Are You a 'Pre-Crastinator'?


You’ve no doubt heard of procrastination. You might be procrastinating right now by reading this story. But have you met procrastination’s cousin, “pre-crastination”?

The term was recently coined by researchers from Penn State University, who define it as “the inclination to complete tasks quickly just for the sake of getting things done sooner rather than later.”

Pre-crastinators are compelled to check things off their to-do list ASAP, whether or not the job is well done, according to research by psychology professor David Rosenbaum and Cory Potts, a graduate student.

The researchers came to this conclusion after studying the economics of effort. They asked participants to carry one of two buckets a certain distance. One bucket was closer to the subject, and the other closer to the finish line. They wondered whether people would naturally pick up the bucket they could carry the least—that is, the one closer to the finish line. That required the least amount of effort.

But to their surprise, that’s not what many participants did. “We got instead this strange thing where they were frequently picking up the closer of the two buckets,” Potts explains to mental_floss. Over and over, in a series of nine experiments involving 250 participants, many people chose the bucket closest to them and carried it all the way to the finish line, increasing the amount of effort they had to expend. Why?

“‘I wanted to get it done more quickly,’” Potts says these participants reported. But there was no reason for them to believe that picking up the closer bucket would get the job done faster. They had to walk the same distance regardless.

We see real-life examples of pre-crastination all the time. “People answer emails immediately rather than carefully contemplating their replies,” explains Rosenbaum in Scientific American. “And, people grab items when they first enter the grocery store, carry them to the back of the store, pick up more groceries at the back, and then return to the front of the store to pay and exit, thus toting the items farther than necessary.”

Rosenbaum and Potts speculate that our pre-crastination tendencies are rooted in evolution. (In other experiments they ran, pigeons proved to be pre-crastinators too.) One theory is that getting things done quickly frees up part of our working memory, making room for other more demanding tasks. Or perhaps it’s a remnant of our need to take whatever we can while it’s available—a sort of “low-hanging fruit” approach.

But maybe the answer is even simpler, Potts says. Checking things off a to-do list just feels good, no matter how trivial the task. How many times have you put on your to-do list something that’s easy to accomplish just so you could cross it off?

Wait, so now we have to worry about not getting things done too late or too early? Actually, Rosenbaum and Potts say these two forces can work together. “Break larger tasks into smaller ones,” Rosenbaum says. “Such smaller tasks, when completed, will promote a sense of accomplishment, will bring one closer to the final goal, and, via trial-and-error learning, may support the discovery of even more adaptive or innovative ways of behaving.”

And we admire pre-crastinators. “Finishing tasks quickly gets you a reputation as being a conscientious person,” Potts says.

Not-So-Fancy Feast: Your Cat Probably Would Eat Your Rotting Corpse

Tycson1/iStock via Getty Images
Tycson1/iStock via Getty Images

Cat enthusiasts often cite the warmth and companionship offered by their pet as reasons why they’re so enamored with them. Despite these and other positive attributes, cat lovers are often confronted with the spurious claim that, while their beloved furry pal might adore them when they’re alive, it won’t hesitate to devour their corpse if they should drop dead.

Though that’s often dismissed as negative cat propaganda spread by dog people, it turns out that it’s probably true. Fluffy might indeed feast on your flesh if you happened to expire.

A horrifying new case study published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences offers the fresh evidence. The paper, first reported by The Washington Post, documents how two cats reacted in the presence of a corpse at Colorado Mesa University’s Forensic Investigation Research Station, or body farm, where the deceased are used to further forensic science for criminal investigations.

The study’s authors did not orchestrate a meeting between cat and corpse. The finding happened by accident: Student and lead author Sara Garcia was scanning surveillance footage of the grounds when she noticed a pair of cats trespassing. The cats, she found, were interested in the flesh of two corpses; they gnawed on human tissue while it was still in the early stages of decomposition, stopping only when the bodies began leaching fluids.

The cats, which were putting away one corpse each, didn’t appear to have a taste for variety, as they both returned to the same corpse virtually every night. The two seemed to prefer the shoulder and arm over other body parts.

This visual evidence joins a litany of reports over the years from medical examiners, who have observed the damage left by both cats and dogs who were trapped in homes with deceased owners and proceeded to eat them. It’s believed pets do this when no other food source is available, though in some cases, eating their human has occurred even with a full food bowl. It’s something to consider the next time your cat gives you an affectionate lick on the arm. Maybe it loves you. Or maybe it has something else in mind.

[h/t The Washington Post]

Wolf Puppies Play Fetch, Too, Study Finds

Christina Hansen Wheat
Christina Hansen Wheat

It took thousands of years of selective breeding for wolves to become the Golden Retrievers you see at dog parks today. Domesticated dogs are very different from their wild counterparts, but according to a new study, they may have a surprising trait in common. Researchers found that some wolf puppies are willing to play fetch with total strangers, suggesting that following human commands is intrinsic to canines.

For their study in the journal iScience, researchers from Stockholm University in Sweden set out to find how domestication affects behaviors in young wolves. They raised litters of wolf and dog pups separately from 10 days old and placed them in various scenarios.

When the scientists tested how the wolf puppies would respond to a game of fetch, they expected to be ignored. Chasing a ball and bringing it back requires understanding human commands and obeying them—abilities that were thought to only have emerged in dogs post-domestication.

The first two wolf groups met expectations by showing little interest in the toy, but something different happened with the third set. Three eight-week old pups went after the ball and brought it back when they were encouraged to do so. This was the case even when the person giving the commands was someone they had never met before.

Even though most of the puppies didn't play fetch, the fact that those who did belonged to the same litter indicates a "standing variation" for a retrieving trait in wolves. "When you talk about a specific trait in the context of standing variation, it means that there is variation for the expression of this trait within a given population," co-author Christina Hansen Wheat tells Mental Floss. "For our study it suggests that, while probably rare, standing variation in the expression of human-directed behavior in ancestral populations could have been an important target for early selective pressures exerted during dog domestication." In other words, ancient people seeking to domesticate wolves might have focused on some wolves' innate ability to follow human commands.

The first dogs were domesticated as far back as 33,000 years ago. Over millennia, humans have selected for traits like loyalty, friendliness, and playfulness to create the modern dog, but these new findings could mean that the dog's earliest canine ancestors were genetically predisposed toward some of these behaviors.

"All three litters were brought up under identical and standardized conditions across years," Hansen says of the pups in the study. "With this significant effort to control the environmental conditions, it is likely that the differences in behavior across litters to some extent have a genetic basis."

After raising the dog and wolf litters for three years and completing that part of their study, the researchers will continue to analyze their data to see if there are any other adorable (or weird) traits the two groups share.