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Designing A Psychology Class For Auditors

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In designing a psychology class for auditors, the lesson would center on the topic of Effort Heuristic. Effort heuristic is the mental practice of assigning a value to something based on the amount of perceived effort put into it completion. The lesson would discuss five applications of the Effort heuristics: external evaluation, internal evaluations, effort justification, product appraisement, and audit planning.

One of the more common practices in which effort heuristic is a factor, is on external evaluations. When reviewing the work of staff auditors it can be easy to assume that something is done right just because they took a good bit of time to accomplish it. Similarly, when a staff accomplishes a task faster than expected, the first thought of the reviewer is that it must be wrong. These are both equally erroneous and dangerous assumptions to make. In the first case a reviewer could accidently sign-off on a work paper that fails to catch a material misstatement. In the second scenario, the reviewer may refrain from fully utilizing the staff because of an unjust lack of confidence in their abilities. This could also lead to poor reviews for the staff and a missed opportunity for better efficiency. For example, in a study done by Justin Kruger, participants evaluated a poem based off how much they enjoyed it, the quality of it, and how much they were likely to spend on it. The participants were either told that the poem took 4 hours to complete or 18 hours. The

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