DISCUSSION OF A Review of the Audit Symposium: 1983-1992.

Abstract This article provides information about the review of the first ten years of the Audit Judgment Symposium. Many experimental studies of audit judgment use familiar behavioral decision theory (BDT) paradigms, mostly from the literature on cognitive illusions, transferred into the audit judgment context, with auditors rather than students as subjects. Not surprisingly, the main qualitative finding from such studies has been that the phenomena found using student subjects in non-audit tasks are also observed when similar questions are asked about auditors in intellectually identical tasks with an auditing cover story. The idea of comparing human behavior with the prescriptions of a normative model such as Bayes's Theorem obviously does. But it is not perceptive to dismiss the translation of such normative models into audit contexts as trivial or irrelevant. It is certainly wrong to dismiss as scientifically ho-human either the similarities or the differences between the behavior of naive, untrained subjects of typical BDT work and the behavior of trained auditors typically used as subjects in audit judgment research.