The Procrastination Equation (8 page)

I have painted a pretty bleak picture, but it could be worse. Actually, the worst is still ahead. It doesn’t quite take up as much time as television yet, but it shows a lot more potential. It is the Internet, which has all the allure of video games, television, and more on a single platform. About 80 percent of students already report that Internet activities are particularly problematic for them.
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No wonder. There are websites and blogs that cater to every fetish and interest, videos to download, music to acquire, and text-messages to respond to. The newest twist in the Internet procrastination saga are the hundreds of social networking sites, like Facebook, Bebo, MySpace, and Twitter. Less than a year from its inception in early 2004, Facebook was reported in
The New York Times
as a key enabler of dawdling, with students hitting the refresh key on their screens hundreds of times a day to check for updates.
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This habit is not dissimilar to Skinner’s variable reinforcement research on rats and pigeons, who also pressed their keys hundreds of times for an eventual but unpredictable reward pellet. Since researching Facebook in person would likely endanger the hours I needed to write this book, I decided to locate an expert, someone already intimately entangled and familiar with the site’s details. As if to underscore Facebook’s prevalence in the university population, it took me less than five minutes to track down such an authority, specifically a graduate student. She “Facebooks” about ninety minutes a day and has even set up a Dogbook page for her pug, Schmeebs. I sat down beside her computer so she could give me the tour:

But, I do feel I have gotten to know a lot of my closer friends better. You post funny quotes you have heard, videos of trips, whatever tidbits interest you. Oh look! Chelsea’s dog added Schmeebs as a friend!”

My expert then leads me to the myriad procrastination-dedicated Facebook groups, such as: “AP-Advanced procrastination” (over 18,000 members); “I'm majoring in Napping and Facebook with a minor in procrastination” (over 30,000 members); “I was doing homework and then I ended up on Facebook” (over 900,000 members). There are also over 600,000 members of a Fan Page dedicated solely to “Procrastination” itself. Joining these groups makes a statement about your identity, and provides a wide assortment of suggested diversions, as well as an opportunity to talk about them. Ironically, a recurring discussion among members was focused on how they could limit or quit Facebook itself (e.g., “let parents change your password and only tell you after exams”). Not to be perceived as a Facebook prude, I agree that the site is attractive and intriguing, and that it has useful applications, especially networking. Napoleon Hill, an achievement guru of the last century, considered networking a key element of success. On the other hand, Facebook is a tremendous distraction and it is this and not the networking itself that dominates. A true sign of the addictive aspects of Facebook is that half of those who quit reactivate their accounts.
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They can’t keep away.

HOW WE GOT HERE

The rise of procrastination is hard to avoid, given its deep roots in our brain’s neurobiology. The limbic system focuses on the now while the prefrontal cortex deals with longer-term concerns. In other words, when building a fire, the limbic system is eyeing that can of gasoline while the prefrontal cortex says branches and logs would provide slow, steady heat. The first wants the immediate million-dollar check, while the second favors a weekly five grand for life. Though both the limbic system and the prefrontal cortex come together to reach a final decision, their duet ensures the rise of procrastination. Here’s an example to show you what I mean.

Let’s take two snack food vendors,
Nutrity Nuggets
and
Tasty Tempts.
Nutrity Nuggets
provides healthy fare, which appeals to our long-term and more abstract goals of a slender waist and improved physical well-being. This is brain food . . . well, at least its prefrontal portion.
Tasty Tempts
provides sugar and fat in a dozen deep-fried combinations, immediately delicious and sure to tickle the fancy of our limbic system. Set up across from each other at the mall, which of these two stores will sell more snacks? You don’t need a degree in marketing to conclude that sugar’s moment on the lips wins out over its lifetime on the hips.
Nutrity Nuggets
will be most people’s choice of tomorrow, what they
intend
to eat, while
Tasty Tempts
is the choice for today, what they
are
eating. Furthermore, as sure as the high price of movie theater popcorn,
Tasty Tempts
delivers a much larger profit margin because impulsive purchasing curtails comparison shopping.
Nutrity Nuggets
may well go under while
Tasty Tempts
becomes an international franchise. Businesses respond to our dominant desires, so there is no coercion or conspiracy here, just the invisible hand of the market building a limbic system wonderland. With the ubiquitous overemphasis on the immediate and the material, on the instant and the consumable, people are seduced into putting off long-term but ultimately more satisfying goals involving career achievement, volunteering in the community, raising a family or following a spiritual path. Materialism and consumerism are merely emergent properties of our neurobiology given free rein in a free market.

The process of seduction all starts with the sophisticated science of market research. I should know; I met my wife, Julie, while she was getting an advanced degree in this area. Market research has many different applications, some of which are benevolent. For example, my wife’s university adviser conducted research on how to craft warning labels on cigarettes so that people
don’t
buy a pack. But, like most of life, market research usually concentrates on where the money is, and from children’s television to political parties, marketers are adjusting products to our tastes or even creating desire for them. In doing so, they invariably appeal to our limbic system by creating temptations. The food industry, in particular, has used market research to the hilt, finding out what is most delicious to consumers and how best to package it. In his book
The End of Overeating,
Dr. David Kessler, a commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration under two presidents and the former dean of the Yale School of Medicine, investigates the incredible vigor and purpose that food producers commit to getting us to eat more of their cheap and nutritionally challenged products.
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The amount of engineering that goes into creating visually appealing, flavorful food that scrumptiously crunches, melts, or rolls in your mouth is astounding, rivaling only by that put into designing your flat screen TV or Blu-Ray player. With exquisite fine-tuning of the proportions of sugar, fat, and salt in a recipe, for example, dishes can be created that provide no satiation—we always have room for one more bite.

Once a product has been devised, the emphasis on the limbic system continues during its presentation. Advertisements, which comprise about 1 to 2 percent of most economies, typically accentuate the most concrete and salient aspects of any merchandise.
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When you next walk through a grocery store, note how prominently the look or taste of any product is displayed; compare that to the extra effort required to find its nutritional content or its relative cost, both of which would appeal more to your prefrontal cortex. Finally, the virulence of temptations is truly maximized if desired products are immediately accessible; availability encourages the impulse purchase.
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Since this principle of instant availability considerably strengthens the role of the limbic system in our decision making, we see a lot of it. “Buy-now, pay-later” sales strategies stress the present moment, and sales gurus like Zig Ziglar emphasize: “If the decision is yes, then you . . . could be enjoying the benefits NOW!”
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As David Mesla, a weight management scientist at the Unilever Health Institute, notes: “Every single day and every single place you go, those foods are there, those foods are readily available for you to engage in. There is constant, constant opportunity.”
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Universal proximity is exactly the goal—to shave enough seconds off the mechanisms of delivery that all products can be purchased as impulsively as the candy by the checkout counter. Once this happens, the world becomes an inescapable cage of temptation and if your willpower ever lapses, even for just a second, that’s all the time they need to get you. But wait, there’s more.

Aside from making their products and presentations more alluring to your limbic system, marketers also make concerted efforts to push that pesky prefrontal cortex aside. Habits and rituals, in particular, bypass the prefrontal cortex during decision making, and so great efforts are made to cultivate them in consumers.
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Many of our purchases are triggered rather than chosen, just as the addictive aroma of KFC’s eleven special herbs and spices is designed to create a sudden craving for deep-fried chicken. Regardless of our original intentions, once cued, our actions can be “emotionally hijacked” and we end up automatically eating fast food or ordering that specialty coffee.
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We are all vulnerable to this, me included; I am guilty of consistently buying overpriced movie theater popcorn, which science confirms is less of a conscious choice than a ritualistic act cued by entry to the theater.
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Research on exactly how vulnerable we are is the specialty of Brian Wansink, a professor of consumer behavior at Cornell University. His studies have estab-lished that our eating choices are indeed mostly routines that are weakly based on hunger and more strongly based on context, such as the size of plate or portion, or how visible the treat is. For a study that won him the Ig Nobel Prize, he infamously devised a bottomless soup bowl that surreptitiously refilled itself as people ate from it.
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Though they reported not feeling any fuller than those who had a single bowl of soup, those who ate from the ever-full bowl consumed almost twice as much—76 percent more. Such habits now make up about 45 percent of our daily actions, and increasing this percentage by providing easy options and clear cues is big business.
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The extent to which we can become wedded and welded to our habits is best revealed by the way we rely on our personal digital assistants (PDAs), like Apple’s iPhone or Research in Motion’s BlackBerry. People text everywhere, even while driving. This is a salient example of a pleasurable impulse overriding good judgment, for, as common sense concludes, and my own as well as others' research shows, any cell phone use while driving (hands free or handheld) slows one’s reaction time dangerously.
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Such are the addictive qualities of PDAs that the World College Dictionary voted “CrackBerry” as the word of the year in 2006. They are so embedded in people’s lives that at times our brains, in a testament to their neural plasticity, adopt the devices as part of our bodies. When it isn’t around, people feel something like phantom limb syndrome (sometimes termed “fauxcellarm”). Others report the more familiar problem of repetitive motion disorder, like “BlackBerry Thumb,” which is recognized by the American Physical Therapy Association as an official workplace injury. And what are people frenetically doing with their PDAs so much as to wear out their joints and ligaments? With tens of thousands of applications available, the company comScore undertook to categorize the top twenty-five applications downloaded into the iPhone. The only one that wasn’t entertainment, a game, or a social networking site was Flashlight—a utility that turns your iPhone into a light source.
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SUPPORTING VOICES

So here’s the situation. Procrastination isn’t just battling a hundred million years of evolution. It is battling a hundred million years of evolution that are being actively exploited at every turn by the very fabric of our society. In 1958, Aldous Huxley, in his book
Brave New World Revisited,
warned: “All the resources of psychology and the social sciences are mobilized” with the aim of controlling people by finding “the best ways to take advantage of their ignorance and to exploit their irrationality.”
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In 1985, with the rise of the video game, the influential cultural critic Neil Postman specifically built on Huxley’s work in
Amusing Ourselves to Death,
where he points out that “the rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny 'failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.'”
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And we have Avner Offer, professor of economic history at Oxford University, reviewing in 2006 how current Internet consumption contributes to many of the world’s ills, in
The Challenge of Affluence.
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In sum, the free market is geared toward providing increasingly irresistible temptations that distract us from our greater goals.
^4c