Investigating Moral Disengagement Among First-Year Engineering Students

In this Research Full Paper, we investigate moral disengagement among first-year engineering students. Current engineering ethics education typically assumes that providing information about what is ethical (i.e., as explicated in ethical codes) and developing ethical reasoning skills will lead to ethical behaviors in the classroom and on the job. However, we know that people, including students and practicing engineers, sometimes engage in unethical conduct. Bandura’s theory of moral disengagement explains how people disengage from their ethical principles and behave unethically. In this paper, we investigate and characterize moral disengagement among first-year engineering students. This study is based on survey and interview data collected from first-year engineering students at four U.S. universities as part of a larger longitudinal, mixed-methods research project. Our survey sample showed similar or lower moral disengagement scores as compared to other studies, while our interview data revealed how different students applied different ethical frames when evaluating moral situations and/or making moral decisions. Moreover, seven of the eight types of moral disengagement measured by the survey instrument were evident in our interview data, and we propose another mechanism called unreflective disengagement. We expect our study will be of interest to researchers and engineering educators who wish to better understand moral disengagement among students, including as a potentially relevant factor in ongoing efforts to enhance engineering ethics training.