Perceptions of Auditor Negligence: The Effects of Big Data Visualisations on Jurors’ Decisions

This study analyses the effects of Big Data visualisations on jurors’ decisions in audit litigation cases. Specifically, the study investigates the effects of different types of Big Data visualisations (word clouds or bar graphs) and different sources of Big Data (emails or social media posts) on jurors’ perceptions of auditors’ work and the size of the negligence awards that jurors recommend. The study theorises that the emotions elicited and the reliability of the data used to create visualisations such as word clouds will have dramatic effects on jury verdicts in audit negligence trials. There is considerable literature to support this assertion. However, after data collection, it was discovered that jurors are not influenced by the emotions elicited by visualisations. Rather, participants were very sceptical of more novel types of visualisations, such as word clouds, but could be persuaded by the inherent emotions elicited and the reliability of the data if they found the visualisation useful.