The portrait of the procrastinator: Risk factors and results of an indecisive personality

• Indecision and more generalized procrastination (GP) are often conflated.
• We compare indecision and GP SEMs in happy memories and personality.
• More indecisive people had fewer happy memories, while GP did not predict frequency.
• Indecision (neurotic) and GP (conscientious) had different primary predictors.
• Indecision should be considered distinct from generalized procrastination.

Procrastinators purposefully delay the start or completion of tasks for their own irrational reasons and experience anxiety over the delay. However, imagining a typical ‘procrastinator’ evokes several conflicting images with differing experiences and personality correlates. One reason for this muddled picture may be conflated constructs. We posit that decisional procrastination (indecision) may be a related but distinct construct to more generalized procrastination, being highly correlated but with divergent predictors. In two studies, we examine competing hypotheses regarding the affective experiences (happiest moments; Study 1) and risk factors (personality correlates; Study 2) for both indecision and general procrastination using structural equation modeling (SEM). Results found indecision uniquely predicted fewer happy memories across a lifetime and less detail of those memories, controlling for initial affect. Furthermore, different magnitudes of predictive patterns emerged for indecision (strong neuroticism, moderate introversion) and generalized procrastination (strong unconscientiousness and weakly associated with neuroticism). In both studies, general procrastination led to indecision but models with the opposite effect were much weaker, suggesting procrastinating behavior predicts being indecisive but not vice versa. Results suggest differential experiences of indecisive individuals and more generalized procrastinators. Both procrastination traits appear related but distinct, explaining why ‘typical’ procrastinators can look so different psychologically.