Please note that this blog is co-written by members of the ABAI Practice Board

Ethics Codes

Ethics codes serve an aspirational and a guiding function:

• Aspirational in that they offer a vision of abstract values, such as beneficence, for members of the profession to enact
• Guiding in that they provide a few concrete steps for preventing or resolving ethical conflicts

Because scientist-practitioners encounter many situations in a range of practice domains and a variety of roles (e.g., supervisor, therapist, owner) that may pose ethical questions, ethics codes call for self-reflection and awareness to examine one’s actions, considering the overarching values and the guidance provided.

Behavioral health professionals, such as Kenneth Pope, PhD, recognized decades ago that everyday ethical behavior requires an active stance, a consistent vigilance to detect one’s own blind spots¹. It also necessitates a problem-solving orientation to address the resulting questions. Ethical dilemmas – the “What should I do in this complicated situation?” – are questions of discomfort, ambiguity, vagueness, and doubt. Their concrete content is often not covered in the ethics code.

Creating Community Through Deliberate, Lifelong Learning

Learning ethical behavior requires an increased discrimination of subtle aspects of situations that, unwittingly, could generate harm and violate the overarching aspirational guidance of beneficence. For this reason, researchers have suggested that effective teaching of ethics is like a process of acculturation:

• We as beginning learners of behavior analysis enter the new world of professional ethics
• We explore and compare our personal values and those of the profession
• We learn active problem-solving techniques to define or conceptualize the problem, outline potential solutions, and then select one and evaluate it.

In daily life, this process often occurs in consultation with other professionals (sometimes health service providers, but also legal or medical professionals).

The long-term goal of this communal process is to generate a supportive and informed infrastructure of providers that acknowledges power imbalances that are inherent to professional services, such as relationships of health providers and clients; supervisors and supervisees; supervisors and administrators; instructors and students; researchers and participants; researchers and officials of funding agencies.

A result is the detection of situations that benefit from further exploration and potential course correction, to further the profession in the long run. Below are resources on how to continue your lifelong learning of ethics.²

Everyone’s Doing Their Best

The everyday practice of ethics resembles principles of behavior analysis: Everyone is doing the best they can in their respective contexts, and the detection of a potentially problematic area does not automatically imply ethical or legal difficulties. The first question is whether an ethical dilemma is present. To emphasize, a step-by-step problem-solving approach is the precursor to addressing the potential problem with the affected or involved parties.

Websites such as Pope’s (https://kspope.com/memory/ethics.php) help students as well as seasoned professionals critically think about and cogently describe situations – to develop the prerequisites for a dialogue. This dialogue may occur with colleagues who we consult to discuss deidentified aspects of the situation for our further clarification, to see if a problem is present. OR the dialogue may occur directly with the involved persons, again to collect further information. OR the purpose of the dialogue may be to notify persons that we have detected an ethical problem that needs to be resolved.

Reluctance to Engage Constructively

Addressing a potential ethical problem requires deliberate preparation to initiate a dialogue. We often do not prepare to have this dialogue, which exacerbates the difficulties, as the person we approach is usually not aware of the ethical dilemma we have detected. For this reason, practicing ethics also means learning the art of difficult conversations. Similarly, when we are the ones who need support because we have engaged in practices that might be ethically questionable, we need the skills to clarify the concerns that a colleague, fellow student, or supervisor raises, engage with the person and the topic, reflect, and take effective action.

If the skills necessary for these dialogues are not taught or practiced in ethics courses or during formative years with supervisors in the field, this omission occurs to the detriment of the students and the profession. A student may leave a course or supervision with the impression of a clearcut right-wrong, good-bad, dichotomous ethical world, unprepared for everyday practice that consists of multi-faceted ambiguous dilemmas with high complexity.

What to do?

1. To enhance your understanding, implement a behavior analytic, contextual stance and refrain from participating in a culture of blame, consider Pope’s problem-solving steps that will help you decrease emotional knee-jerk reactions and prepare for conversations. Other tools, such as Nezu and colleagues’ problem-solving therapy techniques³ are available in self-help form, also emphasizing critical thinking and the generation of potential solutions for evaluation.
2. To learn about difficult conversations, work through texts such as “Difficult conversations: How to discuss what matters most.”⁴ Such texts break down aspects of the conversation in a way that will further your understanding of the context (e.g., how your history and your conversational partner’s history intersect with the subject matter). This will help you gain the distance to keep in mind the long-term overarching goal, to generate a collaborative and constructive process that leads to the resolution of hairy and complex issues at all levels of practice and research, not explicitly mentioned in the ethics code yet bearing on the potential well-being of individuals involved.
3. To learn how to have difficult conversations, practice, and consult.

References

1. Pope, K. (n. d.). Therapy, ethics, malpractice, forensics, critical thinking (and a few other topics). https://kspope.com/index.php
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2. Lifelong Learning of Ethics:
   Bashe, A., Anderson, S. K., Handelsman, M. M., & Klevansky, R. (2007). An acculturation model for ethics training: The ethics autobiography and beyond. Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, 38(1), 60–67. https://doi.org/10.1037/0735-7028.38.1.60
   Gottlieb, M. C., Handelsman, M. M., & Knapp, S. (2008). Some principles for ethics education: Implementing the acculturation model. Training and Education in Professional Psychology, 2(3), 123–128. https://doi.org/10.1037/1931-3918.2.3.123
   Suarez, V. D., Marya, V., Weiss, M. J., & Cox, D. (2023). Examination of ethical decision-making models across disciplines: Common elements and application to the field of behavior analysis. Behavior Analysis in Practice, 16, 657-671. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40617-022-00753-1
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3. Nezu, A. M., Nezu, C. M., & D‘Zurilla, T. J. (2006). Solving life’s problems: A 5-step guide to enhanced wellbeing. Springer Publishing. ↩︎
4. Stone, D., Patton, B., & Heen, S. (2023). Difficult conversations: How to discuss what matters most (3^rd ed.). Penguin Publishing. ↩︎