In addition to the moral dilemmas, participants were asked demographic and employment

information.
The survey was posted on the Internet and respondents were recruited through the
snowballing of industry contacts. A total of 65 completed surveys were collected. Some
respondents appear to have started the survey more than once before actually completing. Of the
80 attempted responses to the Internet survey, 27.5% (22) were eliminated for this reason.
Another 8 (10%) were eliminated due to nonresponse error.
WHO THE RESPONDENTS WERE AND WHAT THEY SAID
Demographically, the advertising practitioners who responded to the survey resembled
the journalists who took part in the DIT. The mean age of advertising respondents was 39 years.
The majority (52.4%) were female and more than 90% had college degrees, with 23.6% holding
graduate degrees. These findings for age and education seem to match other industry profiles. A
recent industry survey conducted by Advertising Age (2003) reported that men hold 51% of
positions in advertising. In sum, the respondents were well educated and were not professional
novices. Because moral development is linked to educational attainment, it could be expected
that advertising practitioners would score well on the DIT, as did their journalistic colleagues,
and at least as well on the advertising-specific scenarios, a test of some domain expertise.
Such was not the case.
The study found that advertising professionals demonstrated considerably lower ethical
reasoning than do journalists. In fact, the advertising professional's mean ethical reasoning scores
fall below those of most other tested professions; rather, they are in line with high school
students, whose mean P score is 31, and below U.S. adults in general (P score = 40). However, as
Table 8.1 indicates, advertising professionals' P scores were closely aligned with those generated
by professionals from the business community.
Even more alarming, the advertising practitioners who responded scored even lower in
ethical reasoning when asked to deliberate on advertising-specific dilemmas. The mean P score
for the two advertising dilemmas was 22.7 (5D = 14.5), and the difference between the mean P
score for the advertising dilemmas and the original DIT dilemmas was significant (t = 5.01, df =

64, p< .001). In other words, advertising practitioners scored significantly higher when the
dilemmas were not about advertising.
Table 8.1
Mean P Scores of Various Professions
Seminarians/philosopers
Medical Students
Practicing physicians
Journalists
Dental Students
Nurses
Graduate Students
Undergraduate Students
Veterinary students
Navy enlisted personnel
Orthopedic surgeons
Adults in general
Business professionals
Accounting undergraduates
Accountong editors
Advertising professionals
Business undergraduates
High school students
Prison inmates
Junior high students

65,1
50,2
49,2
48,68
7,6
46,3
44,9
43,2
42,2
41,6
41
41
38,13
34,8
32,5
31,64
31,35
31
23,7
20

These findings suggest that advertising practitioners are capable of reasoning at a higher
stage of moral development, but when asked to do so in a professional setting they suspend
moral judgment to focus on the financial

implications of their decisions, specifically the

financial implications for themselves and their clients.

This line of reasoning was particularly evident in the hiring scenario, specifically whether
an account manager should hire an Asian actor for a car dealership commercial. When asked to
rank which statement would be most important in reaching their decision, 27.7% of respondents
ranked "Does the account manager have the right to make her own business decisions?" as most
important. Another 27.7% ranked "Whether hiring the actor or paying attention to her client's
wishes would be best for her agency's business" as most important.

It is important to note that the DIT privileges the reasons for making ethical choices
rather than the final choices in evaluating moral development. Nonetheless, with most of the
participants giving reasons that ranked relatively low on the moral development scale, it is
difficult to conclude that these final choices represent deeply reflective moral thinking. This is
particularly troubling because academic research has shown that racial minorities comprise an
increasingly large group of consumers, whom it would be in the advertising practitioners'
financial best interest to reach. In this case, a decision that privileges universal ethical principles
could also have had a beneficial financial impact, something that does not always happen in
advertising. Yet, participants did not appear to make that connection.
At first glance, the dilemma dealing with alcohol advertising offers some indication that
advertisers look beyond profit-and-loss statements in making difficult decisions. For this
scenario, 40% of respondents ranked the statement "Whether Stevens has an opportunity to
produce socially responsible alcohol advertising" as most important. Ranking second most
important among 15.4% of respondents was the normative/ideal schema statement "The public
has a right to receive product information in order to make informed consumer choices." Another
15.6% rated this statement as third most important and 16.1% rated it fourth.
Although the ranking of these statements is encouraging, it may also be misleading
insofar as they support the business decision advocated by 70.8% of respondents and leading to
the greatest financial gain for themselves and their agency: pitching the account. " The high
ranking of these statements by the participantsa preponderance of personal interest schema
statementsdemonstrates the focus of thinking centered on financial and personal gain rather
than social, and perhaps more universal, issues.