Social media addiction mediates the relationship between basic psychological needs satisfaction and academic procrastination

Abstract Academic procrastination is the failure to perform academic tasks on time or not doing at all. It can cause undesirable consequences for students' academic development and mental health. It has a complex structure that includes cognitive and emotional components in addition to its behavioral dimension. This study seeks to answer whether social media addiction mediates the relationship between satisfaction of basic psychological needs and academic procrastination. The participants were 647 university students (70.6% female and 29.4% male) representative of all the programs in the College of Education at a public university in Turkey. We used two analytic approaches to test the mediation effect (regression with bootstrap and structural equation modeling) and arrived the same conclusion. Results showed that social media addiction partially mediated the relationship between university students' basic psychological needs and academic procrastination. While greater satisfaction of basic psychological needs was directly related to a reduction in academic procrastination, indirectly, it was associated with a further decrease in academic procrastination through social media addiction. Thus, we suggest that preventive and curative psychological services should focus on enhancing the satisfaction of basic psychological needs (autonomy, competence, and relatedness) to help mitigate the development of social media addiction, which further reduces academic procrastination.