Time required to complete a task. When asked, “How much time will you require to com...

Time required to complete a task. When asked, “How much time will you require to complete this task?”, cognitive theory posits that people will typically underestimate the time required. Would the opposite theory hold if the question was phrased in terms of how much work could be completed in a given amount of time? This was the question of interest to researchers writing in Applied Cognitive Psychology (Vol. 25, 2011). For one study conducted by the researchers, each in a sample of 40 University of Oslo students was asked how many minutes it would take to read a 32-page report. In a second study, 42 students were asked how many pages of a lengthy report they could read in 48 minutes. (The students in either study did not actually read the report.) Numerical descriptive statistics (based on summary information published in the article) for both studies are provided in the accompanying table.