People take longer to judge part-to-whole relationships with bar graph
s than with pie charts or divided bar graphs. Subjects may perform sum
mation operations to establish the whole with bar graphs, which would
be unnecessary for other graph types depicting the whole with a single
object. To test this summation model, the number of components formin
g the whole was varied with bars, divided bars, reference bars, and pi
es in three experiments. Response time increased with the number of co
mponents for bar graphs but there was little increase for other graph
types in Experiment 1. An accuracy emphasis in Experiment 2 produced g
enerally longer response times, but had little effect on the time per
summation. The summation operation was not used when graphs were displ
ayed briefly in Experiment 3, although subjects still look longer with
bars. The estimated time for a summation operation is consistent with
estimates derived from other research. In general, the bar graph is n
ot effective for proportion judgments, and its disadvantage becomes po
tentially greater as the number of components increases. (C) 1998 John
Wiley & Sons, Ltd.