Steel & Ferrari (2013): Demographics of Procrastination
Steel and Ferrari surveyed 16,413 English-speaking adults to see which demographic characteristics track procrastination. Procrastination was somewhat higher among younger people, men, single people and those with less education, and lower in countries the authors characterised as having higher self-discipline. The sample is unusually large for this field, which means almost every comparison reached statistical significance, so the sizes of the differences matter more than the fact that they exist. The paper also argues that procrastination partly explains why men lag women in educational attainment.
| Citation | Steel, P., & Ferrari, J. (2013). Sex, education and procrastination: An epidemiological study of procrastinators' characteristics from a global sample. European Journal of Personality, 27(1), 51–58. |
|---|---|
| Study type | Large cross-sectional internet survey with demographic and cross-national comparisons |
| Sample | 16,413 English-speaking adults, 58.3% women, mean age 38.3 years |
| Key finding | Procrastination was higher in younger, male, single and less educated respondents; effects were statistically clear but individually small, and procrastination partly mediated the link between sex and education |
What the study found
Respondents completed procrastination measures alongside demographic questions. Age showed the clearest pattern, with procrastination declining across adulthood. Men scored slightly higher than women, single people slightly higher than partnered people, and respondents with less formal education higher than those with more. The authors then tested whether procrastination accounts for part of the gap in educational attainment between men and women and found it carried some of that relationship, which they read as evidence that self-regulatory skill rather than ability drives part of the gap. Cross-national comparisons suggested lower procrastination in countries scoring higher on self-discipline indicators.
Why it matters
This is the best demographic map the field has, and it mostly tells you what procrastination is not. It is not a condition of the young that disappears, because the decline with age is gradual rather than sharp. It is not meaningfully a male problem, because the sex difference is small enough to be useless for predicting any individual. What the paper does support is the view that procrastination is a self-regulation skill distributed across the population, with modest group differences, which is why interventions target behaviour rather than demographics. It also supplies the headline statistics people quote about procrastination prevalence, so it is worth knowing what those numbers actually came from.
Caveats
The sample is a self-selected internet sample of English speakers recruited partly via a procrastination website, so it is not a random population sample and should not be read as giving true prevalence rates for any country. All measures are self-report at one time point, so no causal direction can be established: lower education may raise procrastination, procrastination may lower education, or a third factor may drive both. With 16,000 people, trivial differences become significant, so read the effect sizes rather than the p-values. The cross-national comparisons rest on country-level indices that are contested, and comparing procrastination scores across cultures assumes the questions mean the same thing everywhere, which is rarely fully true.
Peer-reviewed study in the European Journal of Personality (Wiley). Verified via Crossref.
Related
Steel (2007) meta-analysisFerrari on procrastination typologiesSelf-regulationProcrastination statistics, with sources
Frequently asked questions
Who procrastinates the most?
In this global survey of 16,413 adults, scores were highest among younger, single, less educated respondents, and slightly higher in men than women. All of those differences were small. Knowing someone's age and sex tells you very little about whether they procrastinate, which is why the research focuses on behaviour and situation instead.
Does procrastination decrease with age?
On average, yes, gradually. Procrastination scores declined across adulthood in this sample, which fits other findings that self-regulation improves with age and that life structure tightens with work and family commitments. It is a trend across a population, not a promise that it resolves itself if you wait.
Do men procrastinate more than women?
Slightly, in this sample, and the difference is too small to describe procrastination as a male trait. The more interesting claim in the paper is that procrastination statistically carries part of the educational attainment gap between men and women, which points at self-regulatory skill rather than ability.