Using the Sociocognitive Model of Moral Psychology to Understand Auditor Actions

ABSTRACT Prior auditing literature often directly relates auditor traits to behaviour, but modern models of moral psychology (i.e., the sociocognitive model) contend individuals' behavioural predispositions must first pass through a self‐regulatory moral gate before they manifest as actions. We investigate one such moral gate, moral identity, that ought to reliably predict auditors' negative (or positive) behaviours. Moral identity is the degree to which morality is important to a person's self‐concept. Using responses from 113 practicing auditors, we predict and find that lower (higher) moral identity auditors' adjustments are (are not) dependent upon management's motive. Moreover, we test moral identity's robustness to a familiar trait associated with negative behaviours (i.e., Dark Triad) and find that, in our experimental setting, moral identity continued to have a strong association with audit quality‐jeopardizing judgements, suggesting that future researchers should consider incorporating the sociocognitive model of moral behaviour when investigating individuals' likelihood to engage in unethical behaviours.