Management Accountants' Empathy and Their Violation of Fiduciary Duties: A Replication and Extension Study Using fMRI
本研究使用功能磁共振成像复制并扩展了早期脑电图研究，发现管理会计师在服务业务单元利益时，认知共情脑区活动与虚报倾向相关，而情感共情无显著作用。
ABSTRACT Research shows that management accountants' role to support business unit managers' decision-making may cause them to succumb to managers' pressures to misreport. Using electroencephalographic (EEG) evidence, Eskenazi, Hartmann, and Rietdijk (2016) demonstrate the role of automatic emotional mimicry, which drives misreporting when managers' personal interest is at stake, but not when BU interest is at stake. In this study, we aim to replicate this finding using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which enables us to separate affective from cognitive empathy. Thirty accounting professionals completed an emotion observation task during which empathy-related brain activity was recorded. We then explore accountants' inclination to misreport using empathy-invoking accounting scenarios. We find that the inclination to misreport correlates with activation of cognitive empathy regions, but only for scenarios in which accountants misreport to serve business unit's interests, rather than managers' personal interests. We find no evidence for a role of affective empathy. Data Availability: Data are available upon request from the corresponding author. JEL Classifications: M41; D87.