Differences in Ethical Decision-making Between Experts and Novices: A Comparative Study

Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) is a computerized text analysis program, which quantifies the frequency of different categories of words used in texts, emails, social media, etc. Linguistic analysis is widely used to predict personality, health and deception. This motivated us to do an exploratory study to investigate if the linguistic cues are the predictors of ethical awareness. In this study we have employed the free online version of LIWC to analyze the answers to the ethical vignettes. Pearson correlation coefficient was calculated, to study the association between four LIWC categories (self-reference words, social words, positive emotion words, and negative emotion words) and ethical awareness. There was a negative association between positive emotion words and ethical awareness. This association was expected, as many positive emotion words are not used to write about ethical breach. In our future study we aim to validate the usefulness of LIWC in predicting ethical awareness, by employing all the 74 LIWC categories to identify the ideal predictors of ethical awareness of a larger sample.