The effect of constrained processing on auditors’ judgments

This study examines whether constraining experienced auditors’ processing by having them process evidence in a pre-established sequence (an experimental control technique used in previous studies) prevents them from using their usual processing strategies and thereby affects their judgments. We compare the relative attention to evidence and judgments of experienced and inexperienced auditors in a constrained versus an unconstrained processing condition. Consistent with expectations, experienced auditors’ going-concern judgments differed from inexperienced auditors’ judgments only when processing was unconstrained. This difference in judgments was the result of differential attention to evidence. These results demonstrate that the failure to consider how experienced auditors process evidence can result in inadvertently adopting control techniques that limit the generalizability of experimental findings. Although our study used a going-concern task, our conclusions are likely to apply to a variety of ill-structured audit tasks that require a goal-oriented, directed evaluation of evidence.