SELF-HANDICAPPING BY PROCRASTINATORS - PROTECTING SELF-ESTEEM, SOCIAL-ESTEEM, OR BOTH

Procrastinators have reported experiencing low self-esteem and high social anxiety. The present study explored whether these characteristics promoted the choice of an environmental performance obstacle more by procrastinators than nonprocrastinators as an attempt to protect social and self-esteems. Female procrastinators (n = 57) self-reported significantly lower self-esteem but not abstract for verbal thinking abilities than female nonprocrastinators (n = 63). Participants then were assigned randomly to one of four conditions, in which they could choose the presence of a distracting, debilitating noise when their performance on either a (bogus) diagnostic or nondiagnostic task was public or private to a female experimenter. Procrastinators (49.1%) were more likely than nonprocrastinators (30.2%) to self-handicap. Most procrastinators handicapped in public when the task was nondiagnostic of ability (69.2%) or in private when the task was diagnostic of ability (73.3%), as opposed to public-diagnostic (35.7%) or private-nondiagnostic (20.0%) conditions. There was no significant tendency across conditions to self-handicap by nonprocrastinators. Results were explained by self- and social-esteem protection motives employed by procrastinators. © 1991.