Expertise and the explanation effect

Abstract

The effect of professional experience on the “explanation effect”, i.e., generation of an explanation for an event occurrence increasing the judged likelihood of the event, is investigated in a risk assessment (financial auditing) context. An explanation effect was predicted for inexperienced auditors (auditing students); however, audit judgment experience was predicted to mediate, or eliminate, any explanation effect. Two competing hypotheses for the origin of the effect, the causal construction and recall-availability hypotheses, are tested given the presence of antecedent conditions for, and against, the explanation events. Audit risk judgments were provided by 58 novice and 42 experienced auditors. Written explanation for occurrence of the target event resulted in the explanation effect for novice subjects, both for specifie event and aggregate risk assessments. The pattern of results supported the recallavailability over the causal construction hypothesis. The judgments of the experienced auditors, however, did not indicate any explanation effect.