Ethics Training Agents: Facilitating Group-Based Ethics Education with Role-Playing and Discussion for Ethical Reflection and Exploration

Abstract: Group-based ethics training for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) students is a complex challenge, requiring substantial resources and expertise. While activity-based teaching methods, such as role-playing and discussions, are commonly employed to simulate real-world scenarios, current practices are often manual and lack integration with effective online platforms for supporting group-based ethical discussions. In this work, we propose Ethics Training Agents, a group discussion system that leverages multiple LLM participants embodying distinct ethical orientations, along with a moderator agent, to enable structured human-AI group ethical discussions for collaborative reflection. We conduct a user study with 45 undergraduate STEM students to evaluate the learning outcomes and user experience. The results show that our system supports engagement, coordination, and perspective-taking in group discussions and has a positive influence on ethical sensitivity. We also discuss practical design strategies for integrating multiple LLM agents into multi-human group settings to facilitate ethics training for STEM students.