This action funds a project in Ethics Education in Science and Engineering, a cross-directorate activity. Existing approaches to teaching research ethics neglect the topic of moral psychology. Specifically, standard classes do not teach students why people act unethically nor provide students with useful strategies to increase the likelihood that they will act in accord with their own ethical commitments and/or the ethical codes of their professions. The goal of this project is to develop a class, Ethics for Researchers: Helping Moral People Act Ethically, which will meet these needs. The class, which will be electronically delivered and can stand alone as a seminar or be added to the curriculum of traditional research ethics classes, exposes students to video clips containing re-enactments of published empirical studies that demonstrate why people act unethically. After a discussion of each case, individual students are guided through a two-part exercise. The first part, developing a Personal Inventory Report, helps them engage in reflection to determine what sorts of situations they might find ethically challenging. The students then develop a personal plan (Adaptive-Strategies Report) addressing what strategies to use to increase the likelihood of behaving ethically in challenging situations (that is, the situations they arrived at while developing the Personal Inventory Report). The products of this exercise, the Personal Inventory Report and the Adaptive-Strategies Report, can be used throughout the student's career, especially when in a new professional situations.
The broader impact of this project is potentially far-reaching. First, if the newly conceived ethics class proves to be efficacious, the course can be readily adapted for other professionals outside science and engineering, including law, medicine, education, and business. Second, although the decision-model being used has been applied to other areas (e.g., teaching reasoning), it has never been applied to ethics education. Thus, this course not only advances the teaching of research ethics, but it may advance other areas of ethics, e.g., normative ethical theory. Third, the investigators intend to teach the class in numerous settings and to share the results at professional meetings and in journals. At OSU, the course is being made available to all members of the university community, hence Native-Americans and other under-represented groups will benefit. Since the course is delivered electronically, it can easily be made available to those at other universities and research facilities. Therefore, there are no geographic and temporal limitations to the administration of this course.
This project was intended to address a gap in ethics education. Specifically, the investigators developed a unique ethics course (primarily for engineers and scientists) that helps students learn that a variety of seemingly benign situational factors may lead them and others to violate ethical codes or act unethically. That is, by exposing students to recent findings in moral psychology, the course teaches students that even if they are committed to living an ethical life (both professionally and personally), these situational factors may lead them to unintentionally or unknowingly violate ethical rules or the codes of their profession. After explaining how and why people might unintentionally or unknowingly violate ethical codes/rules, the course provides students a number of tools that they can use to decrease the likelihood that they will violate ethical rules/codes. After developing this course and posting it on a website, the investigators tested it in order to determine whether it was efficacious. The findings were overwhelmingly positive. Students who took the course demonstrated a better understanding of how people who are committed to acting ethically might find themselves in ethical challenging situations (even though they might not realize that the situations are ethically challenging). In addition, students demonstrated that they understood the different strategies and skills that they can use to reduce the likelihood of acting unethically. This potential impact of this course is far reaching. First, the course is posted on the Internet; thus, it is available, without charge, to all interested parties. Second, although investigators have not attempted to adapt this course so that it could be used by other professionals (e.g., engineers, attorneys, psychologists, social workers, etc…), investigators see no reason as to why it could not be adapted in this way. That is, most of the content of the course is relevant to those in any field. The only changes that would be necessary would be the examples used to demonstrate how the course is relevant to the students taking the course. Finally, the investigators attended a number of conferences at which they discussed/explained the course and published several papers addressing the course and how it might be used by others.
