Mapping concepts engineering students in China use to think about ethics

Abstract

To better understand how engineering students think about ethics across cultures, and improve education in engineering ethics on this basis, a website was developed to host educational contents and conduct research. The site can facilitate large-scale, qualitative research using methods employed by the computational social sciences and digital humanities. To demonstrate its potential value, this paper describes a preliminary study using network analysis and semantic maps to explore the responses of engineering students (N=70) in China to two course-related prompts: give an example of a behavior you consider unethical; explain what makes this behavior unethical. Preliminary results seem to suggest that engineering students in China conceive of unethical behaviors as ones where companies negatively affect people through their products, and that the harmful, other-regarding nature of these behaviors is what makes them unethical. The implications of these results are discussed, as well as shortcomings of the current study and directions for future work.