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National Communication Association Of Ethical Essay

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According to the National Communication Association of ethical principles, “one must advocate truthfulness, accuracy, honesty, and reason as essential integrity of communication”, but in a study done at the University of Iowa by Wendell Johnson this ethic was ignored in order to get participants into the experiment without fail. The study was testing stuttering and the importance of stutterers thoughts, attitudes, and beliefs when speaking publicly or in their daily lives. Johnson reached out to 22 orphans from a veteran orphanage and told them they were going to receive regular speech therapy, leaving out the true intent of his actions. The children were split up, one group given positive speech therapy consisting of praising and encouragement while the second group were given negative speech therapy which pointed …show more content…

Johnson purposely left out that he was testing their stuttering which caused the study to take a pessimistic turn. As a result of this experiment, 11 kids had their positive attitudes taken away from them and became very conscious of everything they said and did. This experiment could also be modestly argued unethical by another ethical principle from the National Communication Association which reads, “We promote communication climates of caring and mutual understanding that respect the unique needs and characteristics of individual communicators”. By telling this group of kids that their speech was awful, sloppy, under average, and most of all useless, the orphans ended up having worse communication skills then they had at the very beginning. This being said, the children's speech was not respected and instead downgraded for research reasons. Overall, the Monster Study was unethical by Johnson's lack of information to the orphans participating and the disrespect to the kids whose speech suffered because of

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