dc.description.abstract | One major challenge of the 21st century is the increas ingly rapid development of new technologies and their
evaluation. In this article we argue for an interdisciplinary
approach to meet this demand for evaluating new and
specifically bioinspired technologies. We combine the
consideration of normative principles in the field of ethics
with psychological-empirical research on attitudes. In
doing so, the paper has a twofold concern: first, we dis cuss how such an interdisciplinary collaboration can be
implemented by using the method of Cognitive-Affective
Mapping. Cognitive-Affective Maps (CAMs) enable
a graphical representation of attitudes, including cogni tive and affective aspects. Second, we argue that CAMs
can be helpful to remedy the deficits of traditional ethical
approaches. We applied CAMs in the context of an ethics
seminar in which students were instructed to create CAMs
based on bioinspired technologies twice – prior to the
seminar to assess their evaluation on bioinspired technol ogies per se (pre-assessment) and after the seminar to
assess how their evaluation might have changed and
especially which normative ethical principles might have
been additionally considered (post-assessment). As could
be shown, CAMs can visualize the students’ attitudes,
including the valence of ethical principles. Further, com paring pre- and post-CAMs indicated students’ attitude
change. | vi |