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Prior research shows that an audit supervisor’s active intervention in a subordinate’s judgment distorts that judgment. However, subordinates’ judgments are only one input into audit team judgments. How do supervisors finalize audit team judgments after actively intervening in their subordinates’ judgments? In an experiment using audit teams, supervisors with weaker or stronger goals to reach a client-preferred conclusion either were or were not asked to first actively coach a subordinate’s judgment (i.e., active intervention) before reviewing it and finalizing the audit team’s judgment. Supervisors’ intervention influenced subordinates’ inputs, which, in turn, supervisors incorporated into their final judgments. More interestingly, intervention biased supervisors’ final judgments, controlling for supervisor directional goal strength and for concurrent effects on subordinates’ inputs. However, supervisors distorted their judgments less as they perceived a larger technical knowledge advantage over subordinates. In a second experiment, auditors appear aware of the bias-reducing knowledge advantage effects but unaware of the bias-increasing active intervention effects. We discuss implications for audit team judgments and audit quality control.

The current study tests for the presence of differential order effects in evaluation tasks with consistent and inconsistent evidence as predicted by the Hogarth and Einhorn (1992) belief-adjustment model. The results, based on both betweensubjects and within-subjects experiments, demonstrate that there were significant recency effects with inconsistent evidence as predicted, larger recency effects when the inconsistent evidence was farther apart in subjective value as predicted, and significant recency effects even when subjects were given training designed to both help them understand the task as completely as possible and to be better able to assess the pieces of evidence. By including a within-subjects design, we were able to demonstrate that the difference in subjective value between two pieces of evidence is the primary factor influencing the magnitude of the recency effect, regardless of whether the evidence is consistent or inconsistent. This latter finding is unique and contrary to previous research and theory. KEY WORDS Belief revision Order effects RecencyA great deal of prior literature has been devoted to documenting the existence of order effects and providing theories to explain their existence. In most decision-making problems the order in which information is seen by the decision maker should be irrelevant to the outcome of the judgment, so the existence of these effects is particularly worth noting. Almost all the empirical tests for the presence of order effects have concentrated on the processing of inconsistent (i.e. positive and negative) information presented in different orders. For example, there has been much research on mock jury trials that vary the order of presentation of prosecution and defense arguments (e.g. Furnham, 1986).Yet many important decision-making tasks involve sources of information that are consistent in sign but that differ in relative degree of favorability (or unfavorability). Thus, for example, in deciding whether to hire or admit someone into a graduate program, we may read several positive letters of recommendation for that person which differ in the extent to which they are laudatory. Does it matter which one we read first? In the present study we will compare order effects with both consistent and inconsistent information, focusing on the role that the differences in the subjective values of pieces of evidence have on the recency effect.Hogarth and Einhorn's (1992) comprehensive review and study of order effects defines important task characteristics for which they predict different order effects. In the present study we specifically test for the existence of order effects in evaluation tasks in which short series of complex evidence

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