ABSTRACT
Auditors experience significant problems auditing complex accounting estimates,
and this increasingly puts financial reporting quality at risk. Based on
analyses of the specific errors that auditors commit, we propose that auditors
need to be able to think more broadly and incorporate information from
a variety of sources in order to improve audit quality for these important
accounts. We experimentally demonstrate that a deliberative mindset intervention
improves auditors’ ability to identify unreasonable estimates by
improving their ability to identify and incorporate into their analyses contradictory
information from diverse parts of the audit and improving their
ability to think critically about the evidence. We perform additional analyses
to demonstrate that our intervention improves auditor performance by causing
them to think differently rather than simply to work harder. We demonstrate
that critical thinking can improve the identification of unreasonable