Judgment by quantity.

Abstract

Five studies are presented that demonstrate the influence of computationally simple quantity information on judgment and the regulation of behavior. Study 1 revealed that Ss used the height of a pile of pages of text to judge their proofreading performance, even when pile size was obviously not determined by the amount of text proofread. In Studies 2 and 3, Ss also used nondiagnostic size information to regulate the amount of time and effort they spent on the task. In Study 4, Ss regulated the amount of effort they spent on a complex essay-writing task by using nondiagnostic page length information. In Study 5, nondiagnostic size information dominated objective performance information, but only when the completed task was in full view of the S. A linguistic mechanism is suggested to explain the use of a judgment by quantity strategy.