The intent of this research is to understand whether techniques of neutralization play a role in students ethical decision making. Previous research suggests that educational interventions that focus on questioning the merit of techniques can improve the quality of students’ ethical decisions. A priori rationalizations tend to be used by students to convince themselves that their decision/behavior is justifiable, even when such behaviour is unethical. Students are more likely to commit unethical acts because they talked themselves into believing some type of excuse for their actions.

According to prior literature, educational interventions designed to question common rationalization can improve students’ ethical decision making. Educational interventions can engage “moral imagination” and consider broader implications of act. Discussion (context and type) has an impact on ethical reasoning. Our study builds upon this and examines directed interventions using brainstorming techniques.

We used a pre- and post-test methodology on a sample of 142 university students in a business program to asses the effect of different types of discussion scenarios on students likelihood to whistle blow. Our results are somewhat surprising indicating that the discussion of the ethical justification by students doesn’t seem to have an impact on their intended behaviour.

This research contributes to the existing literature in several ways. It considers a finer grained analysis of the ethical decision process. It considers neutralization more than just in context of reporting versus not reporting. It is the first study to consider the effects of discussion on neutralization. Finally, it builds upon peer reporting literature to consider student whistleblowing in context of university professors’ misconduct.

Keywords: Ethical decision making, student whistleblowing, experiment.