SEFI Ethics Webinar: Emotions and intuitions in engineering ethics education

SEFI @ Work: Inspiration Events invites you to an Ethics Webinar:

Tuesday, 4 May 2021,  14:00 – 15:30 UTC (UK), 15:00-16:30 CET (EU), 9:00-10:30 EST (US)– Register here

Introduction: Ethics and emotion are intrinsically tied together. Often we know when something is wrong because it feels wrong.  But for decades, people have been taught not to trust their feelings.  Instead, common-sense or folk theories of emotion saw emotion and rationality as being opposed and saw emotion as being a poor basis for decisions.  But things are changing. 

Research in neuroscience, psychology and sociology over the last 30 years has challenged this idea: neuroscientific evidence has made clear that emotions are central to rational decision-making; psychological research has shown that many of our so-called rational decisions are actually based on unconscious emotional appraisals of any situation; while research in sociology and social psychology highlights that many ethical failures arise from the ways in which technology and society can distance us from being emotionally affected by (that is, feeling empathy for) those affected by our decisions. 

This online seminar explores the role of emotion and empathy in how engineers learn to make ethical decisions.  It will explore the ways in which empathy can be integrated into engineering education, what engineering ethics teaching can learn from ethics teaching in other professional education settings, and map the growing research in the field of emotion in engineering ethics education.

Speakers:

Nicola W. Sochacka (University of Georgia, USA): Using empathy to build embodied ethical understandings of complex socio-technical challenges

Yesim Korkut  (Laurelate International İstanbul Bilgi University, Turkey): Integrating emotion into ethics education : what can be learned from professional and clinical psychology

Johanna Lönngren (Umeå University, Sweden), Alberto Bellocchi (University of Queensland, Australia), Pia Bøgelund (Aalborg University), Homero Murzi (Virginia Tech, USA)  Madeline Polmear (University of Florida, USA) and Roland Tormey (EPFL, Switzerland): A systematic review on Ethics and Emotions in Engineering Education Research