Search for: All records

This paper describes the motivations and some directions for bringing insights and methods from moral and cultural psychology to bear on how engineering ethics is conceived, taught, and assessed. Therefore, the audience for this paper is not only engineering ethics educators and researchers but also administrators and organizations concerned with ethical behaviors. Engineering ethics has typically been conceived and taught as a branch of professional and applied ethics with pedagogical aims, where students and practitioners learn about professional codes and/or Western ethical theories and then apply these resources to address issues presented in case studies about engineering and/or technology. As a result, accreditation and professional bodies have generally adopted ethical reasoning skills and/or moral knowledge as learning outcomes. However, this paper argues that such frameworks are psychologically “irrealist” and culturally biased: it is not clear that ethical judgments or behaviors are primarily the result of applying principles, or that ethical concerns captured in professional codes or Western ethical theories do or should reflect the engineering ethical concerns of global populations. Individuals from Western educated industrialized rich democratic cultures are outliers on various psychological and social constructs, including self-concepts, thought styles, and ethical concerns. However, engineering is more cross cultural and international than ever before, with engineers and technologies spanning multiple cultures and countries. For instance, different national regulations and cultural values can come into conflict while performing engineering work. Additionally, ethical judgments may also result from intuitions, closer to emotions than reflective thought, and behaviors can be affected by unconscious, social, and environmental factors. To address these issues, this paper surveys work in engineering ethics education and assessment to date, shortcomings within these approaches, and how insights and methods from moral and cultural psychology could be used to improve engineering ethics education and assessment, making them more culturally responsive and psychologically realist at the same time. 

In the engineering ethics education literature, there has recently been increasing interest in longitudinal studies of engineering students’ moral development. Understanding how first-year engineering students perceive ethics can provide baseline information critical for understanding their moral development during their subsequent journey in engineering learning. Existing studies have mainly examined how first-year engineering students perceive the structure and elements of ethics curricula, pregiven ethics scenarios, what personal ethical beliefs and specific political ideals they hold (e.g., fairness and political involvement), and institutional ethical climates. Complementary to existing studies, our project surveyed how first-year engineering students perceive professional ethical values. Specifically, we asked students to list the three most important values for defining a good engineer. This question responds to a gap in existing engineering ethics literature that engineering students’ perceptions (especially first-year students) of professional virtues and values are not sufficiently addressed. We argue that designing effective and engaged ethics education experiences needs to consider the professional values perceived by students and how these values are related to the values communicated in the engineering curriculum. This paper is part of a larger project that compares how engineering students develop moral reasoning and intuition longitudinally across three cultures/countries: the United States, Netherlands, and China. We hope that findings from this paper can be useful for engineering educators to reflect on and design subsequent ethics education programs that are more responsive to students’ perceptions of professional values when beginning an engineering program. 

This paper describes some first-year results of a five-year project funded by the NSF’s ER2 program. The project explores how culture and education affect the ethical reasoning and moral intuitions of engineering students. This paper describes the project and is divided in two parts. First, it begins by describing some background about this project. Second, the paper presents some first-year results.