Full Paper: Exploring the Relationship between Moral Intuitions and Ethics Education among First-Year Engineering Students in the US, Netherlands, and China

In recent years, there has been an increase in public discourse on how to confront ethical dilemmas. Many widely publicized failures of engineering systems have been traced back to ethical lapses or decisions that did not account for potential societal impacts. This raises the question of how educational institutions, specifically engineering schools, should formally expose students to ethics education and how this education can help students make ethical decisions on an improved moral framework. Due to the global nature of the engineering profession, it is critical to incorporate the effect of national guidelines, cultures, and norms into the understanding of effective ethical decision making. Thus, this paper addresses the following research question: What is the nature of the differences between first-year engineering student moral intuitions across multiple countries? This research hypothesizes that there is a significant relationship between exposure to ethics education and moral intuitions and aims to challenge whether cultural and demographic differences mediate this relationship. This exploratory study utilized data from 1668 first-year engineering students residing in the US, Netherlands, and China from 2021 to 2024. Participants were asked to fill out the Moral Foundations Questionnaire (MFQ) to measure their priorities within moral decision-making. Participants were also asked if they had experienced various forms of exposure to ethics education. In addition, they were asked a variety of demographic questions, such as political affiliation, religious upbringing, gender, etc. This study utilizes descriptive statistical analysis to explore the relationship between first-year engineers' students' moral intuition, their previous exposures to ethics education, cultural differences, and other demographic variations. The analysis showed that students' MFQ scores were higher when they had been previously formally exposed to ethics education, compared to students who had not. There was variation in MFQ scores depending on what type of formal exposure they had received. However, there was no meaningful difference between students' overall MFQ averages based on country of origin, though there was some interesting variation among MFQ categories. In addition, there were significant differences in MFQ scores between students based on political affiliation and religious affiliation. These exploratory results reinforce the hypothesized relationship between moral intuitions and prior experience, culture, and background, potentially helping educators rethink the goals and nature of engineering ethics education.