Santo Domingo.- A study presented by the Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra (PUCMM) during the PUCMM 2025 Research Week revealed that dependence on artificial intelligence tools, such as ChatgPT, can increase academic procrastination and, indirectly, weaken the critical thinking of university students.
The research, titled “ChatgPT generation: age, sex and academic stage as predictors of the relationship between AI and critical thinking”, indicates that dependence on AI has an overall negative and significant impact on critical thinking, mediated by procrastination.
The study—in a preliminary phase and developed by the PUCMM School of Psychology—was carried out with
a sample of 416 Dominican university students, with an average age of 27 years.
The results showed that older students tend to procrastinate less and maintain more stable critical thinking. “Students could have the ease of not doing.
Critical thinking takes effort, and the tool makes it easy to avoid it.
This can explain the phenomenon of procrastination,” explained Jairo Espinal Martínez, professor at the PUCMM School of Psychology and main author of the study.
He added that the male sex was associated with higher levels of academic procrastination.
“The ChatgPT generation does not lose its critical thinking by using artificial intelligence, but rather when it delegates personal cognitive effort to technology. The impact of AI depends on the degree of self-regulation.”
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Espinal pointed out that he is working on expanding the study, with the goal of exceeding 1,000 participants.
and delve deeper into the patterns of relationships between technological dependency.
