Moral and Ethical Decision-Making in a Realistic Field Training Scenario

摘要

This experiment explored moral and ethical judgement and decision- making in an operational context. As part of pre-deployment training at a specific Canadian Forces base, military personnel participate in several realistic training exercises. One such exercise involves a situation that simulates a human rights violation. This is likely to be a highly charged moral situation as trainees must use their negotiation skills to protect the civilians who appear to be being violently abused. This experiment explored the impact of heightening the moral intensity (i.e. the salience and vividness of the moral issue) of this situation by varying the proximity to the female victim. In the high intensity condition, the female victim was scripted to come face-to-face with the team leader, but to remain more than 60 feet away in the baseline moral intensity condition. The entire scenario was videotaped (and later content analyzed) and trainees completed a questionnaire exploring their emotions, attributions of responsibility and perceptions related to the outcome of the scenario. The outcome of the scenario was also analyzed in terms of whether the trainees left the civilians in the hands of the police, watched while the civilians were led into a dense forest by the police, or insisted on following the police and victims as they were escorted to another location. Results showed that heightened levels of moral intensity had important effects on trainee behavior. Specifically, after coming face-to-face with the female victim, trainees never left the victims in the hands of the police and were more likely to follow the victims as they were escorted away by the police. Behaviors that promoted a negative relationship with the military police, and positive behaviors such as gaining situational awareness were also more frequent in the high moral intensity scenarios than in the baseline scenarios.