The impact of varying levels of compassion in ethics education case studies on students’ moral reasoning

Abstract

Previous research has revealed that including emotional content in ethics cases may improve students’ learning. However, there remain concerns as to whether the emotional content will also impact students’ moral reasoning. There is evidence that incorporating compassion-related emotional content into ethics cases through the implicit induction method increased the intensity of compassion without influencing the moral reasoning of participants. However, the impact of a higher intensity of compassion on moral reasoning remained unclear. Thus, in this experimental study, after using two (explicit expression and descriptions of severe consequences) methods of generating a higher intensity of compassion in ethics cases, we investigated whether this higher emotional intensity impacted the moral reasoning schemas activated in participants (N = 299). Our findings indicated that there was no evident impact. This research suggests there are now multiple strategies to integrate compassion into ethics cases at multiple levels of intensity without distorting moral reasoning.