C implies A better than C. Procrastination is framed as a pattern of thought that does not follow that pattern. Nothing wrong with that per se, but most methods of decision making are based on value assignments that are transitive, and don't make sense with intransitive preferences.

Another example would be: the experimenter gives you a choice between two pieces of fruit. If he gives you an apple and and orange, you take the orange. If he gives you an orange and a banana, you take the banana. If he gives you a banana and an apple, you take the apple. Your preferences would be intransitive because they cannot be ranked in a single consistent order.

[bitterlawngnome.livejournal.com]

Got it, I think. But I'm still trying to sort out how this applies to procrastination. Are you saying that a nonprocrastinating work day is transitive (ie, things done in decending order of importance) while a procrastinating day is intransitive, tasks being executed without regard to the importance?

--

I don't see the self-deception, really. You *know* you're supposed to be doing a task, and you're fully aware you're not, and probably also excruciatingly aware of the cost of not doing it; and there's a feedback loop of some kind in there that makes it progressively more difficult to get started the longer you delay. IMO the problem is how to make yourself do something you utterly don't want to do. The things you do "instead", are not really instead, they are just filling in idle time while you fight against yourself. (and by you I mean me)

I can very clearly remember one day ... I had decided it was the day to finish the layout of a book of very, very bad poetry; the author was being a complete dick, countermanding every design decision made by me, the publisher, and usually, his own previous decisions. Consequently it looked like complete crap, and was a nightmare of kluges, exceptions, irregularities ... like a piece of software that's been patched and fucked up by a dozen people who didn't quite know what they're doing. But I had committed to finishing the project. But I utterly, utterly could not bring myself to do another minute's work on this piece of shit. I sat there staring at the file on the desktop, unable to make myself start. So to fill in time, I cleaned the entire house from top to bottom. Not because that was more important, but simply because otherwise I would have sat there staring at the screen, doing nothing, or finding something completely useless to do.