Abstract
Ethics education is essential in business and STEM curricula. For decades up to the present day, a rationalist conception of ethics has been highly influential in its pedagogy. However, in the past twenty years, developments in moral psychology and neuroscience support that moral thought and deliberation are guided by a dual process initiated by intuition. In this research, we present the design of a scaffolding for ethics teaching based on groupware with individual and collaborative activities, informed by the Social Intuitionist Model (SIM) and Moral Foundations Theory (MFT). We conducted an exploratory study based on an original case about academic ethics, involving student samples in five higher education institutions in four countries (N = 249). Results indicate that ethical reasoning, initially guided by intuition, can be influenced by facts, reflective questions, and social interaction. Students regardless of their initial intuitive stance about an eliciting situation, and their moral sensitivity according to MFT, changed their final decision on the situation significantly by the end of the intervention according to a Wilcoxon signed rank test (p < 0.001). About 30% of the sample swung to a stance opposite to what they decided at the outset of the intervention. A question that stems from this research is how students’ ethical thinking could be scaffolded and oriented, both pedagogically and technology-wise, towards identifying and standing for solutions to ethical dilemmas that are based on virtue and bring greater good.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Pfeffer, J., Fong, C.T.: The business school ‘business’: some lessons from the US experience. J. Manage. Stud. 41(8), 1501–1520 (2004)
Holsapple, M.A., et al.: Framing faculty and student discrepancies in engineering ethics education delivery. J. Eng. Educ. 101(2), 169–186 (2012)
Haidt, J.: The emotional dog and its rational tail: a social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychol. Rev. 108(4), 814 (2001)
Haidt, J.: Moral psychology for the twenty-first century. J. Moral Educ. 42(3), 281–297 (2013)
Graham, J., et al.: Moral foundations theory: the pragmatic validity of moral pluralism. In: Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, pp. 55–130. Elsevier (2013)
Hess, J.L., Fore, G.: A systematic literature review of US engineering ethics interventions. Sci. Eng. Ethics 24(2), 551–583 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-017-9910-6
Poje, T., Zaman Groff, M.: Mapping ethics education in accounting research: a bibliometric analysis. J. Bus. Ethics 179, 451–472 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-021-04846-9
Cornelius, N., Wallace, J., Tassabehji, R.: An analysis of corporate social responsibility, corporate identity and ethics teaching in business schools. J. Bus. Ethics 76(1), 117–135 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-006-9271-6
Loeb, S.E.: Active learning: an advantageous yet challenging approach to accounting ethics instruction. J. Bus. Ethics 127(1), 221–230 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-013-2027-1
Jeffries, C., Maeder, D.W.: Using instructional and assessment vignettes to promote recall, recognition, and transfer in educational psychology courses. Teach. Educ. Psychol. 1(2), n2 (2006)
Impagliazzo, J., Gorgone, J.: Professional accreditation of information systems programs. Commun. Assoc. Inf. Syst. 9(1), 3 (2002)
Kulturel-Konak, S., et al.: Assessing professional skills in STEM disciplines. In: 2013 IEEE Integrated STEM Education Conference (ISEC). IEEE (2013)
Kohlberg, L.: Stage and sequence: the cognitive-developmental approach to socialization. In: Handbook of Socialization Theory and Research, vol. 347, p. 480 (1969)
Andersen, M.L., Zuber, J.M., Hill, B.D.: Moral foundations theory: An exploratory study with accounting and other business students. J. Bus. Ethics 132(3), 525–538 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-014-2362-x
Andersen, M.L., Klamm, B.K.: Haidt’s social intuitionist model: what are the implications for accounting ethics education? J. Account. Educ. 44, 35–46 (2018)
Alvarez, C., Zurita, G., Baloian, N., Jerez, O., Peñafiel, S.: A CSCL script for supporting moral reasoning in the ethics classroom. In: Nakanishi, H., Egi, H., Chounta, I.-A., Takada, H., Ichimura, S., Hoppe, U. (eds.) CRIWG+CollabTech 2019. LNCS, vol. 11677, pp. 62–79. Springer, Cham (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28011-6_5
Alvarez, C., Zurita, G., Carvallo, A., Ramírez, P., Bravo, E., Baloian, N.: Automatic content analysis of student moral discourse in a collaborative learning activity. In: Hernández-Leo, D., Hishiyama, R., Zurita, G., Weyers, B., Nolte, A., Ogata, H. (eds.) CollabTech 2021. LNCS, vol. 12856, pp. 3–19. Springer, Cham (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85071-5_1
Alvarez, C., et al.: A social platform for fostering ethical education through role-playing. In: Factoring Ethics in Technology, Policy Making, Regulation and AI, p. 107 (2021)
Montiel, I., et al.: New ways of teaching: using technology and mobile apps to educate on societal grand challenges. J. Bus. Ethics 161(2), 243–251 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-019-04184-x
Gilligan, C.: In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Harvard University Press (1993)
Haidt, J., Joseph, C.: The moral mind: How five sets of innate intuitions guide the development of many culture-specific virtues, and perhaps even modules. The Innate Mind 3, 367–391 (2007)
Rosseel, Y.: lavaan: an R package for structural equation modeling. J. Stat. Softw. 48, 1–36 (2012)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Álvarez, C. et al. (2022). Scaffolding of Intuitionist Ethical Reasoning with Groupware: Do Students’ Stances Change in Different Countries?. In: Wong, LH., Hayashi, Y., Collazos, C.A., Alvarez, C., Zurita, G., Baloian, N. (eds) Collaboration Technologies and Social Computing. CollabTech 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13632. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20218-6_18
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20218-6_18
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-20217-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-20218-6
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)