Emotional empathy and engineering students’moral reasoning

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.