University Ethics Courses and Student Self-Capacities: A Quantitative Study
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Abstract
Moral identity is part of one's self-concept, and an internalized moral identity has been associated with ethical decision-making (Aquino & Reed, 2002; Gu & Neesham, 2014; Rua et al., 2017). Studies of decision-making biases show that people will make biased decisions to maintain congruence with their self-concept (Higgs et al., 2020; Watts et al., 2020). Self-capacities are an individual’s ability to relate to others while regulating intense negative affect and maintaining a solid sense of self through these relationships and changing emotions (Briere, 1992, 1996). Based on literature suggesting connections between moral identity, ethical decision-making, and self-capacities, in this study I used an online survey data collection method and a series of MANOVAs to examine the potential effect of ethics education on moral identity, decision-making biases, and disrupted self-capacities. The final sample consisted of 158 graduate and undergraduate University of Calgary students from a range of disciplines, 47 of whom had previously studied ethics and 111 who had not. Although none of the MANOVAs yielded significant results, I found that students who had studied ethics showed significantly lower scores on one of the scales of the instrument used to measure self-capacities, Susceptibility to Influence. Additionally, post hoc exploration of Pearson correlations among the instrument scales indicated several significant relationships between the disrupted self-capacities scales and decision-making bias scales for students who had studied ethics. Possible implications for counselling and ethics education are discussed. Keywords: Self-capacities, moral identity, decision-making biases, ethics education