Procrastination In Culture

1. Introduction
“Procrastination, quite frankly, is an epidemic,” says the writer of “The Procrastination Cure” Jeffery Combs. Recently, an infographic shows that during the 140 million hours people spent on YouTube watching “Gangnam Style”, four pyramids can be built, according to The Economist. Naturally, we may wonder what drives us to act on this irrationality and feel bad and guilty about it. If it is not truly a personal and individual defect, why not blaming culture roots for the unproductiveness?

Procrastination is referred to the irrational and voluntary delay despite the fact that this intended behavior will result in a negative effect on the individual and can even come at a cost of favorable outcomes (Lay, 1986; Steel, 2007).

For example, Using Hofstede’s 4 dimensions of culture, Mann et al., (1998) suggest that more procrastinators were discovered in the East Asian sample than the Westerns. Built on individualism/collectivism dimension in their research, Janis and Mann (1977) consider the renowned “groupthink” occurrence as a collective example of defensive avoidance. While in Western cultures, an individual is expected to be decisive and take full responsibility for his own decisions, Asian people tend to rely on others in decision making process and blame others for the failure. Self-determination theory ( Ryan & Deci, 2000) suggests that autonomy or motivation based on free will is equally important across universe and it is a predictor of study-outcome and social well-being, even for Chinese. However, many cross-cultural researchers find that autonomy and self-direction are perceived not as important in Eastern culture compared with Western culture. Logically, it may turn out to be a source of pre-decisional procrastination that results from reluctance to self-decision making (Mann et al., 1998). Moreover, a present-fatalistic time orientation was shown to give rise to avoidance procrastination, as it is a sense that the future is predetermined by fate (Zimbardo & Boyd, 1999). Sirois (2014) find that low positive affect and high level of stress partially serves as mediators of the relationship between future time perspective and procrastination behavior. Ferrari (2001) proposes that chronic procrastination behavior is proved to be associated with lower future orientation; one possible explanation can be that it eases the present tension or short-term pleasure is more tempting (since they procrastinate by switching to do other things). However, a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of procrastination that derived from a social context needs to be viewed