The effects of counterexplanation and source of hypothesis on developing audit judgment

Inheriting a hypothesis from a superior and explaining one's decision may lead to the use of a hypothesis-confirming strategy (Church, 1991; 1990). This study investigates whether generating one's own hypothesis and counterexplaining would mitigate such behaviour among auditing students in a classroom situation. We hypothesized that auditing students who inherit their hypothesis from an instructor would resort to a hypothesis-confirming strategy whereas those who generate their own hypothesis would not. Similarly, those who explain their decisions would be hypothesis-confirming but those who counterexplain would not. An experiment using an auditing case study was carried out and the results support our hypotheses. These results have instructional and assessment implications.