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The Roles of Implicit Understanding of Engineering Ethics in Student Teams’ Discussion

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Abstract

Following previous work that shows engineering students possess different levels of understanding of ethics—implicit and explicit—this study focuses on how students’ implicit understanding of engineering ethics influences their team discussion process, in cases where there is significant divergence between their explicit and implicit understanding. We observed student teams during group discussions of the ethical issues involved in their engineering design projects. Through the micro-scale discourse analysis based on cognitive ethnography, we found two possible ways in which implicit understanding influenced the discussion. In one case, implicit understanding played the role of intuitive ethics—an intuitive judgment followed by reasoning. In the other case, implicit understanding played the role of ethical insight, emotionally guiding the direction of the discussion. In either case, however, implicit understanding did not have a strong influence, and the conclusion of the discussion reflected students’ explicit understanding. Because students’ implicit understanding represented broader social implication of engineering design in both cases, we suggest to take account of students’ relevant implicit understanding in engineering education, to help students become more socially responsible engineers.

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Notes

  1. Throughout this article, we use the terms “ethical” and “moral” interchangeably.

  2. Note that this sense of “rationalism” in moral psychology is not the same as “rationalism” in philosophy, which holds that the relevant kinds of reasons are known a priori. The thesis Haidt calls “rationalism” includes (philosophical) rationalism, empiricism, sentimentalism, and pragmatism.

  3. Different psychologists and philosophers prefer one or the other of these phrases, but we see them as getting at the same thing, and so use them interchangeably.

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Correspondence to Matthew J. Brown.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Lee, E.A., Grohman, M., Gans, N.R. et al. The Roles of Implicit Understanding of Engineering Ethics in Student Teams’ Discussion. Sci Eng Ethics 23, 1755–1774 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-016-9856-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-016-9856-0

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