What makes for ethical behavioural science?
My personal 10 commandments
Behavioural science can be used to control people’s behaviour, which puts ethics at the heart of everything we do. So, arguably, every behavioural scientist should be able to articulate a coherent set of ethical principles and apply those in every aspect of our work. Even though I think about ethical principles a lot, I have never made a personal statement of ethics, and I doubt whether many behavioural scientists have. So, let’s give it a go.
Ethics are both social and personal. Our cultures and societies set out certain principles to guide our decision-making, and largely within those, we create our own principles based on our upbringing, temperament and experiences. To help resist the temptation to break our ethical principles when they don’t suit us, it can help to make them as concrete and specific as possible.
The table below lists my newly-minted personal 10 commandments.
In my behavioural science research, communication and consulting, I will always:
1. Strive to promote human wellbeing and autonomy, the wellbeing of other sentient creatures and protection of our habitat. In this I will prioritise the wellbeing of people who are more disadvantaged for whatever reason.
2. Try to treat my colleagues with respect, however much I may disagree with them or whatever opinion I might have about their competence and values. (Some readers may point out that I have not always succeeded in this!)
3. Respect and work within both the spirit and the letter of the legal and ethical frameworks operating at my institution and in my profession.
4. Strive for scientific accuracy above all else and present judgements and beliefs about findings with a level of confidence that is commensurate with the evidence available, being ready to change those judgements and beliefs as new evidence becomes available.
5. Be self-reflective about my possible biases and actively work to counter them.
6. Decline to work with organisations that I believe to be unethical. This includes what may be termed the ‘harm industries’: industries whose products and services cause net harm to the public (e.g., tobacco companies, the alcohol industry, weapons manufacturers, companies that exacerbate inequalities, and companies whose products lead to unhealthy diets). It also includes organisations in any industry who I believe behave unethically, including some social media companies.
7. Decline to work on studies, whoever the funder is, whose findings can be censored, e.g., by contract clauses giving funders the final say in whether and how findings are to be published.
8. Actively engage with communities affected by my work (e.g., research participants, practitioners who implement findings and policymakers), ensuring their perspectives inform research design, implementation, and dissemination.
9. Strive for maximum accuracy and transparency in the conduct and reporting of studies. This includes following the FAIR principles (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reuse) in the collection, recording and use of data, and explicitly using appropriate EQUATOR guidelines for the reporting of studies, study protocols and reviews.
10. Strive to maximise the replicability of studies in which I am involved, including pre-registration of study designs and analysis plans, and full documentation of analysis whether or not the results of these are reported.
These are personal commandments. Some may feel they do not go far enough, while others will feel that they are too constraining. For example, I do allow myself to work with pharmaceutical companies on smoking cessation medications because, on balance, I think their products can promote human well-being, even though I know that commercial interests can distort the way they conduct and report science and they often harm a lot of non-human animals to get drugs on to the market.
As with all ethics, there will be occasions when principles come into conflict with each other. In general, by default, I consider the first commandment to be paramount, but I appreciate that this does not account for every eventuality, in which case I will just try to do the right thing!
You may be prompted to consider your own 10 (or so) commandments and how far you agree or disagree with mine. I think a case can be made for everyone working in behavioural science to include something like this in their personal statements, web pages, ORCID profiles, etc., to help keep ethical thinking uppermost in our minds when doing our jobs. As with all the essays in this series, feel free to comment if you like - but don’t feel you have to!