Abstract:

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.

Keywords: CONFIRMATION; BIAS; SOURCE; OF; HYPOTHESIS; EXPLANATION; COUNTEREXPLANATION

Language: English

Document Type: Research article