Incorporating an Unconscious Bias Curriculum into Audit Education

Abstract

In this learning strategy, we share how we incorporated an unconscious bias curriculum into our accounting program to better prepare students as future professionals in a diverse workforce. Our unconscious bias curriculum leverages preexisting resources that are publicly available and free of charge. Based on data collected across five different institutions, we find that students completing the curriculum report improvements in their understanding of how to recognize and mitigate unconscious biases (e.g., halo effect, horns effect, prototype bias, and similarity bias). To help students understand how these biases can affect decisions they make in their future careers, we introduce these topics within an audit class alongside more traditional auditing topics, such as professional judgments and the auditing of complex estimates. However, the nature of the curriculum offers flexibility such that we encourage instructors to consider how the curriculum could be adopted in other accounting classes, undergraduate or graduate.