Codes of ethics in IT: do they work in isolation?

Abstract

As society advances technologically, ensuring that these strides align with common ethical standards and morally acceptable behavior is essential for a sustainable and ethical future. Hence, in addition to conquering the technical challenges that separate the present from the future, the builders and makers at the technical frontier must constantly solve and address human problems on a moral and ethical level. To aid in this, as in professional fields such as Medicine and Law, codes of ethics have been applied to Information Technology (IT)- related fields to guide the ethical decisions of these professionals. However, the empirical efficiency of this code of ethics (CoE) approach remains underexplored. Building on prior work, this study seeks to assess the influence of codes of ethics on the decision-making of IT students and professionals when confronted with ethical dilemmas and moral self-assessment questions. To this end, we conducted a randomized controlled trial with 225 IT students and professionals, using a multimedia implementation of the 2018 Association for Computing Machinery Code of Ethics as the intervention in the experimental group. In the end, our search for a statistically significant difference in the distribution of answers between our control and experimental groups showed no evidence that these originated from different distributions, i.e., our passive CoE intervention did not promote any measurable behavior change in answering our survey. We conclude this study by critically assessing our results and prescribing recommendations for future research, such as determining whether more active forms of exposure to Codes of Ethics and the like can promote the influence our intervention has failed to produce.

BibTeX

@article{kluge2025codes,
  title={Codes of ethics in IT: do they work in isolation?},
  author={Kluge Corr{\^e}a, Nicholas and William Santos, James and Almeida, {\'E}derson de and Pasetti, Marcelo and Schiavon, Dieine and Panizzon, Mateus and Oliveira, Nythamar de},
  journal={AI and Ethics},
  pages={1--13},
  year={2025},
  publisher={Springer}
}