Resisting Management Influence: Auditor Characteristics that Inhibit Motivated Reasoning.

• In Event: Professional Skepticism in Auditing

Abstract

We study motivated reasoning and the auditors who successfully inhibit it. We find that most auditors initially inhibit motivated reasoning, identifying an unreasonable management preference, but many do not persistently inhibit motivated reasoning, judging that same preference’s recording as acceptable, suggesting most auditors are initially uninfluenced by management’s preferences—as auditors insist—but ultimately influenced—as skeptics allege. Auditors with higher cognitive ability more persistently inhibit motivated reasoning, but only when deploying targeted cognitive effort to do so. Generally, higher emotional stability and extroversion (agreeableness) levels also positively (negatively) correlate with persistently inhibiting motivated reasoning, as does dispositional fear of negative evaluation. Neither auditors’ conscientiousness nor indecisiveness affect motivated reasoning inhibition and, counterintuitively, professional identification negatively correlate with it.

Authors

• Brent A Garza, Texas A&M University

• Brian C Fitzgerald, Northeastern University

• Kecia Williams Smith, North Carolina A&T State University