The Role of the Attitudes in Auditing Research and Directions for Future Research

Attitudes play an important role in determining how the audit will be conducted, and thus, directly impact audit quality. In particular, regulators require that auditors maintain an attitude of professional skepticism and independence of mind throughout the financial statement audit. Despite the heavy emphasis on auditors’ professional skepticism and independence of mind in professional standards, researchers studying auditor judgment and decision-making have only rarely examined auditors’ attitudes explicitly. In this book chapter, we draw from both the attitude literature in social psychology and the auditor judgment and decision-making literature to develop a conceptual framework that depicts important auditor attitudes along with their antecedents and consequential behaviors. One important antecedent that helps form attitudes is cognitive processing (i.e., critical thinking). We utilize the Heuristic-Systematic Model (HSM) to explain the nature of auditors’ vs. inspectors’ potentially different approaches to cognitive processing that may shed light on why they have different perceptions of what constitutes appropriate and sufficient evidence. Overall, the HSM demonstrates that engaging in both heuristic (e.g., intuitive) and systematic information processing can increase efficiency in achieving the goal of an objective evaluation of the evidence (i.e., objective attitude).