Description
The use of the label “procrastinator” for individuals raises several ethical issues, cutting across research ethics and clinical ethics. In this paper, my aim is not to pass judgment but to spark discussion within the field on the ethical choices faced by procrastination researchers and clinicians.One set of issues involves the responsibilities for stereotyping and stigmatizing effects of labeling practices. As with mental health labels such as “ADHD,” characterizations of people as “procrastinators” can serve as a basis for discrimination, particularly when the label is combined in every more sophisticated ways with characteristics of individuals that can be gleaned from social media and fed into predictive analytic algorithms that are used for estimating, for example, a person's credit score or employability.
A second potential harm lies in the domain of self-labeling, where there is a “perfect storm” for erratic patterns of self-diagnosis: the prevalence and familiarity of procrastination, together with the increasing tendency to “Google” symptoms in search of a self-diagnosis, and the widespread confusion generated by competing conceptualization of “procrastination.”
Ironically, the frequent (and appropriate) response to both of these concerns – namely, to call for more rigorous empirical research – raises a third issue, regarding what our research priorities ought to be. With the growing influence of biologically based paradigms (such as the NIMH’s Research Domain Criteria (RDoC)), funding opportunities are likely to go increasingly to approaches that try to get at the “real” nature, understood exclusively in terms of the genetic and or neurobiological causes a condition, such as procrastination (or its component parts). Whatever the scientific merits of such approaches, they challenge many clinical and humanistic understandings of procrastination, understandings that help people make sense of their lived struggles and felt suffering with culpably unwarranted delay. And this raises ethical concerns.
Period | 25 Jul 2019 |
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Event title | 11th Procrastination Research Conference |
Event type | Conference |
Location | Sheffield, United KingdomShow on map |
Keywords
- Procrastination
- Ethics of labeling