“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 2×2 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.