1. The study of Reber et al. (2006):Reber et al. (2006): © POSbase 2008Contributor People often misjudge their own performance (Kruger, 1999). There are different explanations for this effect. Reber et al. tested whether processing fluency – the ease of processing an action or event – influences judgments of past performance.processing fluency judgments Processing Fluency and Judgments of Performance

2. © POSbase 2008 In order to test this, the authors used comparative performance judgments after an action: Participants were asked how well they did in comparison to their fellow students. They had to put a mark on an unnumbered scale which was 100 mm long. Therefore, one could directly measure the percentile of one‘s own judged performance and translate it into „I was better than __% of the student population.“ Processing Fluency and Judgments of Performance

3. © POSbase 2008 In one of the experiments, participants who did not much sports had to run in place for either 15 seconds or 2 minutes and then to tell how well they did in comparison to their fellow students. Those running 15 seconds estimated that they were better than 63% of the other students, whereas those running 2 minutes thought that they were better than 48% of the student population. The easier it was to perform the running-in-place task, the better they thought they were. Processing Fluency and Judgments of Performance

4. © POSbase 2008 In another experiment, participants got a recognition test for a word list they saw earlier (incidental learning task). For one group, 2/3 of the items were old words and 1/3 new words, which yields more fluent processing of the item list than for the other group, where 1/3 of the items were old words and 2/3 new words. recognition Processing Fluency and Judgments of Performance

5. © POSbase 2008 Although recognition performance was not different, participants with 2/3 old words estimated that they were better than 67% of the other students, whereas those having only 1/3 old words thought that they were better than 59% of the student population. The easier it was to perform the recognition task, the better the participants thought they were, supporting the notion that processing fluency influences comparative performance judgments. Processing Fluency and Judgments of Performance