Procrastinating: it's in your genes

In an article published in a journal of the Association for Psychological Science Daniel Gustavson, a scientist of the University of Colorado Boulder, looks at the genetic linkage of procrastination and impulsivity.  Impulsivity is to act on something without thinking about the severity of the action.  Our ancestors made many impulse decisions because they did not know what the next day would hold for them, while procrastination has emerged much more recent in history.  As people in today's world we make long term goals for ourselves and while trying to reach those goals we can become impulsive and get easily distracted.  Many studies have found that there is a positive relationship between procrastination and impulsivity but it is unclear influences them.

 In Gustavson's study he did not only want to answer of why some people procrastinate and make rash decisions more than others, but wants to go further to explain what procrastination is, why it happens and what can be done to minimize it.  To do this he performs a study with 181 monozygotic twins, who share 100% of their genes, and 166 dizygotic twins who share 50% of their genes.  Each individual took several surveys aimed to measure their tendencies towards procrastination and impulsiveness.  What they found is that both traits are inheritable and that there is a complete genetic overlap between the two.  The linkage between the traits Gustavson and his team look forward to further research investigating how these two traits are related to higher level cognitive abilities.