Abstract Auditors' perceptions of the diagnosticity of behaviors in evaluating the competence and integrity of client personnel are investigated. This paper examines, in a professional judgment setting, three integration phenomena which have been documented by social psychologists in people's everyday impression formation: positivity, negativity, and extremity. Seventy-five practicing auditors with median experience of 4.5 years participated in the study. These participants made assessments of the likelihood of an individual with an identified trait exhibiting a specific behavior. Eighty assessments were made for a combination of 20 ability behaviors, 20 integrity behaviors, and two trait dimensions competent/incompetent, honest/dishonest. In making integrity judgments, the auditors perceived negative behaviors as more diagnostic than positive behaviors (negativity). In competence judgments, positive behaviors were perceived as more diagnostic (positivity). In addition, extreme behaviors were perceived as more diagnostic than moderate behaviors in both competence and integrity judgments. Potential implications of these results for the selection of audit strategies and the allocation of audit resources are discussed.
Anderson et al. (Thu,) studied this question.
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