A new paper in Psychological Science (.htm) reports a failure to replicate Study 2 of Ariely and Wertenbroch’s influential article entitled, “Procrastination, Deadlines, and Performance: Self-Control by Precommitment.” The original study, published in Psychological Science in 2002 (.htm), found that people performed better on a set of tasks when each task had its own externally imposed deadline than when people set their own deadlines or faced a single last-day deadline for all tasks. The paper has had a lasting influence. It has been assigned reading in many economics and psychology courses, and has more than 2,100 citations on Google Scholar.
Because this paper has been so influential, it is worthwhile to take a close look at the original study to try to understand why it did not replicate. We did that. This post – and the next one – is about what we found.