If you meant to do something and didn’t, you may call that laziness, but a psychologist would label it procrastination.Īnd psychologists have studied procrastination and what causes it. One person’s idea of “lazy” may be another’s idea of a hard day’s work. That’s according to the work of Michael Jacobsen, PhD, a professor of sociology at Aalborg University in Denmark.įirst, it’s important to point out that pretty much all the research on what people call “laziness” focuses on procrastination.Īgain, this is because laziness is a lay expression, not a formal term, and it’s also a matter of subjective opinion. Laziness, in other words, is always subjective. When exactly does the absence of work qualify as laziness? We all think we’ll know it when we see it. We all engage in pastimes that are pleasurable or restorative, rather than productive. The fact that you procrastinate doesn’t make you lazy. It’s important to make these distinctions because even the most tireless and diligent people sometimes procrastinate. While identifying times when someone procrastinates is often straightforward, nailing down examples of laziness is much trickier. Research has found that up to 20 percent of adults, and fully half of college students, feel that they struggle with procrastination. “We all delay things, but procrastination is a unique form of delay that is self-defeating and has no inherent upside,” Pychyl says. If a person never wanted or intended to do something, they may be labeled “lazy” by a parent or boss, but they wouldn’t meet a psychologist’s definition of procrastination.
A person must intend to do something, and then decide not to do it for the act to qualify as procrastination. “Procrastination is the voluntary delay of an intended act despite expecting to be worse off,” he says. “Both words are used for a disinclination to make effort, and we use both of these words in everyday speech to impugn others,” says Tim Pychyl, PhD, a procrastination researcher who was formerly an associate professor of psychology at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, before retiring from that position earlier this year.īut “procrastination” and “laziness” are not quite interchangeable - at least not to a psychologist, Dr. But it tracks closely with a related and well-studied phenomenon: procrastination. That research reveals how, when, and why people may engage in apparent acts of laziness, and what you can do about it if you think it’s a problem.Īccording to a study published in 2018 in the journal Human Arenas, laziness can be regarded as a failure to act or perform as expected due to conscious, controllable factors - namely a lack of individual effort.Īccording to this definition, a student who can’t get their work done because of an attention disorder would not meet this definition of lazy, while a student who is capable of doing the work but chooses not to would fit this definition.īecause of all this, the concept of laziness doesn’t show up frequently in psychology research. Some say it is related to procrastination - a phenomenon that psychology has clearly defined and studied. Other experts are less dismissive of laziness. “When people appear to lack motivation, it is because they are exhausted, traumatized, in need of support, or do not see any logical incentive to taking part in a task,” he says. It is Price’s view - one he lays out in his recent book, Laziness Does Not Exist - that laziness as people understand it is a misconception. “This takes a massive psychological toll on us and leaves us at a massive risk of burnout.”
Lazy definition professional#
“We aren’t even free during our downtime we are expected to be perfect professional paragons constantly,” he says. Price says that changes in workplace practices and always-connected mobile technologies have broadened our ideas of what laziness looks like. “It dates back to the Puritans and the beliefs they had about hard work being a signal that a person was morally upstanding.”Īlong with our current emphasis on “productivity,” Dr.
“Our culture’s belief that people are secretly ‘lazy’ deep down and need to be browbeaten into productivity is very old and has far-reaching roots,” says Devon Price, PhD, a psychologist and clinical assistant professor at Loyola University in Chicago. Some experts see these criticisms as signs of unhelpful cultural pressures and narratives, rather than pointing the finger at people’s behavior. Another 2019 Pew survey found that a majority of Americans think people are lazier now than they used to be.
And yet a lot of us are willing to slap this label on ourselves and, even more so, on other people.Īccording to Pew Research Center survey data, about half of Americans in 2015 - and 63 percent of Millennials - believe that the typical U.S. American society, by and large, prizes hard work and diligence.
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