EAGER: The Ethical Games Project: Measuring Empathy and Ethical Action, Detecting Empathy's Impact on Ethics

EAGER：道德游戏项目：衡量同理心和道德行动，检测同理心对道德的影响

• 批准号: 1252209
• 负责人: Kristen Monroe
• 金额: $ 5万
• 依托单位: University of California-Irvine
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2012
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2012-09-01 至 2014-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1252209&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: EAGER; Ethical; Games; Project; Measuring

What drives ethical treatment of others? Do we learn ethical values/behavior only as children or can ethics be taught effectively later and, if so, how can ethics best be taught in the high-tech age? Can computer games successfully pose moral dilemmas ranging from personal choices to ones specific to certain professions such as medicine, law, computer science, and engineering? Can we develop games that are culturally and contextually-rich yet universal enough to have broad appeal while not privileging one set of values or ethical system? The PI's goal in this exploratory research is to tackle questions such as these, as Stage 1 of the Ethical Games Project to include a summer internship program, an undergraduate class, and a graduate seminar testing the importance of an empathy-inducing intervention on students' ethical action and ethical self-examination, as measured by a variety of psychometric and ethnographic tests. Pre- and post-tests of ethics will be administered to 40-50 students participating in journal writing and conducting/analyzing narrative interviews with someone "different" (an elder) as well as with a moral exemplar (a philanthropist or someone who has saved another person's life). The "intervention" will consist of the students putting themselves in the place of another via the narrative interviews, and will ask about the impact of such empathetic intervention on students' ethical action and ethical self-examination. The project thus will focus on two foundational conceptualizations of ethics: ethics as behavior that furthers human well-being, and ethics as thinking reflectively about the consequences of one's action. The project will ask about both the reliability of such tests and the relationship between empathy and ethics, by comparing results of different measures on subject and control groups. By these means the PI hopes to understand how best to conceptualize, operationalize and measure ethical self-reflection, ethical action and empathy, and also the possible relationships existing among empathic involvement and the diverse measures of these ethical phenomena. In particular, she will attempt to determine how the different measurements relate to each other, whether and how the substantive relationship detected between empathy and ethics is affected by the different measures employed, and whether certain measures privilege particular values (justice vs. compassion, deliberative vs. non-reasoning) or groupsBroader Impacts: If successful, project outcomes will lay the groundwork for future work on socio-cultural variations and will elucidate the value-structures latent in psychometric and ethnographic tests and ethical games, which in turn will form the basis for a larger project that will develop a game for computers, tablets, and mobile phones, thus utilizing 21st century technology to test one of the oldest ideas in ethics, namely that empathic involvement with another fosters and encourages more compassionate and ethical treatment of that person or group. Such a game could provide a cost-effective way to teach ethics and reach audiences now left untouched by traditional teaching methods.

是什么推动了对他人的道德对待？ 我们是否只在儿童时期学习道德价值观/行为，或者以后才能有效地教授道德，如果是这样，在高科技时代如何才能最好地教授道德？ 电脑游戏能否成功地提出道德困境，从个人选择到特定的职业，如医学，法律，计算机科学和工程？ 我们能否开发出既有文化和背景丰富，又有足够普遍性的游戏，从而具有广泛的吸引力，同时又不违背一套价值观或道德体系？ PI在这项探索性研究中的目标是解决诸如此类的问题，作为道德游戏项目的第一阶段，包括暑期实习计划，本科生课程和研究生研讨会，以测试移情诱导干预对学生道德行为和道德自我检查的重要性，通过各种心理测量和人种学测试进行测量。 道德的前和后测试将管理到40-50名学生参与期刊写作和进行/分析叙事采访的人“不同”（长者），以及与道德典范（慈善家或有人谁救了另一个人的生命）。 “干预”包括学生通过叙事访谈将自己置于他人的位置，并询问这种移情干预对学生道德行为和道德自我检查的影响。 因此，该项目将侧重于伦理学的两个基本概念：伦理学作为促进人类福祉的行为，以及伦理学作为对行为后果的反思。 该项目将通过比较受试者和对照组的不同测量结果，询问此类测试的可靠性以及同理心和道德之间的关系。 通过这些方法，PI希望了解如何最好地概念化，操作化和测量道德自我反思，道德行为和移情，以及移情参与和这些道德现象的不同测量之间可能存在的关系。 特别是，她将试图确定不同的测量如何相互关联，是否以及如何通过所采用的不同措施影响移情和伦理之间的实质性关系，以及某些措施是否优先考虑特定的价值观（正义与同情，审慎与非理性）或群体更广泛的影响：如果成功，项目成果将为今后关于社会文化差异的工作奠定基础，并将阐明心理测量和人种学测试以及道德游戏中潜在的价值结构，这反过来将成为一个更大的项目的基础，该项目将开发一款适用于电脑、平板电脑和移动的手机的游戏，从而利用21世纪世纪的技术来测试伦理学中最古老的思想之一，也就是说，与另一个人的共情参与促进和鼓励对那个人或团体更有同情心和道德的对待。 这样一个游戏可以提供一种具有成本效益的方式来教授道德，并接触到现在未被传统教学方法触及的受众。