Ethics education and neuroscience: A neurocognitive approach to business ethics training

Abstract

This study incorporates recent advances in neuroscience in the evaluation of instructional methods for business ethics education. By utilizing a neurocognitive model which accounts for the fundamental neural processes which underlie human behavior, this research expands the traditional view of conscious cognitive ethical decision-making to include nonconscious drivers of ethical behavior. Measuring ethical behavior directly rather than the traditional but not perfectly-correlated ethical judgment, a game theory experiment was employed to assess the ethical behavior of college students before and after ethics training. The distinct neural systems of reflexive and active judgment were activated with time constraint and altered instructions in different rounds of the game. Subjects were trained with two types of cases to determine if case method ethics education may positively impact ethical behavior. Results indicated significant worsening of ethical behavior in subjects not trained with case method ethics instruction, while case method instruction improved ethical behavior. Previous college-level ethics education and gender were not found to be significantly correlated with improvement in ethical behavior.