What drives ethical treatment of others? Do we learn ethical values/behavior only as children or can ethics be taught effectively later and, if so, how can ethics best be taught in the high-tech age? Can computer games successfully pose moral dilemmas ranging from personal choices to ones specific to certain professions such as medicine, law, computer science, and engineering? Can we develop games that are culturally and contextually-rich yet universal enough to have broad appeal while not privileging one set of values or ethical system? The PI's goal in this exploratory research is to tackle questions such as these, as Stage 1 of the Ethical Games Project to include a summer internship program, an undergraduate class, and a graduate seminar testing the importance of an empathy-inducing intervention on students' ethical action and ethical self-examination, as measured by a variety of psychometric and ethnographic tests. Pre- and post-tests of ethics will be administered to 40-50 students participating in journal writing and conducting/analyzing narrative interviews with someone "different" (an elder) as well as with a moral exemplar (a philanthropist or someone who has saved another person's life). The "intervention" will consist of the students putting themselves in the place of another via the narrative interviews, and will ask about the impact of such empathetic intervention on students' ethical action and ethical self-examination. The project thus will focus on two foundational conceptualizations of ethics: ethics as behavior that furthers human well-being, and ethics as thinking reflectively about the consequences of one's action. The project will ask about both the reliability of such tests and the relationship between empathy and ethics, by comparing results of different measures on subject and control groups. By these means the PI hopes to understand how best to conceptualize, operationalize and measure ethical self-reflection, ethical action and empathy, and also the possible relationships existing among empathic involvement and the diverse measures of these ethical phenomena. In particular, she will attempt to determine how the different measurements relate to each other, whether and how the substantive relationship detected between empathy and ethics is affected by the different measures employed, and whether certain measures privilege particular values (justice vs. compassion, deliberative vs. non-reasoning) or groups
Broader Impacts: If successful, project outcomes will lay the groundwork for future work on socio-cultural variations and will elucidate the value-structures latent in psychometric and ethnographic tests and ethical games, which in turn will form the basis for a larger project that will develop a game for computers, tablets, and mobile phones, thus utilizing 21st century technology to test one of the oldest ideas in ethics, namely that empathic involvement with another fosters and encourages more compassionate and ethical treatment of that person or group. Such a game could provide a cost-effective way to teach ethics and reach audiences now left untouched by traditional teaching methods.
What drives ethical treatment of others? Do we learn ethical values and good behavior only as children, or can ethics be taught effectively later? If so, how can ethics best be taught in a high-tech age? Can video, phone applications, and computer games be used successfully to create games that pose moral dilemmas of a variety of types, from personal moral choices to professional ones specific to certain occupations, such as medicine, law, computer science and engineering? Can we develop games that are culturally and contextually, rich yet universal enough to have broad appeal while not privileging one set of values or ethical system? Using EAGER funding, we addressed these questions by laying the groundwork for a larger project -- the Ethical Games Project—to be coordinated by the UCI Interdisciplinary Center for the Scientific Study of Ethics and Morality. The long-term goal is the development of a game for computers, tablets, and phone applications to test whether empathic interaction with another fosters and encourages more compassionate and ethical treatment of that person or group. The first step in this project, however, was (1) to develop accurate tests to detect and measure shifts in the key concepts: ethics and empathy and (2) to develop an intervention that would encourage empathic involvement with another. Goal 1. We thus first conceptualized, operationalized and developed measures of the critical concepts used in this project: ethical sensitivity, ethical action and empathy. We found, developed or modified six tests to measure various aspects of ethics: (1) the implicit association test of tolerance; (2) personality measures, such as the Myers-Briggs type indicator; (3) measures of individual values, such as the Portrait Values questionnaire; (4) staged class experiments that require students to help or sit-by as bystanders;(5) ethical dilemmas taught in the classical Socratic tradition; and (6) moral stories, taught on-line and in class and dealing with problems similar to those posed via the Socratic tradition, e.g., (a) dealing with cheating by fellow students; (b) determining whether to kill someone in order to save others’ lives by keeping a trolley car from hitting them; (c) choosing whether to steal over-priced medicine for a loved one; (d) asking whether a transplant surgeon should allow a patient to die in order to harvest organs for others; and (e) deciding whether to suffocate a baby whose cries might alert soldiers who then will kill everyone in hiding with the baby. Using EAGER funding, we developed, modified and critiqued each of these tests, modified the Toronto Empathy Questionnaire (TEQ) of empathy, and prepared recommendations for how best to use each test. Goal 2. We next developed an intervention to allow us to administer pre-and post-tests using these diverse measurements of ethics and empathy, to ascertain whether empathic involvement with another leads to better treatment of that person/group. Our intervention focused on the elderly, as illustrative of a discriminated group. While this group draws on personal ties – by asking students to interview their grandparents – the targeted group could easily include someone from another group that has suffered discrimination because of "difference." Such interventions thus can help students understand the roots of prejudice against racial, ethnic, religious, linguistic, national, or gender/sexual minorities. Findings. Our tests work, but must be applied with a few caveats, the main one being that the impact of such an intervention may shift subtly over time and that analysts should conduct long-term evaluations of the impact of such empathy-inducing interventions. Benefit for future work: We hope eventually to be able to answer a third question: What are the possible relationships among measures of empathic involvement with others and our treatment of them? Our initial work suggests the need to develop a simpler protocol that both allows for feedback on the intervention’s impact on ethical sensitivity and ethical action while still protecting the privacy of human subjects. We are continuing our work on this topic, using a simplified intervention, to compare the relation between empathy and ethics, using diverse measurements of the key concepts we were able to develop successfully. Assuming we find a relationship between empathy and ethics, we then can explore further types of empathy-inducing interventions, introduce the concept of cultural variation into our interventions, and ask how these interventions can be introduced into a prototype for a game that evokes empathic involvement with "the other." Thus the funding was extremely helpful in moving forward a project we hope will encourage better treatment of others and aid in the development of a computer/ phone ap/ video game that can help teach ethics to young children and adults, much along the lines of the continuing education in ethics required of lawyers, doctors, engineers, academics, and other professional groups.
