Ethical Issues and Social Responsibility:

UNST GOALS

I chose to put the Ethical Decision Making paper and our Hidden Bias reflection under this category. The Ethical Decision making paper, deals with a given situation and what 'we' would do under such circumstances. The second paper, the Hidden Bias Reflection would fall under the Social Responsibility, not many of us realize we have a bias about one thing or the other and it's our responsibility to be aware of our hidden biases.

1: Ethical Decision Making
Case #1
  After reading scenario number 1 it seemed to me that an employee at a social service agency wouldn't be a hard job, only if there are no feelings/emotions involved. The very first Ethical perspective we chose as a group was Fairness (justice), although all of the other perspectives would fit under the same case as well. At first not being clear of the so called scale that was used to determine which clients would stay and which would go we debated on Mary's wants and needs and her overall progress, which would then result in having her stay. We wanted to be fair to the other clients, it wouldn't be fair to them if we had Mary stay regardless of her score not meeting the scales requirements just because we knew her personally. Who knew if the other clients had gone through a lot more than Mary had, and if they deserved it more than her but were then kicked out of the home because we, as Mary's friend sympathized with her situation.
One of the options we came up with was that we could tell Mary she had to leave that particular home but also help her get into another home where there is room. Being her friend we wouldn't want to abandon her while in need. While all of this was decided, we then were clarified what exactly the scale meant. It was based on a persons "need" to stay at the home, if a client had shown improvement and did not meet the standards they were asked to leave, now knowing this piece of information it had become much easier for us as a group to now finalize out decision. We would simply tell Mary she was getting better and that it was time for her to leave the home and have someone else, who is in much more need of help come take her place.

2: Hidden Bias Reflection Paper

In mentor session we took a couple of 'hidden bias' tests and it was interesting to know how many different tests were made all ranging from Gender, Age, Race and Body Images. I decided to take the tests that would better relate to me. Getting started on these tests I was pretty sure of what my results would be, and surprisingly they were very close. The first test I took was the Age Bias test, although my data suggested a moderate automatic preference for the young, I couldn't understand how they associated the age with all the good and bad things in the world. I think this test tricks our subconscious to automatically relate the old to the good and the young to the bad, but this is not necessarily true in all cases, and also, depending on our age group we would chose the age closer to ours. According to the results, about 58% of the total respondents showed a strong automatic preference for young whereas only 2% showed preference for old.
The second test I took was Body Shape Bias, my data suggested little or not automatic preference for a particular body shape. I fall under the same category as 15% of others who took this same test, but 29% showed a strong automatic preference for Thin and only 3% for Fat, this shows a big bias in the majority of the people who took this test, for them, body image is a big thing. The third test I took was about Gender Bias' and this test stereotype test measures the strength of automatic association between women and men and the concepts "liberal arts" and "science".

Before getting started on this test I knew I would have absolutely no gender bias when it's related to a certain field, because I always believed that women could excel just as much as men can in any field, rather it be Science or Liberal Arts. My data suggested that I show little or no automatic gender association with science or liberal arts, according to the rest of the data it seems as if most people associate men with science 37% more than those who associate females with science. I think these tests are made to prove that even if we don't show our bias' they tend to come out subconsciously.