Leveling-Up Ethical Research Through Smartphone Gaming

As lead engineer of a self-driving car project, you are tasked with teaching the AI to drive. You realize that the AI may have to make a decision between putting the car’s occupants at risk or prioritizing the safety of those outside the car. What do you do? 

The above scenario, adapted from a real-life case, is part of a game called “Apperception”, a smartphone-based educational game developed by a team of ethics researchers led by Britt Holbrook, assistant professor of philosophy at NJIT. 

With funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Holbrook has introduced pedagogical gaming approaches such as Apperception to STEM students, aiming to instill a campus-wide culture of responsible research conduct through collective gaming, rather than solely through traditional coursework in ethical theory.

“We think this gaming experience, which is accessible in terms of being played through smartphones, helps bridge the gap between the classroom and the larger campus culture,” said Holbrook, recipient of NJIT's 2019 Excellence in Teaching Award for Innovative Teaching. “Once students see themselves in a live decision-making situation with others, we hope it takes hold and is more enjoyable in a way that having to take tests and merely having to comply with rules is not.”

In Apperception, up to six users are confronted with ethical dilemmas and must rank a set of three decision options from least ethical to most on their own, later reconsidering their rankings with their group. Points are awarded to each user’s ranking choices as they confront scenarios, spanning ethical issues related to ethical technology design, care for subjects, falsification and responsible conduct of research.

“Many students take ethics because it’s a required class, unaware that ethical questions are intimately interwoven with research they will pursue,” said Holbrook. “We are trying to break this ‘compliance attitude’ and understand how these gaming scenarios might be more impactful to students throughout their careers.”

To learn more, Holbrook is now seeking collaboration with research teams that specialize in assessing the impact gaming ethics has on young researchers in real research settings, both near- and long-term. He was recently awarded a new NSF grant to host a national workshop in Washington D.C. this August — an event that will bring together researchers who have developed various ethics education interventions, such as Apperception, with education intervention evaluation experts that can more accurately measure the effectiveness of these new approaches.

The workshop will involve researchers and assessment experts from Georgia Tech, Michigan State, North Texas, Harvard, Purdue, Colorado School of Mines and University of Mississippi, among others.

“In talking with others who’d developed new approaches to ethics education, we discovered that they, like us, weren’t happy with existing assessment instruments,” explained Holbrook. “We decided to try to work together with assessment experts, to communicate what we need, and to challenge them to develop new instruments capable of assessing our interventions.”

“Our first goal was to develop a method that improves on the traditional compliance approach involving modules and tests,” added Holbrook. “We think we have and developing a way to prove it is what the August workshop is all about.”