Project will level-up ethics training through gamification – Scholar Q&A with Lewen Wei

Ethics is not a game, but it can be. Page Center scholars Lewen Wei, University of New South Wales, and Nahyun Kim, Drexel University, are leading a study that will apply elements of gamification to ethics training. Their idea is to create a learning experience that teaches ethics in an engaging, informational and, yes, fun way. They are first-time Page Center scholars, but both researchers worked on Center projects as graduate students. Kim was the Page Center graduate student in 2019-2020. The project is part of the Page Center’s 2024 research call on ethics training in public relations, journalism, advertising and strategic communication. In this Q&A, Wei defines gamification, how it can be applied to ethics training and the duo’s interdisciplinary plan for taking ethics training to the next level.

How did you and Nahuyn come up with this research idea? How did this project come together?

Nahyun and I started working together when we were in grad school at Penn State. Her expertise is in business ethics and organizational communication, and I come from a communication technology and media effects perspective. When we saw the call from the Page Center on ethics training, we thought it was a good opportunity for both of us to contribute to the idea of making business ethics processes more engaging, more fun and more technology driven. So, we started with this idea of gamification as ethics training. The call is a great opportunity to use this concept and apply it to ethics training in an area that has not really been studied from the gamification perspective.

Can you explain the need for ethics training, and how gamification can help solve some of its issues?

When we’re looking through the literature and the practice of ethics training, we realize that most ethics training is designed in asynchronous video-based modules. People put a lot of work into them, but the participants or the readers are not able to engage. The conventional way of delivering this type of training can easily lose people’s attention or prevent them from understanding the content clearly. We realized that developing ethics competencies like leadership and integrity is not easy, especially when you’re receiving, but not internalizing, information. We figured there might be something we can do to make these complex training programs engaging using more alternative scenarios so participants can absorb and understand the knowledge.

Can you expand on what gamification is and share some examples of other areas where it has succeeded?

In a nutshell, gamification is applying game aspects to non-game contexts. It’s adding game mechanics to make something more like a game experience. It’s been widely applied in marketing. For example, if you go to a bubble tea shop, you can collect a free tea after 10 visits. Or, a basic example is creating an avatar profile in an internal organization to give yourself different kinds of identities. Those are games and the two most common examples.

What is your plan to reveal some of these gamification strategies?

Before we start to implement our project, we are doing a literature review of ethics training, gamification and also counterfactual thinking. After that, we are planning to design three gamified modules based on existing guidelines of gamification development and literature. We are developing relatively low-tech versions of this module because we want to take a first stab at it before making a full system. So, we’ll do a pretest with these three modules to get a usability perspective and see how it’s received by a general audience. After that, we're going to do a full-blown experiment with more participants. We're going to ask employees about their opinions and also their experience with the gamified modules. We hope to see that the gamified modules outperform the non-gamified ones. Then, we will consolidate the findings and hopefully provide best practices to organizations and summarize our findings for future studies and future practice of how to apply gamification to ethics training.

What is counterfactual thinking? How does it apply to this study?

Counterfactual thinking is about what could have happened or what might have happened if you had done something in a different way. So, it's basically an alternative to the reality, which we think is a common mindset when it comes to dealing with ethical dilemmas. Going back to the ethics training, if you’re just giving people information, it may not affect them directly or as deeply. We thought maybe we could add relevant game elements that prompt them to think more about what could’ve happened if they took a different route in their decision-making processes. This way, people will develop more in-depth engagement with the training.

How has receiving the Page/Johnson Legacy Scholar grant helped make this project happen?

This funding will help us do the project. Talking to the board members and hearing and learning about what might be feasible from their perspective – also, talking with other scholars and hearing their perspectives – will be helpful. We generally think this is a good opportunity to not only present our work, but also hear from others and get real perspectives from real practitioners. That will help us disseminate and communicate our results with actionable insights in the end.