Can Thinking about Alternative Explanations Promote Professional Skepticism?
实验发现，审计师在完成审计规划任务前，先对无关事件生成反事实解释，能激活反事实思维模式，从而增强职业怀疑，且无需额外培训即可应用于多种审计任务。
SYNOPSIS We conduct an experiment with practicing Big 4 audit seniors and demonstrate that generating counterexplanations for an event in an unrelated task prior to completing audit planning tasks activates a counterfactual mindset that enhances auditors’ professional skepticism. This approach to activating professional skepticism can be implemented without auditor training and can be deployed across many different audit tasks. Overall, the experiment indicates that activation of a counterfactual mindset has significant potential to enhance audit quality.