Money illusions and the judgements of professional quanitity surveyors

Clients of the construction industry need reliable professional advice. A factor that affects the quality of this advice is human judgement. The exercise of judgement is a human cognitive process that has been found to be subject to errors, bias, and heuristics. Although it is generally accepted that such errors, bias, and heuristics are used by lay people thinking intuitively there exists as yet no consensus on whether the same traits can be found in the judgements made by professionals when they consider problems within their own domain. This paper reports the results of a quantitatively based investigation into the nature of the judgements made by professionally qualified consultant quantity surveyors when they were asked to consider context-related word problems. The study is part of an international investigation of the issue and the data generated as a result of this work with practitioners based in England is capable of being compared with the results of similar studies undertaken in Hong Kong, South Africa and Australia. The paper concludes by calling for more work to be undertaken with professionally qualified construction industry practitioners in the consideration of actual rather than simulated professional problems in order to determine whether the presence of quasi-rational judgements found in the results of this study are replicated in real life situations