A gamification approach to enhancing student empathy towards laboratory animals

School:  Edinburgh Medical School  [Biomedical Sciences]

Team Members: John Menzies, Richard Fitzpatrick

Abstract

Research and teaching in biomedical sciences has led to huge advances in human health. However, these activities require the use of non-human animals and some of these activities can entail animal suffering. This suffering can be detrimental to the animals, but can also impact the learners’/researchers’ emotions or values, and the activity’s scientific outcomes. We do not argue that scientific studies using animals should be stopped. However, issues around compassion in the human-animal relationship are often only indirectly addressed in biomedical sciences, and we need new ways of discussing values and beliefs around using laboratory animals. These new approaches will positively impact students’ own experiences, the quality and reliability of their scientific output, and the experiences of the animals themselves. One way of modifying values and behaviours is to enhance cognitive empathy – the learned ability to understand the perspective and feelings of another individual. Cognitive empathy can be developed when one is exposed to the experiences of the other individual, and one way of experiencing another’s perspective is by playing as that individual in a game. Here we propose to develop and evaluate a digital gamification approach to enhance cognitive empathy towards laboratory animals, with the aim of creating a more compassionate and scientifically robust setting for teaching and learning activities involving animals.