2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

As the global climate becomes more extreme – with more natural disasters, increasing temperatures, and rising sea levels – there is a demand for civil engineers to design more sustainable infrastructure. Infrastructure that helps combat climate change (such as buildings with green roofs), or infrastructure that helps us deal with the consequences (such permeable pavement). While there are guidelines for sustainability put in place by government agencies such as the LEED certification, civil engineers are the key decision makers when it comes to choosing how sustainable infrastructure should be. It is, therefore, important to understand the processes behind how civil engineers make more sustainable decisions, so future generations of engineers can be educated and receive professional development training on sustainable infrastructure decisions.

Here, a systematic review of the existing literature on sustainability decisions in civil engineering is presented. The review is focused on papers investigating cognitive bias in sustainability decisions. Cognitive biases are systematic deviations from rational or “logical” decision making. To be included in the review, papers had to have, (i) measured some sort of bias, (ii) presented data from human subjects, and (iii) studied a civil engineering decision with a sustainability component. Following search and screening, six total papers were found that met the inclusion criteria. The papers were all published in 2015 or later, indicating this is a very new area of research. The papers also all predominantly focus on reference dependence biases, where irrational behavior is driven by people evaluating outcomes and expressing preferences relative to an existing reference point or status-quo. For example, civil engineering students were shown to make more sustainable decisions when the default level of sustainable achievement is raised relative to current industry convention (Shealy & Klotz, 2015).

In order to appropriately educate and prepare the next generation of civil engineers to make more sustainable decisions, more research is needed on how engineers currently go about making these decisions. In particular, more research on the potential biases that make civil engineers vulnerable to sub-optimal sustainable choices. We envision a future where civil engineers have the opportunity to receive educational curriculum or professional development training on disciplinary relevant problem solving, including instruction on bias awareness and strategies for reducing susceptibility to bias. This type of curriculum is already seen in other domains where experts must make judgments that have broad, lasting, and highly consequential impacts (e.g., medicine, business, and even construction management). The findings from our systematic literature review on civil engineers’ sustainability decisions represents a first step towards achieving this educational future.