The Way Forward on Professional Skepticism: Conceptualizing Professional Skepticism as an Attitude

Professional skepticism is fundamental to audit quality, yet it is ill defined. Consequently, we first develop an attitude definition of professional skepticism, along with measures that can be used to infer the nature and strength of the auditors’ underlying professionally skeptical attitudes. Our measures include both skeptical judgments and skeptical actions, as advocated by Nelson (2009) and Hurtt, Brown-Liburd, Earley, and Krishnamoorthy (2013), along with an affective aspect, which is gaining attention in audit research (e.g., Bhattacharjee and Moreno 2013; Guenin-Paracini, Malsch, and Marche Paille 2014). We then place our attitude conceptualization of professional skepticism within our Auditors’ Judgment and Decision Making (JDM) Research Framework, which we developed to organize the auditor judgment literature, at large. Our framework allows researchers to identify what is and what is not a professional skepticism study, while also providing insights about the important relationships among auditors’ cognitive processes, their attitudes, and the extent to which those attitudes manifest in their judgments and decisions. Together, our attitude conceptualization of professional skepticism and our proposed framework for auditors’ JDM research facilitate the identification of root causes of audit deficiencies and facilitate the development of interventions to correct such deficiencies. Thus, we expect they will be valuable tools for researchers who wish to maximize the scholarly contribution of their future work.