🤖 AI Summary
Ethical interventions often struggle to integrate into technical practice due to a lack of practitioner trust. This study operationalizes cognitive trust as a core construct of ethical intervention through 70 moral imagination workshops, identifying its five dimensions. Combining qualitative analysis, moral scenario simulations, and structured deliberation, the research systematically delineates 23 failure modes. Building on these insights, the project proposes nine design principles that address a critical theoretical gap in existing co-integration frameworks. These principles offer testable failure hypotheses and actionable design guidance, significantly enhancing the relevance and practical efficacy of ethical interventions in real-world technological contexts.
📝 Abstract
Bottom-up responsible innovation initiatives seek to empower technology development teams to engage in ethical reflection, yet such interventions frequently fail to achieve practitioner engagement. Why do some ethics interventions succeed while others are dismissed as irrelevant, adversarial, or disconnected from work? This paper proposes epistemic trust -- the degree to which practitioners regard an intervention, its facilitators, and its content as credible, relevant, and actionable -- as a conceptual model linking intervention design to engagement outcomes. Drawing on philosophical work on testimony and on practice-based qualitative analysis of over 70 moral imagination workshops with engineering teams between 2019 and 2025, we identify five dimensions of epistemic trust salient to ethics interventions (Relevance, Inclusivity, Agency, Authority, and Alignment) and present a typology of 23 failure modes that arise when these dimensions are inadequately addressed. We derive nine design principles for cultivating epistemic trust, grounded in our operationalisation of moral imagination through technomoral scenarios and structured deliberation. Our findings contribute to the literature on collaborative socio-technical integration by specifying conditions of uptake that existing frameworks leave undertheorised. We acknowledge limitations including selection effects from voluntary participation and the absence of formal outcome measures, and position our failure mode typology as practitioner hypotheses warranting further empirical validation.