Ego Depletion and Auditors' JDM Quality

Abstract

I report two experiments with senior-associate auditors that investigate whether self-control requirements in auditing tasks cause ego depletion, and whether depleting tasks impact auditors' judgment and decision-making (JDM). In Experiment 1, I find that using self-control to maintain vigilance/focus leads to greater levels of depletion than does using self-control to engage in cognitive processing in an audit planning task or inhibit impulses in a task from the psychology literature. However, I do not find that task-specific experience significantly reduces self-control resources required for task performance. In Experiment 2, I find evidence that depleting tasks – compared to a non-depleted control group –significantly reduce auditors’ cognitive processing in the form of auditors’ ability to generate plausible alternative hypotheses for client-provided explanations for trends. Finally, I find that depleting tasks reduce auditors’ confidence in task performance, when compared to a non-depleted control group.

Keywords: ego depletion; self-control; audit quality; judgment and decision-making; hypothesis generation; cognitive processing