The antecedents and profiles of postgraduate students’ academic procrastination: examining the role of mindset-based meaning system

Despite the established importance of mindset in education, its specific role in postgraduate contexts remains underexplored, particularly concerning how a fixed mindset influences the mechanisms of academic procrastination. Guided by the mindset-based meaning system framework, this study investigated whether a fixed mindset predicts academic procrastination among postgraduate students through the sequential mediation of academic self-efficacy and fear of failure. A sample of 811 postgraduate students was surveyed and analyzed using both variable-centered and person-centered approaches. The variable-centered SEM analysis confirmed that a fixed mindset indirectly increased procrastination through lower self-efficacy and higher fear of failure. The person-centered LPA analysis identified three distinct subgroups: Growth-oriented, Vulnerability-prone, and Defense-driven profiles. The Growth-oriented profile, characterized by low fixed mindset, high self-efficacy, and low fear of failure, reported the lowest levels of academic procrastination. Contrary to the Vulnerability-prone profile, the Defense-driven profile exhibited the highest level of academic procrastination despite high fixed mindset when coupled with high academic self-efficacy, underscoring the importance of considering holistic patterns rather than isolated characteristics to comprehend the intricacies of the mindset-based meaning system. These findings highlight the need for educational institutions to develop comprehensive interventions targeting postgraduate students’ mindset-based meaning systems to foster adaptive behaviors and mitigate academic procrastination.