Teaching Ethics in a Statistics Curriculum with a Cross-Cultural Emphasis

ABSTRACT

Like most professional disciplines, the ASA has adopted ethical guidelines for its practitioners. To promote these guidelines, as well as to meet governmental and institutional mandates, U.S. universities are demanding more training on ethics within existing statistics graduate student curricula. Most of this training is based on the teachings of Western philosophers. However, many statistics graduate students are from Eastern cultures (particularly Chinese), and cultural and linguistic evidence indicates that Western ethics may be difficult to translate into the philosophical concepts common to students from different cultural backgrounds. This article describes how to teach cross-cultural ethics, with emphasis on the ASA Ethical Guidelines, within a graduate-level statistical consulting course. In particular, we present content that can help students overcome cultural and language barriers to gain an understanding of ethical decision-making that is compatible with both Western and Eastern philosophical models. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.

KEYWORDS:

• Confucius
• Consulting
• Cross-cultural
• Curriculum
• Ethics

Funding

This work was partially supported by a course development grant from SMU's Cary McGuire Center for Ethics and Public Responsibility.