Does ACM’s code of ethics change ethical decision making in software development?
Abstract
Ethical decisions in software development can substantially impact end-users, organizations, and our environment, as is evidenced by recent ethics scandals in the news. Organizations, like the ACM, publish codes of ethics to guide software-related ethical decisions. In fact, the ACM has recently demonstrated renewed interest in its code of ethics and made updates for the first time since 1992. To better understand how the ACM code of ethics changes software-related decisions, we replicated a prior behavioral ethics study with 63 software engineering students and 105 professional software developers, measuring their responses to 11 ethical vignettes. We found that explicitly instructing participants to consider the ACM code of ethics in their decision making had no observed effect when compared with a control group. Our findings suggest a challenge to the research community: if not a code of ethics, what techniques can improve ethical decision making in software engineering?
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
McNamara et al. (2018) found no significant difference between the two groups after brief introduction to ethical standards or ACM Code of ethics.
“the study found no significant difference between the two groups (McNamara et al., 2018).”
From The influence of ethical principles and policy awareness priming on university students’ judgements about ICT code of conduct compliance (2022) · cites this paper as McNamara et al., 2018
There was no control group in McNamara et al. (2018), so it is not possible to see whether both forms of 'priming' had been equally successful or inadequate.
“There was also no control group (i.e.no ethical sensitisation activity), so it is not possible to see whether both forms of”
From The influence of ethical principles and policy awareness priming on university students’ judgements about ICT code of conduct compliance (2022) · cites this paper as McNamara et al., 2018
McNamara et al. (2018) showed no significant difference between the control group and the experimental group that viewed the code of ethics.
“That study also showed no significant difference between the control group and the experimental group that viewed the code of ethics.”
From The influence of ethical principles and policy awareness priming on university students’ judgements about ICT code of conduct compliance (2022) · cites this paper as McNamara et al. (2018)
Even though our priming interventions were longer than those used by McNamara et al. (2018) and we included a control group, we still could not quantitatively demonstrate that the intervention significantly affected users' knowledge or planned behaviours.
“Even though our priming interventions were longer than those used by McNamara et al. (2018) and we included a control group, we still could not quantitatively demonstrate that the intervention significantly affected users' knowledge or planned behaviours.”
From The influence of ethical principles and policy awareness priming on university students’ judgements about ICT code of conduct compliance (2022) · cites this paper as McNamara et al. (2018)
A recent study of the ACM Code of Ethics revealed that it has little effect on the day-to-day decision-making of software engineering professionals and students.
“A recent study of the ACM Code of Ethics revealed that it has little effect on the day-to-day decision-making of software engineering professionals and students.”
From Principles alone cannot guarantee ethical AI (2019) · cites this paper as [65]
Cites
Kish-Gephart, J. J., Harrison, D. A., & Treviño, L. K. (2010) · Journal of Applied Psychology · doi:10.1037/a0017103 · Cited by 1,690 · see citing works
Brief, A. P., Dukerich, J. M., Brown, P. R., & Brett, J. F. (1996) · Journal of Business Ethics · doi:10.1007/bf00705586 · Cited by 164 · see citing works
Flagged first, then by citations
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Principles alone cannot guarantee ethical AI
Mittelstadt, B. (2019) · Nature Machine Intelligence · doi:10.1038/s42256-019-0114-4 · Cited by 1,886 · see citing works
“Commitment to public service: professions involve a public declaration to provide a service to society or for the public good, making use of specialized, often privileged expertise 65 that takes precedence over individual gain 51 .”
InfluentialEmerging challenges in AI and the need for AI ethics education
Borenstein, J., & Howard, A. (2021) · AI and Ethics · doi:10.1007/s43681-020-00002-7 · Cited by 626 · see citing works
Madaio, M. A., Stark, L., Wortman Vaughan, J., & Wallach, H. (2020) · Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/3313831.3376445 · Cited by 436 · see citing works
Ethics of AI: a systematic literature review of principles and challenges
Khan, A. A., Badshah, S., Liang, P., Waseem, M., Khan, B., Ahmad, A., Fahmideh, M., Niazi, M., & Akbar, M. A. (2022) · The International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering 2022 · doi:10.1145/3530019.3531329 · Cited by 170 · see citing works
A principlist framework for cybersecurity ethics
Formosa, P., Wilson, M., & Richards, D. (2021) · Computers & Security · doi:10.1016/j.cose.2021.102382 · Cited by 105 · see citing works
AI Ethics – Too Principled to Fail?
Mittelstadt, B. (2019) · SSRN Electronic Journal · doi:10.2139/ssrn.3391293 · Cited by 82 · see citing works
Integrating ethics in AI development: a qualitative study
Arbelaez Ossa, L., Lorenzini, G., Milford, S. R., Shaw, D., Elger, B. S., & Rost, M. (2024) · BMC Medical Ethics · doi:10.1186/s12910-023-01000-0 · Cited by 67 · see citing works
Polyportis, A., & Pahos, N. (2024) · Humanities and Social Sciences Communications · doi:10.1057/s41599-023-02464-6 · Cited by 64 · see citing works
A theoretical framework to guide AI ethical decision making
Ferrell, O. C., Harrison, D. E., Ferrell, L. K., Ajjan, H., & Hochstein, B. W. (2024) · AMS Review · doi:10.1007/s13162-024-00275-9 · Cited by 24 · see citing works
Time to audit your AI algorithms
Sandu, I., Wiersma, M., & Manichand, D. (2022) · Maandblad voor Accountancy en Bedrijfseconomie · doi:10.5117/mab.96.90108 · Cited by 12 · see citing works
What Could Safety Research Contribute to Technology Design?
Hallamaa, J. (2021) · Lecture Notes in Computer Science · doi:10.1007/978-3-030-77431-8_4 · Cited by 7 · see citing works
Richards, D., Nazeer Khan, S. B., Formosa, P., & Bankins, S. (2022) · Organizational Cybersecurity Journal: Practice, Process and People · doi:10.1108/ocj-01-2022-0001 · Cited by 2 · see citing works
- Authors
- McNamara, A., Smith, J., & Murphy-Hill, E.
- Affiliations
- North Carolina State University (US)
- Venue
- Proceedings of the 2018 26th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2018-10-26
- Pages
- 729-733
- OpenAlex
- W2899367046
- Cited by
- 244
- References
- 2
- Citations by year
- 2026: 17 · 2025: 34 · 2024: 50 · 2023: 25 · 2022: 54 · 2021: 35 · 2020: 13 · 2019: 13 · 2018: 1 · 2017: 1
- FWCI
- 38.01
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE) (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Information Systems and Management › Ethics in Business and Education
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Flooding and Environmental Impact
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Software Engineering Techniques and Practices
- Keywords
- ACM Code of Ethics, ethical decision-making, software ethics, code of ethics, software developers, software engineering students, replication, behavioral ethics, ethics education
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
