Abstract :Ethical sensitivity is a key component of moral human behavior. It is the ability to recognize essential elements of a situation that affect the good and bad of other people. Although morality involves four basic components (sensitivity, judgement, motivation, and character) and ethical sensitivity is an important precursor for resolving moral dilemmas, ethical sensitivity may lack elaboration compared to others. While teachers may be knowledgeable about ethics, they may not be competent with all dimensions of ethical sensitivity. In this sense, negligent actions in any subdomain may lead to detrimental effects on students’ well-being and their values or beliefs may lead to moral dilemmas or cause them to fail in resolving them. On the other hand, when people avoid thinking, they also tend to be prejudiced, biased, and reductionist or they experience challenges, problems, conflicts, misconduct, or injustice. Thereby, this study hypothesizes a relation between ethical sensitivity and thinking, and it will explore whether people’s perception of emotions, perspective taking, recognition, and prevention of social bias, as well as generation of interpretations and identifying the consequences of actions may relate to thinking styles. To explore this question, this study employed descriptive survey research and recruited 122 pre-service teachers based on volunteerism and convenience sampling method. Data were collected via two scales; the Ethical sensitivity scale and the Thinking styles inventory, and they were analyzed via a non-parametric correlation test. Findings confirmed that participants’ ethical sensitivity and the use of thinking styles were moderate. While the highest ethical sensitivity subdimension was caring by connecting to others, the functions (i.e., legislative, executive, and judicial) of thinking styles were comparatively higher than forms, levels, scopes, and leanings. It was also found that all subdimensions of ethical sensitivity were correlated with all thinking styles at various levels. Hierarchical and liberal thinking styles correlated with all dimensions of ethical sensitivity whereas conservative thinking style was the one that correlated the least of ethical sensitivity subdimension. This study recommends future research to explore teacher educators’ ethical sensitivity as they role-model pre-service teachers. Also, it suggests instruction to exercise practices of ethical sensitivity through different methods or techniques. Keywords : Ethical sensitivity, thinking styles, pre-service teachers
