The proportion heuristic: Problem set size as a basis for performance judgments

How do people evaluate their degree of mastery over a task? A series of fou r studies demonstrated that a potentially irrelevant cue can have a strong influence on such evaluations. In these studies, the total amount of work g iven 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) participant s' assessments of their performance and their feelings of preparedness for a related future task. These effects occurred even when a randomization pro cedure was used to emphasize the arbitrary nature of the problem set size. The effects vanished, however, when participants were given extra time to e valuate their progress after completing each problem. Copyright (C) 2001 Jo hn Wiley & Sons, Ltd.