PhronesisChronic lateness is a wrong attractor W_late in which the person's relationship to time is organized around systematic underestimation of duration, transition costs, and task completion time — producing reliable, recurring lateness across contexts despite genuine intentions to be on time. We apply the Displacement Framework to formalize chronic lateness. The temporal accountability ground state S0_temporal is defined via Zimbardo and Boyd's balanced time perspective and the implicit social contract of punctuality.
W_late is maintained through the planning fallacy and optimism bias (Kahneman and Tversky 1979 — systematic underestimation of task completion times based on idealized best-case scenarios ignoring past experience; Buehler et al. 1994 — robust across incentive conditions), time blindness (Barkley 1997/2015 — ADHD executive function impairment reducing the ability to sense time passage as neurological variant), and the transition cost underestimation problem (systematic failure to account for the time costs of task-switching and routine transitions).
Nine formal propositions cover: S0_temporal as temporal accountability (P1), W_late as time-dysregulation wrong attractor distinct from passive-aggressive lateness (P2), the planning fallacy (P3), time blindness as neurological variant (P4), transition cost underestimation (P5), relational and social dimensions — the implicit communication that the late person's time is more valuable (P6), overlap with ADHD, anxiety, and perfectionism (P7), cumulative Phi_late across relational, occupational, identity, and somatic domains (P8), and return paths including external time scaffolding, departure time calculation, and ADHD-specific interventions (P9).