Here's the background on its construction for those interested,the academic article "Integrating Theories of Motivation"
http://webapps2.ucalgary.ca/~steel/images/Integrating.pdf
Spectacularly uncontroversial really, based on the core and best established parts of the key motivational theories. Due to limiting the theory this way (i.e., focusing on the core elements), it doesn't cover directly obvious elements like satiation, though really you would incorporate it in value.
If I could redo it again, I would differentiate between goal choice and goal...
This is neat and actually might be better in some ways than the original book. People tend to respond better to stories than statistics and science, though the most useful stories are those based on the latter. Could be the best of both worlds?
Wish I could be there
Let's go back and look at the source article one more time: "PubMed references more than 25 million articles relating primarily to biomedical research published since the 1940s. A comprehensive search of the PubMed database in May 2012 identified 2,047 retracted articles, with the earliest retracted article published in 1973 and retracted in 1977."
So over 99.99% of articles aren't retracted. Lets say the retracted ones are a tip of the iceberg and the real situation is ten times worse. That makes it 99.9% accurate.
Aside from the sensationalism, these results are a stunning and unequivocal endorsement that the scientific system works.
Aside from the sensationalism, these results are a stunning and unequivocal endorsement that the scientific system works.
2047 articles retracted (for any reason) out of 25 million = 0.008%. (Edit: I mistyped the figure as 5 million instead of 25 million, but the percentage was correct.) 21.3% of that was retracted due to error, i.e. 0.0017% of all published papers later admitted an error that made the paper worthless.
That looks like massive underreporting. I cannot believe that there weren't several orders of magnitude more retraction-worthy cases, whic...
Too good. Trying to think up new ones that would belong, but I can't verify my own predictions. Heh, maybe that is one right there. Some more (?):
"Well, essence does precede existence." "Total spaghetti monster." "You have to make your cognitive biases work for you." "What's the citation count on that?" "I'll wait for the meta-analysis, thank you very much."
You are probably right. It was an overly onerous requirement on my part. However, peer-reviewed is our best stamp of quality research we have and a meta-analysis is even better, comprised of hundreds of peer-reviewed research. I am passionate about science, well aware of the limitations of clincial expert opinion, and was probably too strident.
In truth, it is almost impossible for a sole practitioner to discern whether the efficaciousness of their treatment is due to the treatment itself or other apparently non-relevant aspects, such as the placebo effect...
Given our difference on opinions, I think we managed to conduct this dialogue with a fair amount of decorum. However, I don't we are going to have any agreement. I have to go with the science.
You give any group of people a perfectionism or fear of failure test along with almost any procrastination scale and you get pretty much anywhere from a negative to at best a very weak positive correlation. And if you control for self-efficacy or self-confidence, that weak correlation disappears. Science does not back you up.
Similarly, characterizing impulsiveness as...
This is interesting. Actually, you are quite right in that TMT is an overall integrative model. It was actually designed to be a Roseatta stone, allowing us to draw findings and applications from different fields into a coherent whole. It was at one level of detail and has it uses, just as a map of the city is useful but not equivalent to a blueprint of a house (though neither are wrong). For example, it excluded nonsense solutions, which the field is rife with.
You have a naturally critical mind, which is useful, but you are taking a few short cognitive s...
Here's the research it cites along with a few hyperlinks to other articles. Did you read it?
Mellers, B. A. (2000). Choice and the relative pleasure of consequences. Psychological Bulletin, 126, 910-924. Ghahremani, D. G., Tabibnia, G., Monterosso, J., Hellemann, G., Poldrack, R., & London, E. D. (2011). Effect of modafinil on learning and task-related brain activity in methamphetamine-dependent and healthy individuals. Neuropsychopharmacology, 36(5), 950-959. Repantis D., Schlattmann P., Laisney O., & Heuser I. (2010). Modafinil and methylphenidate for neuroenhancement in healthy individuals: A systematic review. Pharmacol Res, 62(3), 187-206.
You would think that career selection and vocational counseling would be obvious to everyone, but sadly only a sliver of humanity take it seriously that career selection is driven by three criteria: i) Demand (is there a need for this, especially in terms of salary), ii) Skills (can you do this or are you willing to get the education), iii) Job satisfaction (will you like it). There are huge differences in what the literature calls person-job fit, so getting these three things right matter. However, people often go into careers knowing little about how the...
Now we are talking. Big debate over this one in key journals like Science. Here's the scoop n NZT-48 and other "success pills." Most would take it.
And you might want to read the book that you are critiquing. I understand that this is inevitable to proceed impulsively in this day and age, but you will find that everything (yes, everything) is backed up by what most find as an annoyingly long series of endnotes. Here is the part that you should have read:
You want to tackle it when you tend to have the most zip, and that when that is depends upon your circadian rhythm. Some of us are morning larks, relentlessly chipper and active early in the morning, filling gyms during in the pre-dawn hours. Others a...
Actually, the placebo effect has a bad rap (note: I'm really impressed by the smart questions you get on this site; this is a treat) in that it does reduce pain, remove depresion and increase confidence. If you want it do these things, the goal is to so in the most cost effective manner (and not have people buy 20,000 dollar magic healing crystals). It becomes problematic as people extend the placebo effect beyond what it can do to doing things like curing cancer and the like. As a treatment for self-efficacy, yes it is a good idea as believing does make it so (in this case).
Pretty much the reciprocal of the equation works for punishers. You do get different weights for objectively the same phemenon, as "Losses loom larger than gains." Ten dollars lost is more aversive, relatively, than the pleasure of ten dollars gained. The groundbreaking and hugely influential book "A General Theory of Crime" pretty much emphasizes just the impulsive aspect to criminal decisions. However, to reduce the effects of crime, as the old adage goes, "Swift and sure." That is low delay and high expectancy. We live in a society that only gets the value part, that determing crime can only be done with harsher prisons sentences. As a society, we ain't that bright.
Thought you might like to see David Hume outlining the basics of construal theory about 300 years earlier. Here he is reflecting on how the nearby and concrete always seems to supersede the long-term and abstract:
“In reflecting on any action which I am to perform a twelvemonth hence, I always resolve to prefer the greater good, whether at that time it will be more contiguous or remote; nor does any difference in that particular make a difference in my present intentions and resolutions. My distance from the final determination makes all those minute differ...
I go with the CSI approach. Challenging, Specific, Immediate and make them approach goals. I think specific and concrete overlap quite a bit, though sometimes I separate them out too. SMART goals are based on a early 1980 paper on project management for teams. Only tangentially relevant for individual motivation.
The best way of making this technique is focusing on the negative sides of engaging in temptation, of what would happen if you played video games instead of working for example. This is basic application of Walter Mischel's attentional control research as well as covert sensitization.
Though everything in the book is backed up with research (that was my standard for inclusion), I like where how you are focusing on it. Any of these techniques can misfire if applied inappropriately or in the wrong way. Devil is always in the details.
What a wonderful post!
I considered the benefits of meditation as a procrastination control technique and you will find it in the notes section of the book. I have practiced mindfulness meditation but no longer keep up with it. Though the mindfulness part does give you an option to reduce the power of temptations, you are quite right that it also can expand to eliminate value in general (nihilism). However, the reason I rejected it as viable solution is that it takes so long to master and this is the exact type of discipline that procrastinators will put o...
Very nice review here. Any better and I would say you needn't bother buying the book. About the equation, it is indeed a simplification of the full model -- trying to balance completeness with making sure it is understandable. As the book (and for those super keen, Temporal Motivation Theory described in my Academy of Management Review article "Integrating Theories of Motivation"), we add a constant in the denomenator to prevent the entire thing sky rocketing to infinity when delay approaches zero (in joke, one of the characters has a kid named Constance in reference to this).
Love xkcd. Spherical cows and all that. But appropriate parsimony is a desirable feature. Here's a summary of whether the equation does a good job of summarizing the science:
http://studiemetro.au.dk/fileadmin/www.studiemetro.au.dk/Procrastination_2.pdf
Also, from the book "The Procrastination Equation"
The Procrastination Equation attempts to economically describe the underlying neurobiology that creates procrastination. I will tell you right now; the biology and the math won’t match exactly. A road map of a city, for example, no matter how recent ... (read more)