Procrastination and Intelligence: Do Smart People Procrastinate More?

Procrastination and intelligence are essentially unrelated. The largest meta-analysis of procrastination found an average correlation of r = .03 between procrastination and intelligence or aptitude scores across 14 studies and 2,151 people, a figure indistinguishable from zero.

What procrastination does track, strongly, is low "conscientiousness", the personality trait that covers self-control and organization. This article covers what the research shows about procrastination and IQ, what procrastination actually is, why the "smart people procrastinate" idea is so popular, and what procrastination does to grades.

The key source is a 2007 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin by the organizational psychologist Piers Steel, which pooled 691 correlations from the procrastination literature. Steel noted that no theory predicted a link between intelligence and procrastination, and none appeared.

• Intelligence and aptitude: across 14 studies (N = 2,151), the average correlation with procrastination was .03. The 95% confidence interval ran from -.03 to .09, so the true value could be slightly negative or slightly positive, and either way it is tiny.

• Openness to experience: the personality trait most closely tied to intellect also correlated .03 with procrastination, across 16 studies.

• Conscientiousness: the average correlation was -.62 across 20 studies (N = 4,012). Self-control specifically correlated -.58. After correcting for measurement error, Steel estimated these correlations at roughly -.75, about as high as the correlations between different conscientiousness questionnaires.

To put r = .03 in plain terms, squaring a correlation gives the share of variation two measures have in common. For .03, that is less than one tenth of one percent. Knowing someone's IQ tells you essentially nothing about whether they will file their taxes late.

The newer twin research points the same way. Gustavson and colleagues studied 663 twins from the Colorado Longitudinal Twin Study in 2014 and estimated procrastination to be about 46% heritable. Its genetic influences were indistinguishable from those on impulsivity (a genetic correlation of 1.0), and both were tied to everyday "goal management", the ability to keep long-term goals in mind and act on them. A 2015 follow-up with 751 twins found that procrastinators did slightly worse on laboratory tests of "executive function" (r = -.15), the mental control processes that keep behavior on track. The authors pointed out that IQ explained only about 25% of the variance in that executive-function factor in the same sample, so the link should not be read as a link with general intelligence.

The evidence base has limits. Steel's intelligence estimate rests on 14 mostly student samples, and procrastination is almost always measured by self-report. Still, the finding fits a much larger body of work. A 2022 meta-analysis by Anglim and colleagues found that conscientiousness, the trait procrastination largely reflects, correlated just -.02 with intelligence across 214 studies and nearly 121,000 people.

Steel defines procrastination as voluntarily delaying an intended course of action despite expecting to be worse off for the delay. That last part matters. Putting off a task for a good reason, such as waiting for information, is a sensible delay. Procrastination is the delay you know is a bad idea and do anyway.

It is very common. Steel cites estimates that 80% to 95% of college students procrastinate, and that procrastination chronically affects about 15% to 20% of adults. In his meta-analysis, the strongest predictors were features of the task (how unpleasant it is and how far away the reward is), low confidence in being able to do it, impulsiveness and distractibility. Neuroticism, rebelliousness and sensation seeking showed only weak links.

Steel's explanation, which he calls "temporal motivation theory", treats procrastination as a problem of valuing rewards that are close in time far more than rewards that are distant. A boring report due next month competes badly with something enjoyable available right now, and that pull is stronger in impulsive people. Nothing in that account involves reasoning ability. Procrastination is a failure to act on what you already know.

If you see yourself in the perfectionist version of procrastination, where fear of a flawed result delays starting, our article on perfectionism and IQ covers that trait and how it relates to ability.

The idea has some intuitive appeal, and there are a few likely reasons it persists.

• A real finding about creativity: Shin and Grant (2021) found in two US experiments that participants given moderate opportunities to procrastinate (funny videos to watch) produced more creative ideas than those who procrastinated little or a lot. A field study of Korean employees found the same inverted-U pattern for supervisor-rated creativity, but procrastination also predicted lower task efficiency. The study concerned creativity on specific tasks and did not measure IQ.

• Memorable exceptions: a bright student who starts an essay at midnight and still earns a B is noticed and remembered. The many bright students who quietly finish early are not, and the struggling students who cram and fail do not tell the story as a sign of brilliance.

• Ability can mask the cost: for a person with strong reasoning skills, last-minute work may be good enough often enough that the habit survives. That explanation is plausible, but I am not aware of a study that has tested it directly, so treat it as a hypothesis.

The data say the two traits sit on different dimensions of a person.

Procrastination does have costs. In Steel's meta-analysis, procrastination correlated -.19 with overall performance across 41 studies (N = 7,447), and -.16 with grade point average. Steel summarized the pattern bluntly: procrastination is usually harmful, sometimes harmless, but never helpful. That cost is about the same size as the benefit conscientiousness brings to performance, which makes sense if procrastination is largely the absence of that trait.

This creates a confound worth knowing about. Because procrastination lowers grades, a researcher who used grades as a stand-in for intelligence could wrongly conclude that procrastinators are less able. Studies that use actual ability tests, as in Steel's intelligence estimate, find no difference.

Other factors also shape who procrastinates.

• Age: in Steel's meta-analysis, procrastination declined with age (r = -.15 before correction, and much stronger once Steel corrected for the narrow age range of student samples).

• Sex: men procrastinated only slightly more than women (a correlation of about .08 between sex and procrastination, across 44 studies).

• Education: in a global online survey of 16,413 adults, Steel and Ferrari (2013) found that procrastinators tended to be young, single men with less education. That survey was cross-sectional, so it cannot say whether procrastination limits education or the reverse.

Test-taking effort is a separate issue from everyday procrastination. A person who does not try hard during an IQ test can score well below their ability, a problem discussed in our article on the impact of motivation on IQ scores. If procrastination is severe and long-standing, or comes with problems with attention and organization across many areas of life, a family doctor or a licensed psychologist can help work out what is going on.

No. A meta-analysis of 14 studies found a correlation of .03 between procrastination and intelligence or aptitude, which is effectively zero.

Not measurably. High and low scorers procrastinate at about the same rates; the trait that predicts procrastination is low conscientiousness, which is itself nearly unrelated to IQ.

Partly. A Colorado twin study estimated procrastination to be about 46% heritable and found that its genetic influences overlap almost completely with those on impulsivity.

One set of studies found that moderate procrastination was linked to more creative ideas than very little or a lot of procrastination. The same research found that procrastination reduced task efficiency.

Usually, though modestly. Procrastination correlated about -.19 with academic performance in a meta-analysis of 41 studies.

Procrastination says almost nothing about how intelligent someone is. It is best understood as a self-control problem tied to low conscientiousness and impulsiveness, and it tends to cost a little in grades and performance whatever a person's ability. If you want a measure of your reasoning ability that is separate from your habits, you can take a full-length online IQ test.

1. Steel, P. (2007). The nature of procrastination: A meta-analytic and theoretical review of quintessential self-regulatory failure. Psychological Bulletin, 133(1), 65-94. [doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.133.1.65](. doi.org

2. Gustavson, D. E., Miyake, A., Hewitt, J. K., & Friedman, N. P. (2014). Genetic relations among procrastination, impulsivity, and goal-management ability: Implications for the evolutionary origin of procrastination. Psychological Science, 25(6), 1178-1188. [doi.org/10.1177/0956797614526260](. doi.org

3. Gustavson, D. E., Miyake, A., Hewitt, J. K., & Friedman, N. P. (2015). Understanding the cognitive and genetic underpinnings of procrastination: Evidence for shared genetic influences with goal management and executive function abilities. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 144(6), 1063-1079. [doi.org/10.1037/xge0000110](. doi.org

4. Anglim, J., Dunlop, P. D., Wee, S., Horwood, S., Wood, J. K., & Marty, A. (2022). Personality and intelligence: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 148(5-6), 301-336. [doi.org/10.1037/bul0000373](. doi.org

5. Shin, J., & Grant, A. M. (2021). When putting work off pays off: The curvilinear relationship between procrastination and creativity. Academy of Management Journal, 64(3), 772-798. [doi.org/10.5465/amj.2018.1471](. doi.org

6. 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. [doi.org/10.1002/per.1851](. doi.org

Hero image: Sand clock Enschede, by Gianluca Miscione, CC BY-SA 4.0. Via Wikimedia Commons.