Commentary: Pre-crastination: hastening subgoal completion at the expense of extra physical effort

Citation: Richter M (2015) Commentary: Pre-crastination: hastening subgoal completion at the expense of extra physical effort. Rosenbaum et al. (2014) announced in a recent Psychological Science paper the discovery of a new psychological phenomenon. They presented nine studies on task choice in a bucket carrying task and claimed that the results of these studies provide evidence for pre-crastination, the tendency to complete (sub)tasks as soon as possible, even if this comes with the expense of additional physical effort. In this commentary, I discuss whether the findings of Rosenbaum and colleagues indeed reveal a new, surprising phenomenon or are old wine in new skins. Participants in Rosenbaum and colleagues' studies had to choose one of two buckets and to carry the selected bucket to a target position. Systematically varying the distance between participants and buckets as well as the distance between buckets and target position, Rosenbaum and colleagues observed that participants frequently chose the bucket that was closer to them, even if this implied a longer carrying distance and thus a higher total physical effort. They were surprised by this finding and explained it by participants' motivation to complete the first subtask (choosing a bucket) as soon as possible. They suggested that (task) goals impose a memory load and that individuals' primary motivation is to free the memory from this load by attaining the goal. I agree that the finding that individuals are more interested in freeing their memory from the load imposed by a goal than in minimizing energy investment would constitute a new phenomenon. However, I doubt that Rosenbaum and colleagues' studies provide evidence that is strong enough to warrant such a claim. The claim about the discovery of a new phenomenon is only warranted if the empirical findings are indeed new and have not been described before and if the findings cannot be explained by existing theoretical approaches. I will show in the following that both premises do not hold. First, there is already empirical research that has demonstrated that, under certain conditions, individuals prefer effortful tasks over effortless tasks. For instance, Eisenberger et al. (1985) demonstrated that children who could choose between earning 2 cents for doing nothing and 3 cents for copying nonsense words chose more often the higher reward even if this implied a higher effort. This empirical finding fits well with Rosenbaum and colleagues' suggestion that keeping busy is more rewarding then doing nothing …