Implications of Seemingly Irrelevant Evidence in Audit Judgment
通过实验室实验，发现审计人员在同时获得诊断性和非诊断性证据时，做出的判断比仅使用诊断性证据时更不极端，且非诊断性证据的吸引力越强，影响越大。
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role that nondiagnostic evidence, which is a priori irrelevant, can have in audit judgment. In a laboratory experiment, auditor-subjects given a mix of diagnostic and nondiagnostic evidence made decisions that were less extreme (more regressive) than those made using only diagnostic evidence. The magnitude of the observed effect was in some cases directly related to the capacity of the nondiagnostic evidence to hold the auditor-subject's attention. This paper adds to the literature that explores how attributes of accounting settings affect decision performance (see Libby [1989]). Audit settings contain a mix of diagnostic and nondiagnostic evidence. But the focus in judgment research is typically on the relation between the importance (or relevance) of evidence in judgment and its predictive value. My results indicate that such a focus is too narrow, as judgments are influenced by evidence devoid of predictive value. The chosen research focus typically influences the types of evidence researchers include in experimental materials; that is, they typically include only the evidence they expect subjects to use.