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.

翻译：自下而上的负责任创新举措旨在赋权技术开发团队参与伦理反思，然而此类干预措施常常难以实现从业者的实际参与。为何某些伦理干预能够成功，而另一些则被视为无关紧要、具有对抗性或与工作脱节？本文提出认知信任——即从业者视干预措施、其推动者及其内容为可信、相关且可行的程度——作为连接干预设计与参与结果的概念模型。借鉴关于证言的哲学研究，以及基于2019年至2025年间与工程团队开展的70余次道德想象工作坊的实践性定性分析，我们识别出伦理干预中认知信任的五个关键维度（相关性、包容性、能动性、权威性与一致性），并提出当这些维度处理不当时会出现的23种失败模式类型学。基于我们通过技术道德场景与结构化讨论对道德想象的操作化实践，我们推导出培养认知信任的九项设计原则。我们的研究成果通过具体说明现有框架理论化不足的采纳条件，为协作式社会技术整合领域的文献做出贡献。我们承认研究局限性，包括自愿参与带来的选择效应以及缺乏正式结果衡量指标，并将我们的失败模式类型学定位为有待进一步实证验证的实践者假设。