The Effects of Hindsight Bias on Evaluating Auditor's Decisions

With the evolving new information about the events happening after the date of audit reports, some people unfairly change their judgment about the auditor’s decisions. It is called hindsight bias; the influences of the outcomes on the previously made decisions. This paper examines the hindsight bias of the users of audit reports in Iran. Data were collected through a two-step standard questionnaire during 2015. A number of 300 of auditors and non-auditors (including accounting students, investors, bankers…) from an unlimited society entered the study as the research available sample, from which just only 149 participants completed the research process. T-Test and Cramer's V Coefficient tools are applied in analyzing the research hypotheses. The study concludes that not only non-auditors but also the auditors (as professional audiences of audit reports) who are engaged in evaluating and judging the audit reports have shown hindsight bias. That is, all good (positive) and bad (negative) news about the outcome of auditors’ reports influences the judgment of the audit reports’ users.