Teaching Engineering Ethics Through A Psychology Course

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 phenomenological experience of ethics is a source to explain psychological truths, while engineering 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 students in psychology courses show that teaching engineering ethics through a psychology course has a significant effect on improving the knowledge of engineering ethics for students. The relationship between the pre and post test scores is 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.