Professionally Skeptical Yet Politically Susceptible: Variance Explanations Are Less Believable When Provided by Political Opponents

• In Event: Social Ties, Team Identity, and Political Bias

Abstract

Political polarization causes people to feel positively towards those of the same political affiliation and negatively towards the opposition, influencing their behavior in the same direction. While this effect should be mitigated for accountants due to their professional requirement to be objective, our experiment shows that accounting students in the role of management accountants are less likely to believe variance explanations provided by managers with opposing political beliefs compared to those with similar beliefs. This occurs because the participants dislike managers they perceive to be less similar to them and find them (and their explanations) to be less trustworthy, but only when sharing political beliefs is important to the participants. We also find that whether or not the effect manifests through state professional skepticism, heightened trait professional skepticism has limited ability to insulate participants from the effects of outgroup hate.

Authors

• Elena Klevsky, University of Tampa

• Robert P. Mocadlo, University of North Dakota

• Robert Rankin, Texas A&M University - Commerce