| The auditor is often placed in a situation in which the client's views on an accounting matter differ from those of the auditor, and the client attempts to persuade the auditor to agree with the client's position. This dissertation examined the effects of time pressure and source expertise on the persuasion process. An audit situation was used, with 181 senior accounting students serving as subjects in a laboratory experiment.;High time pressure and was predicted to induce peripheral processing, resulting in little difference in persuasive effects between strong and weak arguments. Also, high time pressure was expected to result in more reliance on source expertise as a extraneous cue to the persuasion process. Conversely, low time pressure was predicted to induce central processing, resulting in a large difference in persuasive effects between strong and weak arguments. Here, source expertise was not expected to be relied upon for persuasive evaluation.;Overall, results did not support the above predictions. The hypothesized interaction between time pressure and source expertise was significant only when using the percentage of thoughts that were favorable as a dependent measure. However, an unexpected interaction occurred between source expertise and argument strength. The quality of the arguments affected persuasion only when the source had high expertise. When the source expertise was low, the different strengths of arguments did not differentially affect persuasion. Possible explanations for the results include (1) source expertise may not have operated as an extraneous cue, (2) power may have been insufficient, (3) manipulation of time pressure and source expertise may not have been consistent, and (4) manipulation of time pressure altered the subjects' perception of time pressure but not their level of processing, an assumption used in developing the hypotheses. |
