The Role of Religiosity/Spirituality and Medical Socialization in Medical Student Moral Foundations
Aaron Franzen, PhD, Assistant Professor, Hope College
The American Medical Association’s Code of Medical Ethics states that “[t]he practice of medicine, and its embodiment in the clinical encounter between a patient and a physician, is fundamentally a moral activity” (AMA 2016 sec. 1.1.1). This statement, recently revised, is seemingly straightforward but also masks the complexity of moral perceptions that may differ quite a bit between physicians within a single field that many perceive from the outside to be more or less unified. But what does it mean to be ‘moral’? The present project is an exploration of a representative sample of US medical students and their moral dispositions using moral foundations theory (Haidt and Joseph 2008). Prior work has shown that religiosity is related to one’s moral foundations within the general population (Johnson et al. 2016) and there have been some early descriptive attempts to do the same within non-random samples of practicing physicians (Franzen 2017). I use these unique data not only to test whether or not religious practices, beliefs, and affiliation are connected to moral foundations within US medical students, but also to see if other features of medical education, such as being mistreated by attendings or other faculty, are related to patterns of students’ moral foundations. The institution of medicine has long had a vested interest in the dispositions of the aspiring professionals socialized to care for the health and wellness of communities. Further, if moral dispositions impact patient care, then beginning to understand how medical socialization shapes these foundations is an important step towards understanding how seemingly individual interactions with patients are also actually deeply structured by the process of professionalization.
Cited Works
AMA. 2016. AMA Code of Medical Ethics.
Franzen, Aaron B. 2017. “Physicians’ Moral Dispositions, Role Perceptions, and Patient Interactions: Exploratory Findings from Physicians in the Midwestern United States.” Michigan Sociological Review 31:135–50.
Haidt, Jonathan and Craig Joseph. 2008. “The Moral Mind: How Five Sets of Innate Intuitions Guide the Development of Many Culture-Specific Virtues, and Perhaps Even Modules.” Pp. 367–91 in The innate mind: Foundations and the future. Vol. 3, Evolution and cognition., edited by P. Carruthers, S. Laurence, and S. Stich. New York, NY, US: Oxford University Press.
Johnson, Kathryn A., Joshua N. Hook, Don E. Davis, Daryl R. Van Tongeren, Steven J. Sandage, and Sarah A. Crabtree. 2016. “Moral Foundation Priorities Reflect U.S. Christians’ Individual Differences in Religiosity.” Personality and Individual Differences.
Cited Works
AMA. 2016. AMA Code of Medical Ethics.
Franzen, Aaron B. 2017. “Physicians’ Moral Dispositions, Role Perceptions, and Patient Interactions: Exploratory Findings from Physicians in the Midwestern United States.” Michigan Sociological Review 31:135–50.
Haidt, Jonathan and Craig Joseph. 2008. “The Moral Mind: How Five Sets of Innate Intuitions Guide the Development of Many Culture-Specific Virtues, and Perhaps Even Modules.” Pp. 367–91 in The innate mind: Foundations and the future. Vol. 3, Evolution and cognition., edited by P. Carruthers, S. Laurence, and S. Stich. New York, NY, US: Oxford University Press.
Johnson, Kathryn A., Joshua N. Hook, Don E. Davis, Daryl R. Van Tongeren, Steven J. Sandage, and Sarah A. Crabtree. 2016. “Moral Foundation Priorities Reflect U.S. Christians’ Individual Differences in Religiosity.” Personality and Individual Differences.