Transformative moderation: Self-control redefines the relationship between social media usage perception and academic burnout among high-achieving adolescents.

Procrastination, putting off against better judgement, is commonly known as a self‐regulation failure (e.g., Steel, ). Previous procrastination research and interventions have focused on person‐related antecedents of procrastination. A growing body of literature, however, suggests that situational and social factors may also influence procrastination episodes (e.g., Bäulke & Dresel, ; Svartdal et al., ). One social factor, which might have an effect on procrastination and which is very common in higher education, is group work among students. Group as compared to individual work can increase individual effort and performance, if the own contribution is perceived as indispensable for the group product (Johnson & Johnson, ; Torka et al., ; Weber & Hertel, ). This typically occurs in conjunctive group work, in which the group performance is determined by the weakest group member (Steiner, ). Here, the least capable group member exhibits effort and performance gains (Torka et al., ; Weber & Hertel, ). This might also apply, albeit to a lesser extent, to additive group work, in which the group performance is determined by all members' contributions (Steiner, ). Here, the weakest group member's contribution can be compensated by stronger group members, rendering perceptions of indispensability less pronounced. This raises the question whether conjunctive and additive group work can also reduce procrastination. There is initial pertinent evidence from a qualitative study (Klingsieck et al., ) and a vignette study (Koppenborg et al., ), whose generalizability to real settings is limited. In this registered field experiment, we investigated the effects of conjunctive and additive group work versus individual work on procrastination, monitoring positive and negative affect as key variables in procrastination research and exploring indispensability perceptions as a potential underlying variable. The results should be relevant not only for interventions against procrastination but also for a new approach that seeks to prevent it by changing the learning environment. Procrastination has been defined as “the voluntary delay of an intended course of action despite expecting to be worse of for the delay” (Steel, , p. 66) and has been coined as the “quintessential self‐regulatory failure” (Steel, , p. 65). As an umbrella term, self‐regulation includes the regulation of cognition, emotion and behaviour for the sake of reaching a personal goal (Inzlicht et al., ). In the cognitive dimension, procrastination has been associated, with deficits in executive functions (e.g., Gustavson et al., ; Rabin et al., ), in the emotional dimension with emotional dysregulation (Wiwatowska et al., ) or unsuccessful down‐regulation of task‐related negative affect (e.g., Duru et al., ; Eckert et al., ) and, in the behavioural dimension, with failure to prepare the learning environment to avoid distraction (e.g., Chen et al., ; Senécal et al., ).