Teaching Engineering Ethics Through a Psychology Course

Abstract

While ethics instruction is now widespread, studies are still looking for different ways to integrate ethics in engineering programs. In this article, we propose a novel approach by teaching engineering ethics through a psychology course. Starting with the relevant literature studies, we have argued that the phenomeno-logical experience of ethics is a source to explain psychological truths, while en-gineering ethics can be better taught from psychological / behavioral perspectives. A pedagogical approach of experiential learning has been applied to integrate engineering ethics into the psychology course. The empirical study with 400 stu-dents in psychology courses show that teaching engineering ethics through a psychology course has a significant effect on improving the knowledge of engi-neering ethics for students. The relationship between the two pre- and post-test scores was a strong positive linear relationship. A regression equation with a slope of a straight line of 0.57 and a constant of 1.52 has been provided to predict the improvement of post-test scores through pre-test scores. This study proposes the formation of a "psychology and ethics" module in technical schools.