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Does ACM’s code of ethics change ethical decision making in software
development?
Conference Paper · October 2018
DOI: 10.1145/3236024.3264833
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Does ACM’s Code of Ethics Change Ethical Decision Making in
Sofware Development?
Andrew McNamara
North Carolina State University
Raleigh, North Carolina, USA
[email protected]
Justin Smith
North Carolina State University
Raleigh, North Carolina, USA
[email protected]
Emerson Murphy-Hill
North Carolina State University
Raleigh, North Carolina, USA
[email protected]
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 frst time since 1992. To
better understand how the ACM code of ethics changes softwarerelated 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 fndings suggest a challenge
to the research community: if not a code of ethics, what techniques
can improve ethical decision making in software engineering?
CCS CONCEPTS
• Social and professional topics → Codes of ethics;
KEYWORDS
ACM code of ethics, software engineering
ACM Reference Format:
Andrew McNamara, Justin Smith, and Emerson Murphy-Hill. 2018. Does
ACM’s Code of Ethics Change Ethical Decision Making in Software Development?. In Proceedings of the 26th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering
(ESEC/FSE ’18), November 4–9, 2018, Lake Buena Vista, FL, USA. ACM, New
York, NY, USA, 5 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3236024.3264833
1 INTRODUCTION
Software developers must constantly make ethical considerations,
including deciding the proper amount of user data to collect; balancing added functionality with potential adverse environmental
effects; and performing due diligence to reduce the risks of critical
security bugs. Such ethical decisions can cause substantial harm to
people, to organizations, and to our planet. Consider two recent
examples.
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https://doi.org/10.1145/3236024.3264833
The frst example is the Uber versus Waymo dispute [26], in
which a software engineer at Waymo took self-driving car code
to his home. Shortly thereafter, the engineer left Waymo to work
for a competing company with a self-driving car business, Uber.
When Waymo realized that their own code had been taken by their
former employee, Waymo sued Uber. Even though the code was
not apparently used for Uber’s competitive advantage, the two
companies settled the lawsuit for $245 million dollars.
The second example is the “Dieselgate” scandal [21], where software inside certain diesel Volkswagen cars was programmed to run
in one of two modes. In one mode, the car operated under normal,
day-to-day driving conditions, but emitted pollution at levels above
what is allowed by US and international regulators. In the other
mode, the car emitted allowable pollution levels, but only when it
detected that it was being inspected by regulators. Although software engineers raised objections to management about the devices,
they did not bring these concerns to authorities [19]. Consequently,
the company was forced to pay $30 billion dollars in compensation
so far [31] and an estimated 59 people suffered early deaths as a
result of the excess emitted pollution in the US alone [5].
As early as 1913, organizations have published codes of ethics
to guide people facing such ethical situations [3]. In 1972, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) adopted a code of ethics
designed to specifcally to apply to software development. In 2018,
the ACM code of ethics was updated for the frst time since 1992 [2].
In light of recent software ethics scandals, like Dieselgate and the
Uber versus Waymo dispute, and ACM’s renewed interest in revising its guidelines, we are motivated to study the effect of ACM’s
code of ethics on ethical decision making in software development.
While the ACM claims its code of ethics is “intended to serve as a
basis for ethical decision making” [1] to our knowledge the effectiveness of this claim has never been tested.
We asked 63 software engineering students and 105 professional
software engineers to consider 11 software-related ethical decisions.
We derived these decisions from real ethical dilemmas faced by
software developers. To assess how much the ACM code of ethics
influenced decision making, participants were divided into two
groups, a control group, and a group explicitly instructed to use
the ACM code of ethics. The primary contribution of this paper
is a better understanding of ethical decision making in software
development and the influence of the ACM code of ethics on those
decisions.
2 RELATED WORK
Researchers have postulated that many variables can influence
ethical decision making [11]. Here we focus on the most relevant
work pertaining to codes of ethics, including what their purposes
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ESEC/FSE ’18, November 4–9, 2018, Lake Buena Vista, FL, USA Andrew McNamara, Justin Smith, and Emerson Murphy-Hill
are, the effectiveness of codes in organizations, and how ethics
affect Information Technology professionals.
Purpose of codes of ethics: Wood and Rimmer comment that
codes of ethics have become popular because they are a way for
organizations to appear ethical while also noting that the codes can
be a useful starting block when working towards ethical behavior
in market decisions [36]. That being said, there are several organizational benefts that come with having a code of ethics including
clarifying management’s thoughts about what is ethical, providing
employees with a way to think about ethical issues before they
arise as well as a reason to decline performing unethical actions,
and assisting in training employees [24]. The ACM provides some
guidance on how they intend that the code of ethics should be used,
namely to serve as a basis for ethical decision making [1].
Effect of codes of ethics in organizations: Researchers have
been interested in identifying whether these codes affect the decisions of employees. Prior research agrees that there are many
different factors involved in making ethical decisions [18] including
individual characteristics (i.e., cognitive moral development [33],
moral philosophies [4, 12], job satisfaction [10, 17]), characteristics
of the moral issue (i.e., proximity, magnitude of the consequences,
temporal immediacy) [22, 25, 28], and organizational characteristics
(i.e., code of ethics, ethical climate [9, 35]).
Prior studies have measured whether codes of ethics have effects
on ethical decisions made in other domains by examining simulated decisions. Several of these studies have found fewer unethical
decisions are made in the presence of a code [15, 16, 23, 27, 30, 34],
but other studies have found no signifcant effect [7, 8].
Ethics in Information Technology: While most ethics research
has assessed decision-making factors for managers and businesses,
little has specifcally investigated ethics within computing. Harrington found that codes of conduct have little effect preventing Information Systems (IS) employees from misusing computing resources
including cracking computing systems, sabotaging competitors’
security, writing viruses, and conducting bank fraud while denial
of responsibility had a larger effect [14]. Similarly, Thong and Yap
studied entry-level IS professionals’ decisions about whether to
illegally copy software for personal use [32]. In contrast to these
studies that examine the decisions of people who use software, ours
examines the decisions of those who create software.
Peslak investigated students’ level of agreement with select statements in the 1992 ACM Code of Ethics [29]. Our study builds on
Peslak’s work by investigating whether exposure to the ACM code
of ethics influences ethical decision making.
3 METHODOLOGY
Since the ACM claims that its code of ethics is “intended to serve
as a basis for ethical decision making,” we decided to test whether
that claim holds up in practice:
Does the presence of a code of ethics influence software-related ethical
decisions?
To answer this question, we performed a conceptual replication
(or a reproduction, according to Gómez and colleagues’ classifcation [13]) of a study by Cleek and Leonard [8]. Our methodology
parallels Cleek and Leonards’ in that in both studies, participants
were asked to make decisions about ethical vignettes. Rather than
recruiting business students, we instead recruited software engineering students and professionals. We also improved on Cleek
and Leonards’ methodology by instrumenting student participants’
questionnaire to determine whether they read the code of ethics.
In our study, we present participants with vignettes derived from
real-world ethical situations in software development. We asked
participants to decide how they would act in each situation and
compare the decisions made by participants who were given the
ACM code of ethics to a control group of participants who saw no
code of ethics. In the remainder of this section, we describe our
study design, including how we selected vignettes to present to
participants. In Section 3.2, we discuss how we analyzed our results.
3.1 Study Design
3.1.1 Identification of Ethical Issues. To identify ethical issues
in software development, we frst conducted two rounds of exploratory pilot interviews, each with three software engineering
researchers. In the frst round, we simply asked individuals to recall
instances where they made software-related ethical decisions. In
the second round of interviews, we attempted to elicit responses
by discussing each principle of the ACM 2018 Code of Ethics, Draft
1.1 Based on these interviews, we determined that software participants 1) might not be able to recall ethical decisions they made in the
workplace 2) may not be comfortable discussing situations where
they personally had to make ethical decisions during face-to-face
interactions with a researcher.
Since participants did not openly discuss their own personal
ethical decisions, we therefore decided to identify real-world issues posted to online forums and discussed in the literature. First,
we searched the Software Engineering Stack Exchange2 for posts
tagged with “ethics” on November 2, 2017. We removed the posts
that did not present an ethical issue. Many of the remaining posts either covered related topics or were duplicates. To remove duplicates
and identify more general patterns of ethical issues, two authors
clustered the remaining 82 posts. This process resulted in the creation of six general clusters (examples from each cluster given as
footnotes): responsibility to report,3 user data collection,4 intellectual
property,5 code quality,6 honesty to customer,7 and personnel and
time management.8
Based on the Stack Exchange posts in each cluster, we derived
two vignettes describing situations similar to the situation in the
posts. Due to the breadth of topics reported related to intellectual
property, we included fve vignettes in that cluster, for a total of 15
vignettes from the Stack Exchange posts. Each vignette included
two possible actions the reader might take, these two choices were
also based on the content of the Stack Exchange posts. To increase
our coverage of possible topics, we also adapted the six vignettes
used in Cleek and Leonard’s study of corporate codes of ethics [20].
Two of the 21 vignettes we identifed resemble the two motivating
1https://ethics.acm.org/2018-code-draft-1
2https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com
3http://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/97724
4http://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/114289
5http://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/8758
6http://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/147816
7http://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/168013
8http://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/184909
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Does ACM’s Code of Ethics Change Ethical Decision… ESEC/FSE ’18, November 4–9, 2018, Lake Buena Vista, FL, USA
examples described in Section 1 (Waymo dispute and Dieselgate).
We are particularly interested in these vignettes, because they represent high-impact, real-world ethical dilemmas.
3.1.2 Selection of Ethical Issues. To get feedback on our 21 vignettes and select which vignettes should be included in the fnal
study, we distributed the vignettes to a convenience sample of 9 software engineering graduate students. These participants responded
to each of the ethical decisions and were also given the opportunity
to comment on each vignette.
We used the following inclusion criteria to construct our fnal
set of vignettes:
(1) Keep the Waymo- and Diselgate-like vignettes to test whether
prior knowledge of high-profle ethical dilemmas changes
decision-making
(2) Keep one question per Stack Exchange cluster considering,
with highest priority criteria frst:
(a) Variance among pilot study responses — we argue that
when dilemmas are easy, participants make the obvious
choice without the need for a code of ethics
(b) The clearest scenarios, according to pilot participants
(c) The brevity of the scenario description — in order to limit
the load on participants, we preferred shorter scenarios as a
tie-breaker
(3) Three vignettes from Cleek and Leonard, selected according
to the previous criteria
As a result, we selected 11 vignettes to include in the fnal study.
3.1.3 Study Protocol. Consistent with Cleek and Leonard [8] and
based on the discomfort that we observed during face-to-face pilot
interviews, we decided to conduct the study remotely by distributing a questionnaire.
First, the questionnaire described a fctional company that the
participant had just joined as a Lead Developer. Next, participants
were randomly assigned to one of two conditions:
• About half of the participants were simply told that the backbone of the company culture was strong ethical standards.
(n = 34 students, n = 56 professionals)
• The other half were told that the backbone was the ACM
Code of Ethics. This second group of participants were shown
a brief version of the ACM 2018 Code of Ethics (n = 29 students, n = 49 professionals)1
All participants were asked to open a link to the background information about the company in a separate tab for reference. For
participants in the second group, this page also included the full
ACM Code of Ethics.
We presented participants with the 11 vignettes, one at a time, in
a randomized order. Figure 1 depicts what participants encountered
for one of these vignettes. Participants were then asked to, “respond
to whichever answer best describes the way in which you would act
in the particular situation.” Participants could select between two
options, or specify that they were unsure. After the participants
responded to all of the vignettes, we collected basic demographic
information.
1Because the fnal version of the code was not yet available when we conducted
our study with students, for students we used Draft 2 (https://ethics.acm.org/
2018-code-draft-2).
Figure 1: Intellectual property (Waymo) vignette
A full replication package, including the background briefngs,
11 vignettes, and options presented to participants is provided in
the Supplemental Materials.
3.1.4 Participants. After the fnal set of ethical issues were selected,
we distributed the IRB approved protocol to undergraduate students,
then later to a set of professional software developers.
For student participants, we recruited from a third-year software engineering course. In order to increase participation, the
instructor for the course awarded extra credit on a course project
for completing the study. 63 student participants completed the
study. Most participants were 20-25 years old. Of the 29 participants that were familiar with the ACM before the study, 24 of them
knew that the ACM had a code of ethics. Additionally, 59 individuals reported believing that ethical behavior is either defnitely or
probably important for success in an organization.
For professional participants, we paid Qualtrics Research Services2 $4000 USD to recruit software developers in the U.S. that
had 5 years of experience or more. Responses were excluded from
analysis if a participant either (a) provided nonsensical or irrelevant responses to free form questions, or (b) completed the survey
too quickly, with a cutoff of one third median completion time, as
defned by pilot run with professional developers. 105 professionals
completed the study, most over 40 years old. Of the 51 participants
that were familiar with the ACM before the study, 39 knew that
the ACM had a code of ethics. 100 reported that ethical behavior is
either defnitely or probably important for success in an organization.
3.2 Analysis
3.2.1 Data Collection. The primary measure we collected was participants’ responses to each of the 11 vignettes. There were three
possible responses for each vignette; participants could choose
between two actions or indicate they were unsure. To ensure participants in the Code of Ethics condition read the code, we instrumented the website where it was hosted. We measured the time
each participant spent on the website and collected click-based
data, which revealed that participants interacted with the website.
We used instrumentation only with students; we judged that this
would be more challenging with professionals for privacy reasons.
3.2.2 Data Analysis. To determine whether participants who viewed
the ACM Code of Ethics made different decisions compared with
those in the control group, we analyzed the variance between responses in the two conditions. Since the vignette decisions are not
normally distributed, we used the Kruskal-Wallis Rank Sum Test
2https://www.qualtrics.com/research-services/
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ESEC/FSE ’18, November 4–9, 2018, Lake Buena Vista, FL, USA Andrew McNamara, Justin Smith, and Emerson Murphy-Hill
Table 1: Vignette response counts

Cleek & Leonard CoE #2 Control Cleek & Leonard CoE #3 (Dieselgate) Control Cleek & Leonard CoE #4 Control Cleek & Leonard CoE #6 Control Responsibility CoE to report Control User data CoE collection Control Intellectual CoE property Control Honesty to CoE customer Control with the null hypothesis that decisions are the same between the
two conditions (α = .05). Since we would be running this test once
per vignette, we controlled for false discovery using a BenjaminiHochberg correction [6].
4 RESULTS
We compared the distribution of responses from participants under
the Code of Ethics condition to the distribution of participants’
responses in the control group to answer our research question:
Does the presence of a code of ethics influence software-related
ethical decisions?
No statistically signifcant difference in the responses for
any vignette were found across individuals who did and did
not see the code of ethics, either for students or for professionals. While all participants who were in the “code” condition
saw a brief version of the ACM Code of Ethics in the background
section of the questionnaire, the full code was not available to participants unless they opened the external website in a new tab.
Therefore, we re-ran the tests only considering those students who
had either opened the code of ethics in another tab or remained on
the project description for at least thirty seconds. Even with these
more strict inclusion criteria (which removed two people from the
“code” condition), there was no signifcant difference.
Table 1 summarizes responses under both conditions, those who
viewed the Code of Ethics (CoE) and those in the control group
(Control), for each vignette. For example in the CoE condition, responding to the Intellectual property (Waymo) vignette: 0 students
selected option A (“Download the data on a personal hard drive so
you can continue development at home”); 2 students were unsure;
and 27 selected option B (“Stay at work longer in order to continue
development”). Comparatively, in the control group for the same
vignette: 1 student selected option A; 1 was unsure; and 32 selected
option B. The rightmost three columns show similarly proportioned
response counts for professional participants.
The data also allows us to answer the follow-up question:
Does awareness of news stories influence software-related ethical
decisions?
Since two of the vignettes were based off of recent news stories
(Dieselgate and the Waymo dispute), after the questionnaire we
provided the opportunity for participants to indicate whether they
recognized news stories. None of the participants indicated that
they recognized the Waymo dispute, however, 19 students (30%) and
1 professional (1%) specifcally mentioned the Dieselgate scandal.
We tested to see if students who recognized the Dieselgate news
story made different decisions. We found that students who did
not mention the Dieselgate incident were more likely to indicate
willingness to create test-evading software (p = .013). In fact, none
of the students who recognized the story indicated they would build
the cheat software. Perhaps this suggests that one effective way to
influence ethical decision making in software development is to
help developers see the connections between the consequences of
their decisions and examples of similar news-worthy decisions.
5 THREATS TO VALIDITY
Since the vignettes, as presented, do not fully qualify the situations
(i.e., what measures have previously been taken or what other options are available), participants might prefer to remain undecided
about what decision to take. Furthermore, to enable us to compare
response between individuals, we had to constrain the choices for
each vignette. Our questionnaire only presents two possible actions
for each vignette (along with an “unsure” option). Decisions in
these situations rarely have only two available actions, therefore,
some participants might be unsure what they would do because
they would really do neither of the options presented.
Our ability to detect statistically signifcant differences is limited by study sample size. More participants may yield signifcant
results.
Finally, our questionnaire measures participants’ intentions, rather
than their actual ethical decisions. Using intention as a proxy for
behavior is common in behavioral ethics research [18]. Further,
this design choice was necessitated by our pilot participants’ reluctance to discuss ethical dilemmas in which they had been directly
involved.
6 CONCLUSION
We investigated the ACM code of ethics’ effect on software-related
ethical decisions. Despite its stated goal, we found no evidence that
the ACM code of ethics influences ethical decision making. Future
research is required to identify interventions that do influence
decision making, such as by helping developers identify parallels
between their decisions and infamous software news stories.
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