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The purpose of this longitudinal study was to examine if participation in a four-year ethics curriculum strengthened college students’ confidence in their own ethical reasoning ability. A longitudinal cohort of college students was followed over four years from their freshman (n = 779) to senior year (n= 545). Students’ confidence in their own ethical reasoning abilities were assessed before and after completion of the curriculum with results indicating an increase in students’ confidence.

In this chapter, the authors critique dominant technocratic conceptions of rigor in management research and elaborate an alternative account of rigor that is rooted in methodology and involves a concern with the quality of scientific reasoning rather than a narrower focus on methods or measurement issues per se. Based on the proposed redefinition, the authors conceptualize how rigor, as an essential quality of reasoning, may be defined and the authors in turn qualify alternative methodological criteria for how they might assess the rigor of any particular piece of research. In short, with this chapter the authors’ overall aim is to shift the basis of rigor to an altogether more legitimate and commensurable notion that squarely puts the focus on reasoning and scientific inference for quantitative and qualitative research alike. The authors highlight some of the benefits that such an alternative and unified view of rigor may potentially provide toward fostering the quality and progress of management research.

Prior studies investigating the relationship between moral reasoning (as measured by the defining issues test, DIT) and political orientation have rendered mixed results. We seek to find an explanation for these mixed results. Using responses from a sample of 284 practicing certified public accountants (CPAs), we find evidence that value preferences underlie both moral reasoning and political orientation. Specifically, we find a statistically significant inverse relationship between moral reasoning and conservatism in univariate tests. However, this relationship is no longer significant when eight individual value preferences and gender are taken into account. These results suggest that variations in moral reasoning scores of CPAs are accounted for by their value preferences, which also underlie their relative conservatism.

Cognitive moral development, often referred to as moral reasoning, stems from the field of cognitive developmental psychology and moral psychology. Early work done by Jean Piaget studying the cognitive abilities of children to make moral judgments as they grow and mature created the foundation for the later work of Lawrence Kohlberg and James Rest in studying the moral reasoning abilities of adults. Thus, moral reasoning refers to the cognitive process of how a person reasons about ethical situations. This chapter will present the evolution of the use and validity of cognitive moral development/moral reasoning in determining how individuals resolve ethical or moral dilemmas. Further, more recent models and potential measurement of moral reasoning and ethical decision-making including our intuition and emotions will be discussed and suggestions regarding directions for developing methods to measure such cognitive and emotional (or intuitive) means by which individuals make difficult moral choices will be discussed.

Pew and Mavor (1998) called for an integrative representation of human behavior for use in models of individual combatants and organizations. Models with integrated representation of behavior have only been achieved at rudimentary levels according to those performing the studies (e.g. Pew & Mavor, 1998; Tulving, 2002) and those building the models (e.g. Warwick et al., 2002). This chapter will address aspects of cognitive performance that are important to incorporate into models of combat based on acceptance of theory, strength of empirical data, or for other reasons such as to bridge gaps where incomplete knowledge exists about cognitive behavior and performance. As a starting point, this chapter will assess which of Pew and Mavor’s recommendations are still appropriate as determined by a review of selected literature on cognition and its representation. We will also provide some review and extensions of key literature on cognition and modeling and suggest a way ahead to close the remaining gaps. Different aspects of cognition are described with recent findings, and most are followed by an example of how they have been represented in computer models or a discussion of challenges to their representation in modeling.

This chapter investigates the effect of moral reasoning of tax professionals on the aggressiveness of their reporting recommendations. The findings of the study indicate moral reasoning influences the aggressiveness of tax reporting decisions separate from the influence of client pressure. As the level of moral reasoning increases, the aggressiveness of the reporting position is found to0 decrease. Contrary to prior research, client pressure is not related to tax reporting aggressiveness. Failure to observe this relationship may signal a shift in behavior resulting from the intense public and regulatory scrutiny at the time of data collection which was in the immediate aftermath of the Enron scandal.

The purpose of this paper is to show that for frequently procuring public clients: the reasoning behind the use of procurement instruments is a process in its own right that requires managerial and scientific attention; modeling this process contributes to making sensible procurement choices; and managing this process is a relevant factor in the client’s development toward strategic procurement.

A model is developed to conceptualize the reasoning behind procurement instruments. Using this model in a case study, the reasoning behind the evolution of a particular procurement instrument as applied by a public infrastructure management organization is reconstructed.

The case study results show that an initially explicitly formulated set of main reasons for operating a qualification system can implicitly evolve over time into a different set of reasons. From a managerial point of view, explication of implicit reasons is important to both avoid the risk that the real value of the procurement instrument remains undetected as well as properly assess its strategic alignment with higher level strategies. The conceptual model proves to be a useful tool to support that.

Bringing the reasoning behind the use of procurement instruments to the fore, this study explores an area of construction procurement research that is positioned between the disciplines of purchasing and supply management, knowledge management and strategic management.

This paper aims to compare two types of prompts, encouraging participants to think about real-world examples or engineering principles to show how these two approaches can result in vastly different design practices.

Two studies (N = 20, N = 40) examine the impact of two different prompts. Non-expert students, from high school and university, completed a hands-on, engineering design task in pairs. Half were prompted to ideate using real-world examples, while the other half were prompted to ideate using engineering principles. The findings are based on human coding and artifact analyses.

In both studies, and across multiple measures, students in the principle-based condition performed better than students in the example-based condition.

A seemingly small difference in how students are prompted or encouraged to approach a problem can have a significant impact on their experience. The findings also suggest that leveraging engineering principles, even when those principles are only loosely formed, can be effective even for non-experts. Finally, the findings motivate identifying student reasoning strategies over time as a potential means for assessment in Makerspaces.

Encouraging makers to think about different ways for approaching problems can be an important way to help them succeed. It may also be a useful way to chronicle their learning pathway.

To the author's knowledge, explicitly looking at ideation strategies has not been widely discussed within the Maker community as a way to support learners, or as a way to evaluate learning.

Complex social interactions such as argumentation and persuasion are increasingly common in online communications. To better understand these interactions and their impacts on people and on the society, it is important for the authors to understand how people reason online such as when they need to justify themselves or convince others with their perspectives. Reasoning in online discussions is expectedly to be different from doing so offline, as one often communicates with others anonymously and asynchronously in such contexts (e.g. Reddit discussions). The purpose of this paper is to investigate people's reasoning behavior in online environments focusing on how they justify their perspectives.

In this study, the authors examined how a subreddit Change My View (CMV) users offer their opinions and justify them through the lens of argumentation and reasoning. The authors annotated, 330 Reddit discussion original posts (OPs) to identify claims, rationales and supports for reasoning, i.e. personal experiences, definitions, domain expertise and external sources. The authors investigated the correlations among the occurrences of these supporting statements and whether they are related to the topics of the posts.

The findings suggest that if people mention their domain expertise, they tend to provide related personal experiences as well. Additionally, if the participants talk about the topic of domestic politics, they tend to utilize their personal experiences.

Further research may be conducted to help system designers. System designers (e.g. online debate systems, collective decision-making systems, etc.) may benefit from the findings to design systems by considering commonly used supporting statements, which may enhance people's reasoning and argumentation processes. The sample size is a small sample. The authors acknowledge that the small sample size of the study may limit the generalizability of the findings; however, it is still acceptable compared to the existing literature. One future study could be annotating a larger dataset to further probe the use of supporting statements in online reasoning.

The authors' findings might be useful to understand how Reddit users are justifying their opinions as the reflection of their reasoning processes. In order to contribute further research in argumentation and reasoning in online platforms, the authors make the annotated dataset publicly available.

To best of the authors' knowledge, this study was one of a few studies whose purpose is to understand Reddit CMV users' reasoning processes. To understand how online users offer their reasons while providing their ideas is important to have effective communication processes and to improve online discussion experiences which are very common in today's digital era.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-08-2020-0330