How do undergraduate students in engineering conceive of themselves as professionals? How can a course on engineering ethics affect the development of an undergraduate student’s professional identity? In this project, students responded to questions about the characteristics and responsibilities of professional engineers. The results indicate that students learn about professionalism primarily ...

Two experimental studies examined the effect of power-seeking intentions on backlash toward women in political office. It was hypothesized that a female politician's career progress may be hindered by the belief that she seeks power, as this desire may violate prescribed communal expectations for women and thereby elicit interpersonal penalties. Results suggested that voting preferences for fem...

The paper presents the structure and function of an ethical micro world simulation and of a support system in ethical problem-solving and decision-making. The ethical micro world simulation models realistic scenarios with interacting independent stakeholders. Users of the simulation are triggered to make autonomous decisions in dilemmas arising in the interaction between stakeholders. The goals...

A case study is presented in which an institutionalized, schizophrenic woman refuses the abortion her legal guardian wants her to have. Her psychiatrist considers her to be incapable of responsible parenthood, and her child would probably be placed in permanent foster care. Mahowald considers a legal determination of the woman's competence to be crucial, although she argues that even a legall...

We argue that debate regarding whether and how physicians should engage religious concerns has proceeded under inadequate terms. The prevailing paradigm approaches dialogue regarding religion as a form of therapeutic technique, engaged by one stranger, the physician, upon another stranger, the patient. This stranger-technique framework focuses the debate on questions of physicians' competence, ...

Story understanding is a central competence that illuminates all other aspects of human intelligence. In this work, I demonstrate how our story understanding ability sheds light on our ability to think in terms of hypothetical situations. Using the Genesis story understanding system as a substrate, I develop a story-enabled hypothetical reasoning system that models several high-level human abil...

This paper aimed to introduce the Konstanz Method of Dilemma Discussion KMDD® as one most effective methods that are designed foster moral competence and, therefore, promote tolerance and equality, regardless cultural background, religion, or views. It is mainly used within educational context, but it can be also implemented in different environments conditions. The should considered representa...

The distinction between individualistic (IV) and collectivistic (CV) instrumental values was compared to the distinction between competence-related and moral personality traits. Study 1 (N=89 students) showed that IV referred mostly to competence and were self-profitable, whereas CV referred mostly to morality and were other-profitable in their nature. Therefore, IV were predicted to reach a re...

To assess the effectiveness of the Tier 1 Program of the Project P.A.T.H.S., a randomized group trial with eight waves of data collected was carried out. At the fifth year of data collection, 19 experimental schools (n = 2, 662 students) and 24 control schools (n = 3, 272 students) participated in the study. Analyses based on individual growth curve modeling showed that participants in the expe...

This experiment develops an integrative, path-analytic model for the endorsement accorded formal leaders. The model contains four independent variables reflecting aspects of group structure (i.e., group success-failure, the payoff distribution, the degree of support by others members for the leader, and the vulnerability of the leader). Also included are two intervening variables reflecting per...