Think then act, or act then think? Double-response reaction times shed light on decision dynamics in precrastination

People often try to complete tasks as soon as possible, even at the expense of extra effort-a phenomenon called precrastination (Rosenbaum et al., 2014). Because precrastination is so widespread-as in answering emails too quickly, submitting papers before they have been polished, or, on larger scales, convicting people in the rush to judgment, or even going to war in the rush for revenge-it is important to understand its basis. Building on previous work on this phenomenon, we focused on two plausible accounts of it. According to the behavioral account, there is a desire to act for the sake of acting itself. According to the cognitive account, there is a desire to shorten one's mental to-do list so cognitive resources can be directed to other things. We invented a new task to distinguish between these hypotheses. Our participants made yes-no decisions under the requirement that they always respond twice per trial. We found that participants took longer for the first choice than the second and rarely changed their minds, even when second response accuracy was emphasized. This outcome went against the behavioral account, which predicted shorter first-response times than second-response times and lower (near chance) first-response accuracies than second-response accuracies. Instead, the data clearly showed that participants did all or most of their decision-making up front. The double-response reaction time task provides a new tool for studying decision dynamics. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).