Design and Evaluation of a Decision Aid to Help Accounting Students at a Mid-Atlantic College Make Ethical Decisions

The purpose of this study was to design and test a decision aid that could be used to improve ethics education, raise self-serving bias awareness, and improve the deliberative reasoning of accounting students. The decision aid was administered using a 2x2 experimental design with two levels of decision aid use and two levels of ethics instruction to 118 accounting students in conjunction with the Accounting Ethical Dilemma Instrument. While students perceived that the decision aid was helpful in reducing bias, there were no significant differences between the deliberative reasoning scores of students who used the decision aid and those who did not. Although answers to open-ended questions demonstrated that students considered ethical principles when making ethical decisions, there was no association between deliberative reasoning scores and ethics instruction. The most significant finding was that the students were pre-conventional in deliberative moral reasoning (primarily considering benefits to themselves and close associates) in considering what they would have done in the accounting-specific scenarios. The decision aid might have been more effective in improving prescriptive moral reasoning (what should be done) rather than deliberative reasoning (what would you do). Recommendations are made for improving decision aid design and ethics instruction.