Remember the fable of the ant and the grasshopper?
The ant works hard during the summer to store up food
while the grasshopper procrastinates
the year away and winds up starving when winter comes
But that fable is clearly talking about people,
because other animals don’t procrastinate.
Right?
Well, David Turnell asked us over on Patreon
if there are any non-human animals that procrastinate.
And it turns out, some do display behaviors
that look a lot like procrastination.
At least in a lab setting.
Which may come as a bit of a relief
for my fellow grasshoppers out there.
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Before I dig into a video about procrastination,
I should probably establish a working definition of it.
For research purposes,
scientists have defined procrastination
as putting off a task,
only to have to deal
with a worse version of that task later.
Like say, instead of cleaning your bathroom once a week
like youre supposed to you procrastinate and then,
you have to clean an extra dirty bathroom
when you have people over for the holidays.
The underlying assumption here
is that the task you’re putting off is something
you don’t really want to do.
I mean, I’m certainly way less likely
to procrastinate getting coffee
with a friend than cleaning my bathroom.
I might even get coffee
with a friend to avoid cleaning the bathroom.
And if you’ve ever procrastinated by googling
whether or not other animals do it too,
you may have come across some studies in pigeons.
They’re basically the only publications
we could find out there
with the explicit goal of studying procrastination
in non-human animals.
The first one comes to us from 1996.
The title?
“Procrastination by Pigeons”.
And it ultimately tested if pigeons
would rather wait around for a bit
before starting a pecking task,
or after completing it.
Because the birds appeared
to prefer waiting before,
the scientists concluded
that this was evidence of pigeon procrastination.
But there were a couple of hiccups in those experiments.
For example,
the pigeons knew that at some point
they were going to get a food reward.
So the experiments
were kinda looking to see how long pigeons
were willing to put off getting something good,
rather than avoiding something bad.
But also,
he authors assumed pigeons don’t like both waiting around
as well as pecking tasks.
And that assumption is debated in the literature.
If, as other researchers argue,
pigeons don’t feel any particular way about waiting and pecking
then we still need to know
if they’d intentionally put off the negativity
of an unpleasant task,
which is how I think most people would define procrastination.
Luckily, other research seems to have gotten to the bottom of that question,
even if the authors didn’t call it procrastination.
This work was actually published in the 70s,
and in it,
the pigeons received a small shock.
Nowhere near enough to kill them,
just enough that they’d want to avoid it.
Then, the pigeons learned
that they could choose when they got shocked.
They could have this experience they don’t like either sooner or later.
When the options were getting shocked in the next 10 seconds
or getting shocked three minutes from now,
the pigeons chose to put off the shock.
So even though they had to go through
with the same unpleasant thing either way,
they chose to be unhappy later.
We’re getting closer to the idea of getting coffee now
and cleaning the bathroom later,
but this still isn’t the same as having
to clean an even dirtier bathroom once the time comes.
That’s Which is where the rat studies come in.
When a different team of scientists gave rats
the option to have a small shock sooner or a bigger shock later,
they chose the smaller one.
So it looks like rats don’t procrastinate.
Maybe they’re smarter than us after all.
Unless…
you give them the option to plan ahead.
When the smaller shock was pushed farther into the future,
two of the three rats chose to procrastinate
on making the decision about
whether or not they’d procrastinate.
It didn’t really make a difference
in terms of which option they chose,
but some rats were just not ready to commit
and wanted to make the decision at a later time.
So rats might be like us,
with some individuals more inclined
to procrastinate than others.
Although, larger samples
would be nice to have
before we make any real conclusions.
However, it’s worth noting that
the authors of this paper described their rats’ behavior
as impulsiveness and a lack of self-control.
Not procrastination.
So there appears to be more than one way
to interpret these studies.
We could be learning about
impulsive behavior, control, procrastination,
or all of the above.
In the end,
some animals put off things they don’t like,
even when they know it’s coming later.
And other animals prefer to get it over
with so it doesn’t become worse.
Not all animals might procrastinate the way we do,
but we do share at least some parts of procrastination with them.
Ultimately, there are all sorts of reasons to study this.
Maybe it would lead to a better understanding
of survival strategies.
But maybe we all just want an excuse to feel less guilty,
because if other animals procrastinate too,
then at least humans aren’t the only ones
who knowingly make things worse for ourselves.
So If you’re a procrastinator,
it looks like you’re not alone.
Why don’t you celebrate
by watching more SciShow videos
instead of doing that thing you really should be doing?
This SciShow video is supported by Brilliant,
an online learning platform
with thousands of interactive lessons in science,
computer science, and math.
Their course on Reasoning with Algebra
is just for you if you’re the kind of grasshopper
who can reason away all of that procrastination.
And you’ll need the problem solving skills
that this algebra course teaches
if you let those procrastinated problems
get bigger with time.
It may be a course focused on mathematical equations,
but the intuition and understanding
that the course emphasizes
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That’s why Brilliant makes each course interactive,
with puzzles, quizzes, and explanations
for guided problems,
so that that information sticks in your head
and you can carry it with you outside of the course.
You can try it for free for 30 days at Brilliant.org/SciShow
or by clicking the link
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That link also gives you 20% off
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Thanks for watching this SciShow video!
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