Auditing

Advances in Behavioral Research

This book has been prepared for those readers who want to maintain their knowledge of current developments in the field of behavioral research as applied to auditing. The articles and papers presented in this volume were selected because they will contribute to the knowledge and advancement of not only the individual researcher or educator, but also of the profession. It is our belief that if research endeavors may be viewed as having stages of life, then the field of behavioral research in auditing is in its genesis. Almost twenty years ago, in speaking of the state of the art of psychology, William Hays expressed a most·appropriate thought: Experimental evidence is accumulating at a rapid rate in psychology, and efforts at constructing psychological theories with mathematical deductive power are constantly being made. However, it seems safe to say that it will be sometime before there are psychological laws and theories on a par with those of physics. The absence of a general theory does not imply that those relations are missing or unhpportant in psychology; the discovery and specification of relations is the process by which those theories are built. (Hays, 1973, p. 40.) In the first chapter, "Experimental Research and the Distinctive Features of Accounting Settings," Robert Libby presents an encompassing and knowledgeable summary of the changes that have taken place during the last decade in human information processing research in accounting and experimental economics as it relates to those issues.