Ethical Issues in Standardizing Professional Decision-making

Recent scholarship in applied behavior analysis has focused on the conceptual development of decision-making algorithms (DMA) to assist professionals in making practice-related decisions. A DMA is typically portrayed as a decision tree or flow-chart. By answering a series of questions, the user is guided through the DMA towards a specific answer. Though a DMA may allow for standardization of employee decision-making, the ethical issues and limitations surrounding their use requires discussion. The purpose of this presentation is to discuss outcomes from a series of studies that have evaluated DMAs in the context of visual analysis in order to highlight some of the ethical issues and limitations associated with their use in practice.

Learning objectives:

Participants will identify examples of decision-making algorithms in behavior-analytic research.

Participants will identify ethical-issues associated with the development of decision-making algorithms.

Participants will identify ethical-issues associated with the use of decision-making algorithms in behavior-analytic practice.