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The proportion heuristic: problem set size as a basis for performance judgments
Author(s) -
Silvera David H.,
Josephs Robert A.,
Giesler R. Brian
Publication year - 2001
Publication title -
journal of behavioral decision making
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.136
H-Index - 76
eISSN - 1099-0771
pISSN - 0894-3257
DOI - 10.1002/bdm.373
Subject(s) - feeling , task (project management) , set (abstract data type) , heuristic , psychology , preparedness , cognitive psychology , social psychology , work (physics) , computer science , artificial intelligence , management , political science , law , economics , programming language , mechanical engineering , engineering
How do people evaluate their degree of mastery over a task? A series of four studies demonstrated that a potentially irrelevant cue can have a strong influence on such evaluations. In these studies, the total amount of work given to participants (the problem set size) influenced both (a) the amount of work participants completed before feeling that they had performed well and were adequately prepared for a related future task, and (b) participants' assessments of their performance and their feelings of preparedness for a related future task. These effects occurred even when a randomization procedure was used to emphasize the arbitrary nature of the problem set size. The effects vanished, however, when participants were given extra time to evaluate their progress after completing each problem. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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