This engineering ethics course examines how confirmation bias operates across professional engineering practice and why it constitutes both a technical and an ethical concern.
Confirmation bias is one of the most thoroughly documented phenomena in cognitive psychology, yet one of the least discussed in engineering practice. Engineers are professionally and legally obligated to protect public health, safety, and welfare, and that obligation depends on the quality of the judgment behind it. When bias leads engineers to interpret ambiguous evidence in the direction of prior expectations, to communicate findings in ways that obscure risk, or to allow organizational pressure to narrow their field of view, that obligation is not being met, even where no rule has been consciously broken.
The course draws on cognitive psychology, documented engineering failures, and professional ethics codes to build a practical understanding of how bias operates, why it is so difficult to detect in one's own reasoning, and what safeguards are most effective in limiting its influence.
- Teacher: J Moghraby