Personality dimensions, global and ethical perspectives and engineering students’ ethical decisions

Abstract

Motivation is an important predictor of ethical awareness; however, it is not easy to assess. The goal of our study is to examine the relationship between motivation and ethical awareness in engineering students. We focus on two personality measures: person-thing orientation and spheres of control and test their association with ethical awareness using engineering scenarios that present ethical dilemmas. We predict that engineering students who score higher on the personality dimension of personthing orientation will display more ethical awareness than those who score lower. We also predict that students with a higher level of personal control will also display more ethical awareness. Two groups of students were involved in the study. Group 1 was formed by fifty-three first-year engineering students from University in the United States and Group 2 was represented by sixty-four sophomore engineering students in Engineering School in Spain. Students worked individually on case studies that presenting ethical dilemmas; they were asked to write short essays describing how they would respond to each situation. Then the essays were analyzed using an ethical reasoning and a global awareness rubric. Results revealed that 1) the context/nature of the students’ responses to the case study varied greatly, 2) personality traits and global and ethical perspective, all correlate to students’ ethical decisions as measured by their responses to the case studies scores, 3) there is an alignment between the SOC and the Global Perspective Inventory (GPI) dimensions that merits further exploration.