Repository logo

Infoscience

  • English
  • French
Log In
Logo EPFL, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne

Infoscience

  • English
  • French
Log In
  1. Home
  2. Academic and Research Output
  3. Conferences, Workshops, Symposiums, and Seminars
  4. Emotional empathy and engineering students’moral reasoning
 
conference paper

Emotional empathy and engineering students’moral reasoning

Kotluk, Nihat
•
Tormey, Roland
2022
Towards a new future in engineering education, new scenarios that European alliances of tech universities open up
50th Annual Conference of The European Society for Engineering Education- SEFI 2022

Although engineering education is often characterized as a rational activity, research suggests that emotions are vital for learning at all levels of education. In ethics education, there is evidence that including mild emotional information in case studies can enhance learning. Evidence also suggests that specific emotions such as guilt and shame can impact motivation to act in ethical scenarios. However, the place of emotions in ethics education remains controversial since emotion can be perceived as a source of bias rather than a valuable factor in learning and motivating action. While some specific emotions have been explored in ethics research, there is a lack of empirical research addressing the relationship between ethical judgement and emotional empathy. In this research, therefore, we aimed to investigate the impact of mild emotional empathy on engineering students' moral judgements. We conducted this study as an experimental design with 305 participants in two groups. Both groups took a modified version of the Engineering and Sciences Issues Test (ESIT) with an experimental group in which we induced low emotional empathy and an emotionally neutral control group. Results show that low emotional empathy does not impact participants' ethical decisions/judgments. Since the prior research evidence suggests that a low level of emotional content improves learning, and given that it does not introduce biases in moral reasoning, we conclude it would make sense to include a low level of emotional content in ethics case studies.

  • Files
  • Details
  • Metrics
Logo EPFL, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne
  • Contact
  • infoscience@epfl.ch

  • Follow us on Facebook
  • Follow us on Instagram
  • Follow us on LinkedIn
  • Follow us on X
  • Follow us on Youtube
AccessibilityLegal noticePrivacy policyCookie settingsEnd User AgreementGet helpFeedback

Infoscience is a service managed and provided by the Library and IT Services of EPFL. © EPFL, tous droits réservés