Report of the Committee on the Relationship of Behavioral Science and Accounting.

Abstract The article presents the text of the 1972-73 report of the American Accounting Association Committee on the relationship of behavioral science and accounting. Behavioral accountants typically have been trained traditionally as either accountants or behavioral scientists. Some accountants have used behavioral methods to test hypotheses; some behavioral scientists have used accounting situations and contexts to test general behavioral hypotheses. In the past, behavioral accounting research has been conducted by accountants with occasional and often casual inputs from behavioral scientists. Basically, the accountants have interesting problems which are likely to be amenable to behavioral techniques, whereas the behavioral scientists have the requisite skill in those techniques. Perhaps the greatest deficiency in behavioral accounting research is the lack of formal models. By formal models, here, we simply mean systematic attempts to formulate sets of principles, postulates, and hypotheses about relationships among variables which can then be tested empirically. Essentially, it includes any attempt to formalize a priori the relationships between selected independent and dependent variables.