Deadlines and procrastination
A 2002 paper in Psychological Science asks whether deadlines help people overcome procrastination. In its second study, sixty participants were paid to proofread three ten-page documents over 21 days, twenty in each of three conditions: one document due each week, deadlines they chose themselves, or all three due on the last day. Participants with evenly spaced deadlines made about 136 corrections on average, against about 71 with a single final deadline, and were also less late and earned more; those who chose their own deadlines fell in between. The authors conclude that people recognise their self-control problems and impose costly deadlines on themselves, and that these deadlines help but are not as effective as evenly spaced external ones. The paper is widely taught and has been cited more than 2,000 times.
It failed. Psychological Science retracts it, 2 September 2026. Asked first, the model said it didn’t know how this ended.
What the lenses found that the standard AI missed
Why: Simon's idea that attention is the scarce resource led the lens to read each deadline as a reminder and pacing cue, an account needing no self-control failure. Its cited post-1980 studies added evidence on memory and forgetting, and one commitment result. The standard AI instead proposed fatigue or extra effort, and doubted early choices show self-knowledge.
What the standard AI found that the review didn’t
Why: The standard AI cited nothing; it reasoned that a middle average could hide a split, some choosing spaced dates and doing well, others late dates and doing badly, which within-condition comparison cannot settle. Feynman instead held that 'in between' would appear half the time if self-set deadlines did nothing, and that the motive was never measured.
Why: The standard AI set the paper's fame against knowing of no large preregistered repeat, and cited a later paper co-authored by the first author, retracted in 2021 over fabricated data, as a reason to check raw data, not evidence against this one. Feynman raised replication only as a missing result, keeping to the study's design.
Both answers found 5 other problems, matched blind.