Debiasing the curse of knowledge and audit judgement: Experience reconsidered

Abstract

This study contributes to the research related to judgment biases in auditing by examining the extent to which relevant audit experience debiases (mitigates) the “curse of knowledge” (outcome knowledge bias) in audit judgements. Auditors, with a wide range of experience, from the Sydney, Australia, office of a Big 6 public accounting firm, participated in the field experiment involving an internal control evaluation task. The results support the hypothesis that relevant audit experience debiases the curse of knowledge in audit judgments.