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

Abstract As society advances technologically, ensuring these strides align with common ethical standards and morally acceptable behavior is essential to ensure a sustainable and ethical future. Hence, besides conquering the technical challenges that separate the present from the future, the builders and makers at the technical frontier must constantly solve and accommodate human problems on a moral and ethical level. To aid in this, much like in professional fields like Medicine and Law, the use of codes of ethics has been applied to Information Technology (IT) related fields to help guide the decisions of these professionals in the ethical sense. However, the efficiency of this code of ethics (CoE) approach, in the empirical sense, is a matter up for investigation with little documented exploration. Building upon past works, this study seeks to assess the influence of codes of ethics on the decision-making process of IT students and professionals when confronted with ethical dilemmas and moral self-assessment questions. For this, we conducted a randomized controlled trial on 225 IT students and professionals, using a multi-media implementation of the 2018 Association for Computing Machinery Code of Ethics as our intervention in our experimental group. In the end, our search for a statistically significant result in terms of differences in the distribution of answers from our control and experimental group showed no signs that these originated from different distributions, i.e., our passive CoE intervention did not promote any measurable behavior change in the answering of our survey . We conclude this study by critically assessing our results while prescribing recommendations for future research, like determining if more active forms of exposure to Codes of Ethics and the like can promote the influence our intervention has failed to produce.