The Impact of Auditors' Cognitive Styles on Fraud Risk Assessment (A Test of Gregorc's Energy Theory)

The intellectual framework of individuals is determined by their cognitive style and the cognitive style of individuals plays the role of an intermediate element between accounting information and decision making. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to investigate the effect of Gregorcchr('39')s cognitive styles of auditors on fraud risk assessment. Gregorcchr('39')s cognitive styles include Concrete-Sequential, abstract-sequential, Concrete-random, and abstract-random styles. The statistical sample of the research consisted of 539 auditors working in the auditing institutes of the Iranian Society of Certified Auditors and the audit organization located in the geographical area of Tehran in 2019 which were selected using simple random sampling. The research method is a descriptive survey and the instrument used in the research is the standard questionnaire. Structural equation modeling using Lisrel software was used to analyze the data and test the hypotheses. The results of the analysis and findings indicate that auditorschr('39') cognitive styles have a significant effect on fraud risk assessment at a 99% confidence level. Therefore, abstract-random, abstract-sequential, Concrete-Sequential, and Concrete-random cognitive styles have the greatest impact on fraud risk assessment, respectively. The results of this research can lead to the expansion of topics related to judgment and decision making in auditing and finally to improve audit quality.