The Impact of Ethics Education on Reporting Behavior

This psychological study focuses on examining the impact of ethics education on reporting behavior using the cue-target judgment of learning on accurate cue only.

Ethical education is the education that teaches people in the society the importance of being trustworthy and honest in all matters and especially when it comes to employment sector,(Brian & Pamela, 2008), employees particularly those who work in the department such as finance they are expected to be very honest and trustworthy.

This paper focuses on drawing the relationship between the impacts of ethical education on the ethical behavior of people. This will be our memory debate. Many people claim that there is a relationship between the impact of ethical education that one's receives and his/her general response to ethical behavior,(Montuoro&Lewis, 2017).

Although there have been claims by past researchers that presented their research on this topic. For instance, According to Deanne (2005), claimed that some business students showed a reasoning improvement in their behavior after they had undergone a program in business ethics. But he noted that this improvement did not last long and that it appeared to be short-lived.

The stand that is taking is that there is no correlation between impacts of ethical education and the reporting behavior or ethical behavior of any individual,(Brian & Pamela, 2008). We will use hypotheses and cue-target judgment of learning on accurate cue only to make our inferences on this topic relating to the relationship between the impact of ethical education and the ethical behavior that one displays. Examining hypothesis will be, Null: There will be no correlation between the impact of ethics education and reporting behavior, and any correlation will be due to chance.

Alternative: There will be a correlation between the impact of ethics education and reporting behavior.

This study is set to examine the impact of a particular education program to the reporting behavior in a given community. Some of the examinable questions would be, what will be the effect of higher level of the impact of the particular ethic education to the reporting behavior, will it be high, low or no effect. And the general interpretation that will be taken will depend on the relationship that has been traced using the after the cue-target judgment of learning on accurate cue only has been done.

To establish the claim, we used psychological methods that included natural observation. A group of master students undertaking Accounting was selected since this group had already undergone through the ethics program,(Brian & Pamela, 2008). Students specializing in accounts are expected to have high ethical morals since most of the time they are involved with matters relating to companies funds. We also included another group of students of the fifth year that had not yet been exposed to ethics program. This second group was intended to draw understand the behavior of an individual that has not been exposed to ethical education towards their ethical behavior (reporting behavior). And thus these two groups were used for analysis.

Two social conditions treatment were designed that included public disclosure and anonymity to help in providing opportunity and motivation to money misreport,(Brian & Pamela, 2008). This was intended to examine the effect of ethics education to the report level of the participants. Thus drawing out the impact of ethics on the trustworthy level of the participants involved in this psychological study. If the number of misreporting is high, then there is no impact of ethics education and if low then the ethics education has impacted and hence very effective in solving the problem. The key focus was that if the total observed reports on relating to the honest behavior of the involved participant were higher than the expected reports, then the ethical education was effective. Note that we expected at least observed reports to be equal to the total number of mater students since they all had been exposed to ethical education.

The results obtained, there were significantly lower rates of program misreport on the participants that completed the ethics program (the master students) than the participants that did not participate in the ethic program (the other students that had not undertaken ethical education). Thus the observation psychology suggesting that there is no effect of ethics education on ethical behavior. This is because it was expected that the response from students who had undergone ethics program to be higher compared to the response from another group. We could not make a general conclusion unless we conducted another research that was intended to prove that our claim will be valid. To do this, we used laboratory research as another psychology method in this study case.

We carried out laboratory research to strengthen the judgment of learning and to verify whether the results obtained using natural observation of the participant was correct in as used to examine the whether there is any correlation between ethics education and ethical behavior in a given community.

We could not apply random assignment on the ethical program since not all students had undergone through this program,(Brian & Pamela, 2008). And thus we designed quasi-experimental. There was a possibility that other ethical programs that had been offered not only in college but also in secondary school could also affect our result. By putting this consideration, we divided our participants depending on their knowledge towards ethical programs. We aimed to analyze several social conditions that may result in public moral intensity,(Drumright at el, 2015). This could only be achieved by exposing each of our participants into different circumstance and have the responsibility in which the participant would react to such circumstance. All these circumstances related to matter to do will finance. We conducted experimental sessions one day which minimized the opportunity for the participants to share their experience towards their responses in the different circumstances that they were exposed to.

After analyzing participants' responses, our result showed that different social condition increased moral intensity. This can be interpreted that, most of the factors that influence individual trustworthy were social related,(Brian & Pamela, 2008). This may also mean that irrespective of the impact that one had acquired from the ethical program, the ethical behavior was different. For instance, if an individual is poor, then there is a high possibility of being untrustworthy. This result affirmed our initial study that moral education does not affect ethical behavior.

This affirmed our initial conclusion that there is no relationship between the impact of ethical education and the reporting behavior (ethical behavior). Thus, we fail to reject our null hypothesis and conclude that, no correlation between the impact of moral education and individual moral behavior. And that the individual ethical behavior is affected by other social factors.

Bibliography

Brian W. & Pamela R. (2008), ""The Impact of Ethics Education on Reporting Behavior"" journal of business ethics pp. 398-416

Drumright, Prentice& Biasucci (2015), ""Behavioral Ethics and Teaching Ethical Decision making""journal of innovative education (431-445).

Kariame K,Deanne N (2005), ""Ethical leader behavior and leader effectiveness"". International journal of leadership studies (103-120).

Sorensen, D. P., Miller, S. E., & Cabe, K. L. (2017). Developing and measuring the impact of an accounting ethics course that is based on the moral philosophy of Adam Smith.? Journal of Business Ethics,? 140(1), 175-191.

Montuoro, P., & Lewis, R. (2017). Personal responsibility and behavioral disengagement in innocent bystanders during classroom management events: The moderating effect of teacher aggressive tendencies.? The Journal of Educational Research, 1-7.

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