A Mental Models Approach to Ethical Decision-Making

该项目由跨NSF科学与工程伦理教育项目支持，调查科学、技术、工程和数学(STEM)研究生的伦理决策过程。STEM领域的研究生和教职员工通常很少接受研究伦理方面的培训或教育。相反，教师和学生带来直观的信念和隐含的框架，作为他们在工作中做出判断的基础。在传统的研究伦理培训中，学生们对抄袭或伪造数据的案例的讨论往往是关于对与错的，很少考虑文化或其他背景。这种方法在扩大的全球科学网络中受到限制，因为对文化价值观和道德的考虑必须超越一种文化的大多数人所持有的价值观和道德。在某种程度上，学生的直觉框架包括培训中没有解决的问题，他们可能很难将自己的直觉信念与似乎忽视了重要考虑的课程协调起来。在当今进行研究的复杂环境中，理解这些认知框架并在教授伦理决策时解决它们是很重要的。这个项目将提供一种明确的、系统的方法来确定研究生研究道德培训的两个关键领域应该涵盖哪些概念：隐私和透明度。隐私是隐藏的，透明度是揭示的。这两个互补的领域对研究兴趣都很重要，平衡这两个领域对技术的发展和科学事业本身至关重要。该项目首先通过征求具有国际和跨学科科学技术经验的实践研究人员的意见，开发了关于这两个伦理问题的专家模型。其次，对理工科研究生的心理模型进行了归纳、表征，并与专家模型进行了比较。最后，这种比较方法将为开发能够使研究生的伦理决策更接近专家水平的教育模块提供指导。

This project, supported by the cross-NSF program in Ethics Education in Science & Engineering, investigates the ethical decision-making process for graduate students in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). Graduate students and faculty in STEM areas typically get very little training or education in research ethics. Instead, faculty and students bring intuitive beliefs and implicit frameworks as the basis for the judgments they make in their work. In traditional research ethics training, student discussions of cases of plagiarism or falsification of data tend to be about right-versus-wrong with little consideration of cultural or other contexts. This approach is limited in expanded global scientific networks because consideration of cultural values and morals must extend beyond those that are held by the majority of one culture. To the extent that students' intuitive frameworks include questions not addressed in training, they may have difficulty reconciling their intuitive beliefs with a curriculum that seems to have neglected important considerations. In the complex environments in which today's research is conducted, it is important to understand these cognitive frameworks and address them in teaching ethical decision-making. This project will provide an explicit, systematic approach for determining what concepts ought to be covered in two key domains of graduate research ethics training: privacy and transparency. Privacy is concealing and transparency is revealing. Both complementary domains are important to research interests, and balancing the two is critical to the development of technology and the scientific enterprise itself. This project first develops an expert model on these two ethical issues by soliciting input from practicing researchers with international and interdisciplinary experience in science and technology. Secondly, the mental models held by graduate students in science and technology are elicited, characterized and compared to the expert model. Finally, this comparative method will provide a guide for developing an education module that can bring graduate students' ethical decision-making closer to the expert level.