Psychological Measurement of Technology Ethics Education using the REGAIN Empirical Framework

Ethics coursework in higher education offers a key opportunity to shift the ethical culture of technology design and development. It could improve anticipation of potential tech harms, increase use of reasoning to address harms proactively, and change how students weigh values against other competing goals within the complex systems of tech companies. Yet, of the empirical measurements that have been developed to assess the effects of tech ethics coursework, most focus only on measuring the quality of students’ abstract reasoning, not their ability to foresee problems or their intended strategies to address them in complex environments. Here we draw on evidence from the human psychology of belief and behavior change to develop a new framework for measuring the effects of tech ethics coursework. Our REGAIN framework assesses how students Reason about ethical decisions, Evaluate their own ethical decision-making, prioritize ethical Goals and values, become Aware of ethical dilemmas, acquire ethically-relevant Information, and perceive social Norms around ethical behavior. We describe the psychological research informing how we operationalize these constructs in the current framework, and we report a study¹ using this framework to measure the effects of a course on tech ethics at a research institution in the United States. Though we cannot draw conclusions about causation, our data suggests that students who completed a tech ethics course showed higher moral awareness of potential tech harms compared to a control condition. Tech ethics students also differed in their reasoning strategies and metacognitive judgements, and they reported stronger intentions to seek diverse perspectives and prioritize society’s goals more than their own goals as developers.