Bridging Military Ethics Education and Operational Decision-Making Using Virtual Reality

Military and law enforcement personnel operate in high-stakes environments requiring rapid ethical decision-making under stress and uncertainty. Traditional military ethics education often relies on theoretical instruction with limited opportunities for applied scenario-based practice. The present study examined whether brief ethical framing interventions delivered within an immersive virtual reality (VR) shooting simulation could influence use-of-force decision-making outcomes. Results indicated that participants in both ethical framing conditions demonstrated significantly greater discrimination between legitimate and illegitimate targets compared with the control group. Ethical framing conditions also reported significantly higher levels of mental demand, effort, stress, perceived pace, and perceived success. No significant differences emerged between the two ethical intervention conditions. Findings suggest that even brief ethical contextualization within immersive VR environments can meaningfully influence operational decision-making performance and cognitive engagement. These results support the utility of VR as a scalable and ecologically valid platform for applied military ethics training and use-of-force decision-making research.