Introduction: The nursing profession seeks to provide evidence-based and competent care, especially based on humane and ethical principles. Providing ethical care requires an appropriate level of ethical reasoning.
Aim: The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of cognitive fatigue based on ego depletion on the moral judgment of nursing students.
Material & Methods: The study design was semi-experimental with two intervention and control groups before and after the test. The statistical population of this research included all female nursing students of Kerman University of Medical Sciences in 2019. 44 female nurses were selected as a sample and divided into two control groups (22 people) and intervention group (22 people). The measuring instrument was Viarah's moral judgment questionnaire (2014). Sedak and Kafta (1990) were presented with solvable (easy/controllable) diagnostic cognitive problems to the control group and unsolvable problems (hard/uncontrollable) to the experimental group. After answering the homework and math problems, the moral judgment post-test was performed on two groups. SPSS 23 software and covariance analysis test were used for data analysis.
Results: The results showed that the treatment of cognitive fatigue based on the ego depletion approach had an effect on the moral judgment of nursing students. The mean (standard deviation) of the experimental group changed from 125.82 (9.019) in the pre-test phase to 152.05 (12.44) (P<0.001). The value of this effect was 0.42 based on eta square.
Conclusion: The results indicated that the treatment of cognitive fatigue based on the ego depletion approach increased the moral judgment of nurses. Therefore, it is suggested that counselors and therapists use the cognitive fatigue treatment based on the ego depletion approach to reduce the psychological problems of nurses.