the effectiveness of ethics training on the … 13, number 2, 2016/1… · by piaget, kohlberg...

Australasian Journal of Economics Education

Volume 13, Number 2, 2016, pp.1-31

THE EFFECTIVENESS OF ETHICS TRAINING

ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF MORAL

JUDGMENT IN FINANCE STUDENTS*

Alan Kovacevic, Gerhard Hambusch,

David Michayluk & Gerhard Van de Venter

University of Technology, Sydney

ABSTRACT

This paper reports on the effects of a freestanding ethics course in a university

finance curriculum on the moral development of students. While a number of

studies have examined the effects of such educational initiatives on business and

accounting students, very few studies have focused on the finance discipline. A

Modified Defining Issues Test (MDIT) was thus developed and used in a test-retest

methodology to examine whether students in the Ethics in Finance course at the

UTS Business School possessed enhanced moral development after taking the

course. We find evidence of a statistically significant improvement in moral

reasoning understood from a Kohlbergian perspective. This effect was, however,

more pronounced in males than females with females beginning from a higher base

of moral development and improving only slightly. While a number of suggestions

are made for future research that might improve on the work reported in this paper,

our results justify the inclusion of separate and well-designed ethics courses in

finance curricula.

Keywords: ethics, moral development, curriculum design.

JEL classifications: A13, A22.

1. INTRODUCTION

Over the last couple of decades, public opinion about ethics in business,

and finance in particular, has been at best skeptical, but more often

* Correspondence: Gerhard Van de Venter, University of Technology Sydney, PO Box

123, Broadway, NSW 2007, Australia, Phone: +61 2 9514 7783I E-mail:

[email protected]. The authors would like to thank two anonymous referees for

comments. Any remaining errors are the responsibility of the authors.

ISSN 1448-4498 © 2016 Australasian Journal of Economics Education

mailto:[email protected]

2 A. Kovacevic, G. Hambusch, D. Michayluk & G. Van de Venter

critical and pessimistic, sometimes regarding the idea of ethics in

business as nothing more than a humorous contradiction. The main

reason for this is not hard to identify. Major financial scandals at firms

such as Enron and WorldCom, with large sums of money

misappropriated by individuals or small groups of conspirators, Bernie

Madoff’s defrauding of clients through a $65 billion Ponzi scheme, and

the more recent LIBOR scandal of 2012, have all undermined public

confidence in the ethics of business people and financiers. These events

have not only triggered legislative changes around the world but they

have also accelerated discussion about the necessity for ethics training

in business education. In response to this, ethics training has been

introduced into virtually all business school programs, either as separate

courses or as integrated material in existing courses.

The question, however, is whether the inclusion of ethics into

business school programs has any effect on the development of

students’ moral judgment, on the nature of their decision-making

processes, and on their behaviour after graduation. Over the past three

decades, numerous studies have assessed the effectiveness of discrete

ethics courses in promoting moral reasoning in students (Boyd 1982;

Welton et al. 1994; LaGrone et al. 1996; Dellaportas 2006; Cagle &

Baucus 2006; Rutherford et al. 2012) with mixed results. Some

evidence clearly suggests that the typical curriculum fails to lead

students to higher-end ethical standards. Kumar et al. (1991) and Wolfe

(1993), for example, find that ethics courses have little effect and are

demoralizing for instructors who hope to equip students with the ethical

integrity necessary to meet the challenges they will face after

graduation. But other studies report contrary findings, and these mixed

results suggest that the effectiveness of ethics courses is still up for

debate. In addition, few studies have focused on the finance discipline

in particular. Given that one might expect finance students to be among

the most susceptible to moral temptation and the most likely to face

ethical dilemmas when they graduate, their ethical dispositions and

development should be an important area for research. This paper

examines, therefore, the impact of including ethics in a university

finance curriculum and whether such inclusion is effective for the moral

development of finance students. We find that participants in a discrete

course in ethics showed signs of significantly enhanced ethical

decision-making. These positive effects are, however, more strongly

observed in males than females.

Ethics Training and Moral Judgment 3

The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. Section 2 reviews

the literature dealing with the effect of moral development training on

students in business, finance and accounting, and considers the theory

of cognitive moral development as defined by Kohlberg (1958, 1969).

Section 3 outlines the methodological approach taken in the present

study and describes the course in financial ethics around which the

study was built. Section 4 describes the data and reports our results

while Section 5 reflects on the study’s limitations and proposes avenues

for future research. Section 6 summarises and concludes.

2. LITERATURE REVIEW

A key requirement for effectively improving the ethical awareness of

finance students is an understanding of the dynamics of moral

development in humans at a more general level. One approach to this

might be to draw upon insights from the field of psychology and

educational psychology that perceive moral development in terms of

changes that occur in an individual’s growth through adolescence to

adulthood. The theory of cognitive moral development (CMD) thus

examines how changes in individuals’ belief systems occur and how

these changes affect evaluations of ethical phenomena and the

generation of solutions to ethical problems.

The foundations of CMD lie in Jean Piaget’s (1932) seminal study of

moral development in children. Kohlberg (1958, 1969) built on this

early work of Piaget with longitudinal research on young adults that

attempted to break this overall development down into more precise

stages. He identified three broad levels of this moral development: pre-

conventional, conventional and post-conventional. At the pre-

conventional level, an individual’s concern is completely egocentric

and moral judgments are based purely on direct consequences. At the

conventional level, the morality of actions is judged by comparing them

to society’s views and expectations of what is right and wrong which

are rarely questioned. At the post-conventional or principled level, an

individual’s own moral perspective may be developed and may take

precedence over that of society.

Kohlberg further breaks each of these levels into component stages.

He breaks the pre-conditional level into Stage 1, where individuals

comply solely with rules and regulations when direct personal

consequences can be avoided, and Stage 2, where the concern is more

focused on actions associated with whatever the individual believes to

be in their best interest. The conventional level is broken into Stage 3,


where the willingness to uphold rules and authority is shaped by an

individual’s desire for the approval of his or her peers and superiors,

and Stage 4, where an individual is orientated towards following rules

and obeying authority in the hope of avoiding the breakdown of social

order. The post-conventional level is broken down into Stage 5, where

laws are regarded as social contracts as opposed to rigid regulations,

and Stage 6, where the determination of what is "right" is based upon

individually developed ethical principles such as, equality, justice and

respect for human rights. Table 1 provides a schematic version of

Kohlberg’s six stages of moral development. This model provides a

hierarchical continuum of cognitive moral development with

movement from a lower stage to a higher one being associated with a

higher level of moral reasoning in Kohlberg’s conception. By

elaborating on the specific cognitive developmental approach followed

by Piaget, Kohlberg established a new method of assessing moral

judgment, which has contributed to the expansion of ethical research

programs. It has also allowed the direct application of CMD theory to

ethical education through Kohlberg’s involvement in teacher training,

curriculum implementation and evaluation measures.

Table 1: Kohlberg’s Six Stages of Moral Development

Pre-Conventional Stages

Stage 1 Punishment & Obedience

Stage 2 Self-Interest

Conventional Stages

Stage 3 Conformity and Interpersonal Accord

Stage 4 Authority and Social Order

Post-Conventional Stages

Stage 5 Social Contract

Stage 6 Universal Ethical Principle


Kohlberg (1971) argues that development through the six stages is

invariant, such that development does not occur for example, directly

from stage 2 to stage 4; rather the advancement is gradual and

chronological. Additionally, there is no guarantee of continual

development, as progress may be stopped at any time. It is believed that

development beyond stage 4 (into the post-conventional level) requires

exposure to diverse external factors (cf. Weber 1990) and rarely occurs

before an individual reaches their mid 20s. This leaves an optimal

timeframe for university students to be exposed to ethical intervention.

While Kohlberg’s approach is not without its critics, it provides a useful

framework for moral development that has been used extensively in

studies that examine the ethics of university students and graduates.

Several approaches have traditionally been employed by researchers

to measure the kind of cognitive moral capacity considered by

Kohlberg. Kohlberg (1958) himself developed the Moral Judgment

Interview (MJI), a semi-structured interview instrument designed to test

moral judgment by assessing responses to a series of hypothetical moral

dilemmas. This approach was criticized, however, because of its time-

consuming nature, especially when used on large samples, and for the

largely subjective nature of individual moral development scores that

depend upon researchers’ interpretations of qualitative interview

responses, a problem compounded when multiple interviewers are

involved. An alternative is Rest’s (1979) Defining Issues Test (DIT)

which is a self-administered objective format questionnaire that

depends on responses to a set of hypothetical social dilemmas. The DIT

presents the subject with six dilemmas as follows:

1) Whether a man should steal a drug that will save the life of his

dying wife;

2) Whether a man should report to the authorities that he has sighted

an escaped prisoner, despite the prisoner leading an exemplary

life since escaping;

3) Whether a principal should halt the publication of a student

newspaper which has angered the community due to its political

ideology;

4) Whether a doctor should provide medicine to a terminally ill

patient who has requested it but whose death it may cause;

5) Whether a store manager should hire a minority member, who is

disfavoured by the store’s customers;

6) Whether students should protest the Vietnam War.


Each dilemma is followed by 12 “items of consideration” which

constitute potential aspects of dilemma resolution and which map onto

stages 2 to 6 of Kohlberg’s schema of moral development. The

participant is asked to rate each “item of consideration” in terms of how

critical it is to resolving the proposed ethical dilemma. Numerical

values are then attached to the subject’s ranking of these items and an

overall index is constructed which indicates how developed the moral

thinking embedded in these responses is in terms of Kohlberg’s stages.

A key feature of the DIT is then that it produces a single index figure,

called a Principled Score or P-score, that characterizes a subject’s

cognitive moral capacity. This index has been repeatedly validated over

the last four decades as consistently providing a better measure of moral

awareness than alternative measures (see Rest et al. 1997) and is,

therefore, the most widely used measure in studies that examine the

effectiveness of ethics training. It is also ideally suited for use when

large samples are involved (McGeorge 1975).

The DIT is, however, designed as a measure of general moral

development and may not be very useful for measuring moral responses

to the more specific ethical challenges that emerge in particular

professional contexts. Welton et al. (1994), therefore, developed and

validated the Accounting Defining Issues Test (ADIT) which adapts the

DIT for specific application to the field of accounting and is comprised

of two business and two accounting dilemmas rather than the general

dilemmas of Rest’s original instrument.

Frameworks such as that built around Kohlberg’s stages of moral

development, and tests derived from these frameworks such as Rest’s

and Welton’s versions of the DIT, have been used to measure and

examine the cognitive moral development of students in various

university departments over the last two decades. These studies have

examined the moral development of students in law (Hartwell 1995;

Landsman & McNeel 2002), dentistry (Bebeau & Thoma 1994; Chaves

2000), medicine (Self & Olivarez 1996) and veterinary medicine (Self

et al. 1993). Studies that directly analyze the effect of ethical education

on finance students are, however, rare, particularly those employing a

Kohlbergian theoretical framework or some version of Rest’s DIT

instrument.

The methodology of many of the studies identified above have

included a test-retest format to measure changes in participants’ moral

judgments as a result of exposure to ethics training. Students sit some


version of the DIT at the beginning of semester, take the ethics course,

and then sit the DIT again. Statistically significant changes in results

from the DIT are then interpreted as evidence of a positive effect from

the ethics course on moral development. Results from the studies listed

above have, however, been inconclusive. Martin (1982), Wolfe &

Fritzsche (1998), Venezia (2004), Waples et al. (2009) in particular find

evidence that ethics courses do not have positive effects on students’

ethical development. The reason for this is not so clear. Cragg (1997)

argues that by the time an individual reaches adolescence, the essential

factors that drive character development have already exerted their

influence and morals are largely formed so that teaching ethics to

university students has little effect. Kumar et al. (1991) supports this

finding. But many of the other studies listed above are consistent with

the proposition that moral development is not completed until later in

an individual’s life, leaving room for intervention during university

studies (see Boyd 1982; Welton et al. 1994; LaGrone et al. 1996;

Dellaportas 2006; Cagle & Baucus 2006; Nelson et al. 2012). Lau

(2010) reviews this literature and Table 2 summarizes his analysis.

Several studies have explored alternative methods of measuring

students’ moral capacity. Cole & Smith (1996), and more recently

Cagle & Baucus (2006), examine students’ ethical perceptions before

and after the introduction of ethical case studies into a finance

curriculum. These studies used a questionnaire adapted by Cole &

Smith (1995) from Froelich & Kottke’s (1991) earlier instrument which

asks students to respond to a series of ethical perceptions from the point

of view of both a typical business person and a more ethically-sensitive

business person. Both studies find that students who have studied the

ethical dimensions of scandal cases demonstrate enhanced ethical

decision-making compared to students who have not.

While the impact of ethics education on general business students has

been measured with a range of instruments, the study of ethics in

accounting has traditionally followed Kohlbergian theories and

measures developed by Rest (1979). Dellaportas (2006) reports on the

development of an ethics course that was presented over a period of 12

weeks. Dellaportas aimed to evaluate whether this course could raise

accounting students’ levels of moral reasoning measured with a test-

retest format based on a shorter three-dilemma version of the DIT.

Students’ P-scores in this study were, on average, significantly

increased as a result of the course.

Table 2: Development of Business Ethics Research, 1980 - 2010

Authors (year) Field Sample Analysis Instrument Measure Impact Findings

Boyd (1982) Business Treatment: 180

Control: 81

Test-retest

format with

comparison of P-

scores

Rest’s DIT P-scores Positive and significant

effect on students’

moral reasoning and

development

Weber & Green

(1991)

Business Treatment: 61 Pre-test to

evaluate what

stage

sophomores,

never exposed to

ethics courses,

would evaluate at

Analysis of an

ethical dilemma

involving an

auditor (Roger

Worsham case)

Kohlbergian

Standard Issues

Scoring (SIS)

measure

Overwhelming majority

(77%) students

demonstrated reasoning

below stage 4

Welton et al.

(1994)

Accounting Treatment: 35

Control: 46

Test-retest

format with

comparison of P-

scores

Welton et al.

ADIT

P-scores Positive and significant

effect on students’

moral reasoning and

development

Cole & Smith

(1996)

Business Treatment: 537

Students & 158

Business

People

Test-retest

format with

comparison of

“ethical”

responses

Froelich and

Kottke survey

Scale ranging

from 1 (strongly

agree) to 6

(strongly

disagree)

Students were more

accepting of

questionable ethical

responses compared to

business people

Abdolmohammadi

& Reeves (2000)

Accounting Hypothesis 1 -

Treatment: 113

Test-retest

format with

comparison of P-

scores

Rest’s DIT P-scores Low impact for female

students, moderate

impact for male

students.

8 A

. Ko

vacevic, G

. Ham

busch

, D. M

ichaylu

k & G

. Van

de V

enter

Table 2: Continued

Authors (year) Field Sample Analysis Instrument Measure Impact Findings

Thorne (2000) Accounting Treatment: 99

Comparison of

DIT and

accounting

specific

instrument

scores.

Rest’s DIT &

Thorne’s

accounting

specific

instrument

P-scores Validates two measures of

moral reasoning of

accountants: prescriptive

and deliberative reasoning

Dellaportas

(2006)

Accounting Treatment: 26 Test-retest

format with

comparison of P-

scores

Three-dilemma

version of

Rest’s DIT

P-scores Positive and significant

effect on students’ moral

reasoning and

development

Cagle & Baucus

(2006)

Business Treatment: 54

undergrad and

32 MBA

students

Test-retest

format with

comparison of

“ethical”

responses

Froelich and

Kottke survey

Scale ranging

from 1 (strongly

agree) to 6

(strongly

disagree)

Positive and significant

effect on students’ moral

reasoning and

development

Ritter (2006) Business Sample: 134

undergrads

Treatment: 33

Control 44

Test-retest

format with

comparison of

responses and

relative four-tier

scores

Smith and

Oakley’s

scenarios (Moral

awareness) and

Ethical vignettes

(moral

reasoning)

Scenarios using

6-point scale

(never to

always) and

four-tier scores

(from non to

highly ethical)

No impact on moral

awareness or moral

reasoning as a whole,

however slight positive

effects in women

Eth

ics Tra

inin

g a

nd

Mo

ral Ju

dgm

ent 9


Thorne (2000) employed and validated two separate measures of

accountants’ moral reasoning: prescriptive and deliberative.

Prescriptive reasoning involves what should ideally be done to resolve

an ethical issue while deliberative reasoning involves the intention to

act naturally on a particular ethical issue. Thorne validated these two

measures by comparing the results of accounting students that

completed Rest’s original DIT to those who completed Thorne’s own

context specific instrument. His results indicate that the context specific

instrument generates a more finely tuned measure of whether the ethics

course taught as part of the study was effective in influencing students’

moral development. Finally Welton et al. (1994) used treatment and

control groups to measure the effectiveness of a stand-alone ethics

course and found that students taking the course demonstrated

improved moral reasoning measured using an accounting specific

version of Rest’s DIT.

While not the central issue of this paper, there has also been an

increased focus in recent literature on gender-related issues in the

response of students to ethics training. More specifically, some studies

have examined whether males and females follow the same ethical

decision-making process and to what extent ethics intervention has a

differential effect on their moral development. Kohlberg’s moral stages

framework has come under significant scrutiny where critics, such as

Gilligan (1977, 1982), have argued for the existence of gender bias

within its structure. Gilligan (1977) reflects on how male social

development is characterised by individualism, while female

development is linked to interpersonal factors. It has also been argued

that women’s moral reasoning is driven by a ‘caring’ factor which

motivates decisions driven by others’ needs and an individual’s specific

relationships. This results in female responses not being evaluated

accurately in Kohlberg’s ‘justice’-oriented system which reflects a

largely male ethical perspective.

The literature has often identified gender-differences in the moral

responses of students to ethics intervention irrespective of whether

gender-sensitive measurement of moral development was used or

whether the study explicitly accounted for gender bias. In regards to the

inadequacy of Kohlberg’s stages framework in accurately reflecting

female moral reasoning, numerous studies have suggested that gender

differences in moral responses identify women as having superior moral

sensitivity. While some studies find no significant difference in the


levels of moral reasoning between males and females (see Rest 1986;

Dellaportas 2006), a number of studies find that females have higher P-

scores in comparison to males (see Walker 1984; Thoma 1986;

Ponemon & Gabhart 1990; Ruegger & King 1992; and Rest 1994).

Cragg (1997) reports a result, however, where females demonstrated

significantly higher levels of moral reasoning after exposure to an ethics

curriculum than males. He suggests the possibility that ethics training

is only absorbed by individuals with a mental framework that is

prepared to engage in the consideration of ethical strategies and

development of moral values. Ritter (2006) expands on this by claiming

that, with enough training, it is possible to create the correct ethical

framework for both genders that will be ready for ethical development.

There may also be differences in how males and females respond to

ethics interventions. Abdolmohammadi & Reeves (2000), for example,

find that male students significantly benefited from a targeted business

ethics course while females did not. Ritter (2006), on the other hand,

found that while careful implementation of an ethics initiative had

positive effects on student moral development, these effects were only

witnessed in women. Loe & Weeks (2000) conclude that both males

and females are positively influenced by ethics training. These

conclusions illustrate the contrasting findings in the literature

surrounding gender bias in ethical development, suggesting that any

contribution that clarifies the role that gender plays in this respect,

would be beneficial.

There is, in summary, a substantial literature on the effect of

incorporating ethics instruction into business school programs on the

moral development of students. This literature draws on the

foundational work of Kohlberg on human moral development which

provides a framework for understanding and measuring that

development. Kohlberg’s original instrument for testing moral

development has been modified and adapted to a number of new

contexts including studies of business and accounting students. Results

from these studies are mixed as to the effectiveness of incorporating

ethics studies into business school programs but a number of studies

suggest that moral development is enhanced by such measures. It would

also seem that there are differential effects on male and female students

with both a greater need for ethical instruction and a greater effect of

this instruction on male students. But results on this issue are, once

again, mixed. Little work has been done directly on finance students


despite the apparent importance of ethics in the finance industry. The

following section thus outlines the context and methodology of the

present study which seeks to fill this gap.

3. CONTEXT AND METHODOLOGY

The present study was based around an existing final-year

undergraduate course called Ethics in Finance taught within the

Finance major and sub-major of the Bachelor of Business degree

offered by the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) Business

School. This course is delivered in a workshop format, where the aim

is to deepen students’ understanding of the major theories of ethics as a

basis for analysing and understanding ethical dilemmas in finance.

Rasche et al. (2013) criticize current ethics education as being limited

in its integration into specific business school disciplines such as

accounting and finance. The Ethics in Finance course is uniquely

positioned, in that it focuses on finance ethics, as opposed to general

business ethics. The subject covers ethical frameworks, case studies and

professional practice issues. By examining scandals that have shaken

public confidence in the ethics of financial markets, this course

demonstrates the importance of ethics in the operation of financial

institutions, in the personal conduct of finance professionals, and in its

potentially far reaching implications for the global economy. In

addition, the subject also covers the CFA Institute Standards of

Professional Conduct and related applications as a best practice

example of conduct rules in the finance industry.

Students in the Spring 2014 semester offering of Ethics in Finance

were asked to complete pre- and post-test versions of what we will call

a Modified Defining Issues Test (MDIT), an adaptation of Rest’s

original DIT using similar modification principles to those employed in

the development of Welton’s et al. (1994) Accounting DIT. A number

of studies have suggested that an abbreviated ethical questionnaire is

the most effective instrument to collect data on students’ moral attitudes

due to practical considerations such as time availability and participant

fatigue. Based on reliability data, Davison & Robbins (1978) find that

a shortened three-scenario DIT is as effective in evaluating cognitive

moral development as the original six-scenario DIT where group means

are the focus. Shortening of moral development questionnaires has

been done effectively in studies such as Welton et al. 1994,


Exhibit 1: The Heinz and the Drug Dilemma

In Europe a woman was near death from a special kind of cancer. There was one drug

that doctors thought might save her. It was a form of radium that a druggist in the same

town had recently discovered. The drug was expensive to make, but the druggist was

charging ten times what the drug cost to make. He paid $200 for the radium and charged

$2,000 for a small dose of the drug. The sick woman’s husband, Heinz, went to everyone

he knew to borrow the money, but he could only get together about $1,000, which is half

of what it cost. He told the druggist that his wife was dying, and asked him to sell it

cheaper or let him pay later. But the druggist said, “No, I discovered the drug and I’m

going to make money from it.” So Heinz got desperate and began to think about breaking

into the man’s store to steal the drug for his wife.

Should Heinz steal the drug? (Check one):

Should steal it Can’t decide Should not steal it

IMPORTANCE:

Great Much Some Little No

1. Whether a community's laws are going to be upheld

2. Isn't it only natural for a loving husband to care so

much for his wife that he'd steal?

3. Is Heinz willing to risk getting shot as a burglar or

going to jail for the chance that stealing the drug might

help?

4. Whether Heinz is a professional wrestler, or has

considerable influence with professional wrestlers.

5. Whether Heinz is stealing for himself or doing this

solely to help someone else.

6. Whether the druggist's rights to his invention have to

be respected.

7. Whether the essence of living is more encompassing

than the termination of dying, socially and individually.

8. What values are going to be the basis for governing

how people act towards each other.

9. Whether the druggist is going to be allowed to hide

behind a worthless law, which only protects the rich

anyhow.

10. Whether the law in this case is getting in the way of

the most basic claim of any member of society.

11. Whether the druggist deserves to be robbed for being

so greedy and cruel.

12. Would stealing in such a case bring about more total

good for the whole society or not.

From the list of questions above, select the four most important:

Most important ________ Second most important ________

Third most important ________ Fourth most important ________


Thorne 2000 and Dellaportas 2006. The MDIT thus employs only three

scenarios specifically selected from the DIT and the ADIT: the

generalized and non-business specific ethical dilemma “Heinz and the

Drug”; and two business specific ethical dilemmas, “Bankruptcy” and

“Reimbursement”. The “Heinz and the Drug” case from the DIT which

introduces students to broad ethical issues was included to facilitate a

comparison with previous studies, while the other two cases use

concepts developed for accounting but relevant for finance. Exhibit 1

replicates information for the “Heinz and the Drug” dilemma and the

full test is provided in Appendix A.

The measurement of moral development obtained using the MDIT

was calculated in the same way as in both the DIT and ADIT and was

done in three steps. Under descriptions of each of the three dilemmas

are twelve statements/questions that identify potential factors that a

participant might bring to bear in making a judgment about the ethical

dilemma posed in the description. Each of these statements maps into

one of the six Kohlbergian stages of moral development. The

statements/questions for the “Heinz and the Drug” case are also shown

in Exhibit 1 and a mapping of the statements/questions for each of the

three dilemmas in the MDIT into the Kohlbergian stages is shown in

Table 3.

The first step in the measurement process was to ask participants to

rate, on a five-point Likert scale, the importance that each of the factors

in these statements or questions might play in their judgment about the

dilemma. This step, thus, required participants to think analytically

about the moral problem and identified a range of possible factors that

might feed into their thinking about a solution. The second step asked

participants to identify the four most important factors in their thinking

about the problem from the list of twelve, in descending order. The third

step involved assigning values or scores to these four factors. This can

be done in a variety of ways. For example, if the objective is to measure

the degree to which Kohlberg’s higher level or “post-conventional”

principles govern moral decision making, the identification of

Kohlberg’s Stage 5 or 6 principles as being among the four most

important factors can be assigned high values, and other principles,

lower values. In this case an index can be calculated that measures the

use of these higher level principles in the participant’s moral decision


Table 3: Mapping of Scenario Statements onto Kohlbergian Stages

Statement

Number

Heinz and the

Drug

Bankruptcy Reimbursement

1 Stage 4 Stage 3 Stage 3


3 Stage 2 N Stage 2

4 N Stage 3 Stage 4



7 N Stage 4 Stage 4





12 Stage 5 Stage 5 N

(N = Nonsense/Irrelevant Statement)

making. Alternatively if one wishes to measure to the degree to which

lower Kohlbergian principles are used in this process, high values can

be given to the identification of Stage 3 or 4 principles among a

participant’s four most important factors and the resulting index would

thus measure the degree to which these “conventional” principles affect

moral decision making. It is even possible for indicies to measure the

use of principles from an individual Kohlbergian stage.

To illustrate, we describe this process for the main P-score that

measures the role of Kohlberg’s Stage 5 and 6 or “post-conventional”

moral principles. The factor identified by the participant as “Most

Important” for one of the dilemmas is given a score of 4 if it is a

Kohlbergian Stage 5 or 6 factor as indicated by the mapping in Table 3,

and 0 otherwise. The “Second Most Important” factor is given a score

of 3 if it is a Stage 5 or 6 statement and 0 otherwise. The “Third Most

Important” factor is given a score of 2 if it is a Stage 5 or 6 statement

and 0 otherwise. And finally, the “Fourth Most Important Factor” is

given a score of 1 if it is a Stage 5 or 6 statement and 0 otherwise. The

maximum number of points that could thus be scored for each dilemma

is 10 summing to a maximum of 30 for all three cases. The actual score

obtained out of this possible maximum of 30 is divided by 0.3 to deliver

a per cent value and this constitutes the P-score for each participant in


each test. An example of a completed questionnaire is provided in

Appendix A and a fully worked example of the P-score calculation is

provided in Appendix B. A participant thus obtains a high P-score

constructed in this way if they make extensive use of advanced moral

reasoning factors defined in terms of Stages 5 and 6 in Kohlberg’s

framework and a low score if they make extensive use of lower level

factors. But it should be noted that if high values are assigned to earlier

stage principles, alternative measures of moral development are

obtained.

Students in the Ethics in Finance course thus completed the MDIT at

the beginning of semester and then again at the half-way point, six

weeks into the semester. Changes in their P-scores between these two

tests were then used to identify changes in moral reasoning skills and

attributed to the treatment associated with participation in the ethics

course. The timing of the pre- and post-tests in this study was largely

determined by the structure of the course. Since the course’s first six

weeks aim at raising awareness of ethical dilemmas and at fostering

responsible and sustainable decision-making in finance, the completion

of this first half of the semester is critically relevant for the ethical

development of students measured in the test. By comparison, the

subsequent study of the CFA Institute Standards of Professional

Conduct focuses on the successful application of knowledge developed

in the first half of the semester.

A number of commentators have argued that “dilemma familiarity”

may reduce the effectiveness of test-retest methodologies using this

kind of moral development measurement. Dilemma familiarity is where

students learn enough about the dilemmas posed in the first test to intuit

the “correct” or morally sensitive responses which they return in the

second test whether or not such responses are authentic. Rest (1979)

argues, however, that the effects of dilemma familiarity are negligible.

Davison & Robbins (1978) suggest that the effect of dilemma

familiarity is sensitive to the time intervals between tests and that an

interval of as little as three weeks is sufficient to nullify any familiarity

bias. The interval of six weeks in the present study clearly exceeds this

minimum.

As in the original moral development studies, several consistency and

reliability checks were conducted in our project. Consistency in

participant responses was checked by comparing Likert ratings of the

four “Most Important” statement/questions identified by a participant


for each dilemma. The five point Likert rating of the “Most Important”

statement was thus compared with that for the “Second Most

Important” statement. The two responses were regarded as consistent if

the first of these ratings was greater than or equal to the second, and

inconsistent if this condition was not satisfied. The five point rating of

the “Most Important” statement was then compared with that for the

“Third Most Important” statement and the same test for consistency

applied. This procedure was repeated for each statement pair within the

four most important statements identified by the participant for each

dilemma. In line with consistency checks in the original DIT (Rest

1979) and the ADIT (Welton et al. 1994) studies, if an inconsistency

was detected in more than one of the three scenarios, that participant’s

questionnaire was removed from the sample.

Reliability of the responses was tested by including at least one

irrelevant statement in the list of twelve that followed each scenario.

Four such statements were included across all three cases of the MDIT

and these are indicated in Table 3. Where one of these statements was

included among the four most important statements identified by a

participant for their overall decision in a particular case, reliability

“demerit” points were assigned to that participant: four points were

awarded where the statement was identified by the participant as “Most

Important”, three points where the statement was identified as “Second

Most Important”, two points for “Third Most Important” and one point

“Fourth Most Important”. This process was applied across all three

scenarios, summing the total points assigned, and dividing by 0.3 to

obtain a percentage value. If the resulting value was greater than or

equal to 20%, the participant’s responses were deemed not to be reliable

and the questionnaire was removed from the sample.

In addition to in-class testing, an identical online test was made

available to allow students that did not attend class on the day that the

test was conducted, to participate. A link to the online test was provided

by email, instructing students to complete the test before having any

exposure to the course and its content. For the post-test, an additional

link was provided to those students who had similarly not attended class

on the post-test day, allowing them too, to participate and maintaining

consistency in testing procedures.

Two hypotheses were tested using the P-scores calculated for each

participant from the pre- and post-instruments described above. In null

form, these were:


H1: Ethics training does not have a significant effect on P-scores.

H2: Cognitive development through ethics training is

independent of gender.

The first of these hypotheses expresses the question of central interest

in this paper. The second, while not a primary focus of the paper,

analyzes the role of gender on the effectiveness of the Ethics in Finance

course on moral development. As discussed above in the literature

review, previous studies have been mixed on whether ethics

intervention affects males and females differently. We hypothesized,

therefore, a notable gender bias in the effect of the Ethics in Finance

course on moral development and this is expressed in the formulation

of the second hypothesis above. The next section describes the data

collected from the methodology outlined in this section.

4. DATA AND RESULTS

As explained above, students completed the MDIT instrument twice

over a period of six weeks: at the beginning of semester (the pre-test);

and in the middle of semester (the post-test). A total of 41 out of 76

enrolled students attended and completed the physical version of the

pre-test, while an additional 27 students completed the online version

of the test before they took the Ethics in Finance course. This generated

an overall pre-test sample of 68 students, out of which the responses of

6 students failed the applied consistency and reliability checks

discussed above. With respect to post-test responses, 9 respondents

were lost across the semester due to attrition, leaving a final matched

sample of 53 questionnaires. The mean age of respondents in this final

useable sample was 22 years, with a male dominated gender distribution

of 66% (34% for females). Full-time students comprised 81% of the

sample. A control group was selected to address potential sample bias

and only a pre-test questionnaire was given to this group. The control

group included students completing a major or sub major in the

Bachelor of Business degree at UTS with a major in Finance, but who

had not taken the Ethics in Finance elective during their studies.

Demographic information for both groups is presented in Table 4. Table

5 outlines the distribution of the participants’ native languages.

Table 6 presents mean values for a range of P-scores constructed to

measure the influence of Kohlberg’s “pre-conventional”,

“conventional” and “post-conventional” principles, as well as the

influence of principles from individual Kohlbergian stages, for the main


sample of 53 Ethics in Finance students and the control group of 38

Bachelor of Business students. The table also presents P-scores from

the pre-test and post-test for the main sample with results for a matched

paired t-test on the change between the two.

Column 1 of Table 6 indicates that the mean pre-test, post-

conventional P-score was 28.30, compared to a mean pre-test P-score

for the control group of 27.72. These scores were not significantly

different from each other (p = 0.98, two-tailed test). Additionally, pre-

test scores for measures of the influence of Kohlberg’s “pre-

conventional” (stage 2) and “conventional” (stage 3 and 4) principles,

in both the experimental and control samples were found not to be

significantly different (p = 0.38 and 0.74, respectively). These scores

were also tested across a range of demographic sub-samples of the two

groups and for an α of 0.05, no significant differences were found on

the basis of gender, age, mode of study or native language. These results

suggest that the Ethics in Finance students were sufficiently

representative of the general Bachelor of Business cohort and that there

was no problem of bias in the formation of the main sample, consistent

with the results of Nelson et al. (2012).

Table 6 also provides some insight into the composition of principles

used by students in both the main and control samples, absent any ethics

course treatment, to analyse moral dilemmas in Finance. The P-scores

for main sample student use of “pre-conventional” and “conventional”

principles in the pre-test were 10.00% and 56.70% respectively. Use of

these principles by students in the control group were not significantly

different at 11.49% and 55.79% respectively. This compares with use

of “post-conventional” principles discussed above at 28.30% for

students in the main sample and 27.72% for students in the control

group. These results are consistent with Kohlberg’s (1984) argument

that the majority of individuals reason at the conventional level and

further moral development is only achieved after direct exposure to

diverse external factors such as an ethics course (cf. Weber 1990).

The key result reported in Table 6, however, is a mean increase in P-

score for the main sample between the pre- and post-test of 11.07

percentage points. This change was statistically significant at the 1%

level indicating rejection of the null for Hypothesis 1 and suggesting

that Ethics in Finance was effective in improving the moral

development of students who took the course. This finding is consistent

with broader results reported by Dellaportas (2006) that students


Table 4: Demographic Features of the Sample

Experimental

Group Control Group

Initial sample size 68 43

Failed consistency & reliability checks (6) (5)

Lost through attrition (9) -

Final student sample size 53 38

Average Age 22 21

Gender Distribution:

Female 18 (34%) 21 (55%)

Male 35 (66%) 17 (45%)

Mode of Study:

Full time 43 (81%) 33 (87%)

Part time 10 (19%) 5 (13%)

Table 5: Language Characteristics of the Sample

Native Language

Experimental

Number of

students

Native Language

Control

Number of

students

English 42 English 31

Chinese 2 Chinese 2

Vietnamese 2 Italian 1

Bengali 2 Bengali 1

Tamil 1 Sinhalese 1

Turkish 1 Mandarin 1

German 1 Cantonese 1

Hindi 1

Japanese 1

taking a business ethics course demonstrated an increase of 12.8

percentage points in a similar measure of moral development and

Welton et al. (1994) who report an increase of 6.4%. Table 6 also

provides a breakdown of this overall improvement in moral


Table 6: P-scores and Changes in P-scores

Pre-test

[1]

Post-test

[2]

Change

[3]

Prob change = 0

[4]

Pre-conventional (Stage 2)

Group mean scores

Experimental 10.00 6.60 (3.40) <0.01

Control 11.49

Probability of group

equality 0.38

Conventional

Group mean scores

Experimental

Stage 3 17.86 14.34 (3.52) 0.03

Stage 4 38.93 34.91 (4.02) 0.04

Combined 56.79 49.25 (7.54) <0.01

Control

Stage 3 20.88

Stage 4 34.91

Combined 55.79


equality 0.74

Post-conventional

Group mean scores

Experimental

Stage 5 22.07 31.19 9.12 <0.01

Stage 6 6.23 8.18 1.95 0.05

Combined 28.30 39.37 11.07 <0.01

Control

Stage 5 23.16

Stage 6 4.56

Combined 27.72


equality 0.98

development into the influence of Stage 5 and 6 principles with an

improvement of 9.12 percentage points (significant at the 1% level)

associated with Stage 5 principles and an improvement of 1.95


percentage points (significant at the 5% level) associated with Stage 6

principles.

Further insight into this result is provided by the reduced use students

made of Kohlberg’s “conventional” and “pre-conventional” principles

in their assessment of the three dilemmas. Table 5 indicates that

students reduced their combined use of Stage 3 and Stage 4 principles

by about 7.54% (statistically significant at the 1% level) with about half

of this effect attributable to each of these stages. Students also made

reduced use of Stage 2 principles by 3.4% (statistically significant at

the 1% level). Students in the main sample thus appear to have

substituted higher level moral reasoning principles for lower level

principles as a result of taking the Ethics in Finance course.

Table 7 breaks down pre- and post-test results for the main sample,

and changes in the key P-scores for this sample, by gender. It also

reports results for a one tailed, two-sample (male and female sub-

samples of the main sample) t-test, assuming unequal variances, as well

as a two tailed t-test for P-score differences between males and females.

Despite a higher pre-test P-score for females of 30.19, compared to that

for males of 26.38, this difference was not statistically significant.

Similarly, the difference between the male and female post-test score

was not statistically significant. However, the difference in differences

of pre-test and post-test scores for males and females (15.33 – 5.18 =

10.15) was statistically significant at the 10% level. This suggests that

gender does play a role in the effectiveness of ethics training on moral

development, at least in the case of the Ethics in Finance course and

this finding is in line with such literature as Ruegger & King (1992), Rest

(1994), Ritter (2006), and Abdolmohammadi & Reeves (2000). But the

reason for this result is important. Females appear to possess slightly

more developed moral awareness than males before being exposed to

ethics training and the effect of this training is that males catch up with

female moral awareness. This finding is consistent with results reported

by Abdolmohammadi & Reeves (2000) that improvement in the moral

development of male students attributed to an ethics course was

statistically significant at the 1% level with a P-score change of 15.33%.

We thus reject the null formulation of Hypothesis 2 and conclude that

gender does make a difference to the effectiveness of ethics training on

moral development with the effect on males being more significant than

the effect on females.


Table 7: Gender-based MDIT P-scores and Change in P-scores

Mean P-score Matched paired

t-test

Gender Pre-test [1] Post-test [2] Change [3] Probability

change = 0

Female 30.19 35.37 5.18 0.31

Male 26.38 41.71 15.33 < 0.01

Gender

significance 0.29 0.20 0.06

5. LIMITATIONS AND FUTURE RESEARCH

The present study has some limitations that future research could

attempt to overcome. Firstly, while Rest (1979) and Welton et al.

(1994) independently tested the validity of their instruments, no validity

tests were conducted on the MDIT. We thus relied on prior validation

of the instruments adapted to create the MDIT inherently assuming a

smooth transition between generalized ethical scenarios and context

specific scenarios. While we regarded this as a reasonable working

assumption, future work could formally test the validity of the MDIT.

It could also take into account the observation of Davison & Robbins

(1978) that as an index of overall moral development, the P-score has

been known to be insensitive to changes that occur in the lower stages

of moral development, as opposed to changes exclusively at Kohlberg’s

principled level.

Secondly, further consideration could be given in future work to the

conception of ethical education itself. Kohlberg’s model of moral

development focuses entirely on cognitive processes and while it can

be assumed that there is some relationship between thought and action,

financial economists tend to focus on action alone. Thus further thought

could be given to the effect that ethics education might have on

behaviour directly. This may well be a ripe field of research for

experimental economics and finance.

Thirdly, the literature has shown that while ethics education does

promote the development of moral reasoning in students, the impact can

be short-lived and more finely attuned moral development can dissipate

after graduation (Lampe & Finn 1994; and LaGrone et al. 1996). As

new graduates are confronted with real ethical scenarios and external


factors such as hierarchical pressures, work place environments and the

influence of peers, they might find that their moral views change and

this is likely to impact on their ethical decision-making. Further

research might, therefore, be focused around longitudinal studies that

track the moral development of graduates from courses such as Ethics

in Finance, to see whether there are further changes in their ethical

decision-making processes after a number of years in professional

business environments. Although a number of studies have attempted

this (see Abdolmohammadi & Reeves 2000; Williams & Dewett 2005;

and Welton & Guffey 2009), mixed results have been reported and this

question would benefit from further research.

6. CONCLUSION

This paper has reported on the effects of a freestanding ethics course in

a university finance curriculum on the moral development of students.

While a number of studies have examined the effects of such

educational initiatives on business and accounting students, very few

studies have focused on the finance discipline. A Modified Defining

Issues Test (MDIT) was thus developed and used in a test-retest

methodology to examine whether students in the Ethics in Finance

course at the UTS Business School possessed enhanced moral

development after taking the course. We find evidence of a statistically

significant improvement in moral reasoning understood from a

Kohlbergian perspective. This effect was, however, more pronounced

in males than females with females beginning from a higher base of

moral development and improving only slightly. While a number of

suggestions are made for future research that might improve on the

work reported in this paper, our results justify the inclusion of separate

and well-designed ethics courses in finance curricula.


APPENDIX A: EXAMPLE OF COMPLETED QUESTIONAIRE


APPENDIX B: CALCULATION OF P-SCORE FOR COMPLETED

QUESTIONNAIRE

Scenario Ranking Score

Heinz and the drug Second most important (Statement 10) 3 points

Third most important (Statement 12) 2 points

Bankruptcy Most important (Statement 6) 4 points

Reimbursement Third most important (Statement 5) 2 points

Fourth most important (Statement 6) 1 points

Total 12 points

P-score for student = 12/0.30 = 40%

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