FAR Working Paper - "Sent from Mobile": The Influence of Communication Devices and Psychological Distance on Professional Skepticism-Enhancing Advice
Abstract: As audit firms increasingly rely on mobile phones for work-related tasks, understanding how different communication devices impact auditor behavior is essential for maintaining professional skepticism and audit quality. Using a setting where an audit supervisor writes a message in response to advice sought by a subordinate auditor, we examine how the audit supervisor’s use of different communication devices (mobile phone versus PC) affects the extent to which their informal advice to the subordinate contains skepticism-enhancing language. We predict that audit supervisor’s advice will be less skepticism-enhancing for the subordinate when communicated by a message sent through a mobile phone compared to a PC. However, this effect is expected to be stronger for advisors with lower compared to higher psychological distance to the task workflow. We conduct a 2x2 between-participants experiment and use Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) textual analysis to measure skepticism in participants’ responses to advice sought by a subordinate. We find that a message conveyed through a mobile phones compared to a PC contains less skepticism-enhancing advice, but only when psychological distance is low. Our study underscores the behavioral implications of device choice and psychological distance, offering important insights for audit firms and practitioners as they navigate the increasing use of digital communication tools in fostering audit quality.
Authors
Sara Bibler is a PhD candidate at the department of Accounting of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
Anna Gold is Professor of Auditing at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Adjunct Professor at Norwegian School of Economics (NHH). She earned her PhD at the University of Amsterdam. Her research interests are in the judgment and decision-making area, primarily applied to the field of auditing. Her research has focused on the impact of regulatory changes (e.g., fraud consultation, audit firm rotation, and auditor reporting standard changes) on judgments and decisions of auditors, preparers, and financial statement users. She has also examined how auditors and audit firms manage errors and whether varying the error management climate affects auditors’ error reporting willingness and learning. Her current work focuses on how auditors use specialist advice, the communication between auditors and audit committees, and auditors’ use of audit technology.
She has published her research in outlets such as The Accounting Review, Contemporary Accounting Research, Auditing: A Journal of Practice & Theory, Accounting Horizons, Journal of Business Ethics, and International Journal of Auditing. Professor Gold currently serves as editor at The Accounting Review (2020-2023) and Maandblad voor Accountancy en Bedrijfseconomie (since 2018). She is a member of the editorial board of Auditing: A Journal of Practice and Theory.
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Farah Arshad is an Assistant Professor in Accounting at the VU Amsterdam, specializing in management accounting research. Using experiments, Farah seeks to understand how challenges and opportunities in the 21st century shape management accounting systems, such as performance evaluation and reporting. Arshad holds a PhD from the Tilburg University (2020).