In many audit tasks, auditors evaluate multiple hypotheses to diagnose the situation. Research suggests this is a complex task that individuals have difficulty performing. Further, there is little guidance in professional standards or literature dealing with the many complexities present in the...

Determining the "root cause" or "root causes" of an observed anomaly is pervasive in everyday life and yet such inferences are difficult since potential causes may be represented in various ways such as mutually exclusive (single cause) or not-mutually exclusive (multiple causes) and as...