Leveraging guidelines for ethical practice of statistics and computing to develop standards for ethical mathematical practice: A White Paper

Abstract

We report the results of our NSF-funded project in which we alpha- and beta- tested a survey comprising all aspects of the ethical practice standards from two disciplines with relevance to mathematics, the American Statistical Association (ASA) and Association of Computing Machinery (ACM). Items were modified so that text such as "A computing professional should..." became, "The ethical mathematics practitioner...". We also removed elements that were duplicates or were deemed unlikely to be considered relevant to mathematical practice even after modification. Starting with more than 100 items, plus 10 demographic questions, the final survey included 52 items (plus demographics), and 142 individuals responded to our invitations (through listservs and other widespread emails and announcements) to participate in this 30-minute survey. This white paper reports the project methods and findings regarding the community perspective on the 52 items, specifically, which rise to the level of ethical obligations, which do not meet this level, and what is missing from this list of elements of ethical mathematical practice. The results suggest that the community of mathematicians perceives a much wider range of behaviors to be subject to ethical practice standards than is currently represented.