Training for Heat-of-the-Moment Thinking: Ethics Training to Prepare for Operations

Abstract

Military ethics training has tended to focus on imparting ethical attitudes and on improving deliberative moral decision-making through classroom instruction. However, military personnel can be exposed to extreme conditions on operations, which can lead to heat-of-the-moment thinking. Under stress, individuals are more likely to engage in automatic processing than deliberative processing, and visceral states such as anger and disgust can increase a person’s risk of behaving unethically. We propose that military ethics training could be improved by reinforcing classroom ethics training with interventions to counteract these risk factors. As training interventions, we recommend incorporating affect-labeling, goal-setting, and perspective-taking into realistic, pre-deployment training to make moral decision-making more robust against stress and other emotional experiences typical in combat. We outline steps researchers and trainers can take to test whether these interventions have the desired impact on ethical behavior.