From an ethics ‘side dish’ to ‘your modus operandi’: neurotechnology researcher perspectives on the impacts of a decade of embedded ethics collaboration

Authors: Tubig, P. A., Brown, T. E., McCusker, D., Pham, M., Klein, E., & Goering, S.

Publication: J. Resp. Innovation

Date: October 24, 2024

Abstract: In this paper, we discuss ethics integration and consider questions about evaluating the success of such efforts by reporting qualitative data from an interview study with researchers who were part of a ten-year, multi-institutional NSF-funded neural engineering research center with a multimodal ethics integration effort. Our analysis of these data highlights three key themes from scientific collaborators about the impact of ethics integration: (1) the development of an ethical culture and expectation for ethics integration throughout the research and design process; (2) the usefulness of offering different modes of ethics engagement to foster productive collaborations between ethicists and researchers; and (3) the fostering of ethics capacity development within scientists themselves. We also report on researchers’ perspectives on the challenges of measuring the effectiveness of ethics integration.

Read full publication