Becoming a Professional: More Thoughts on Ethics

In an earlier editorial, I said that a professional can be defined as a member of a group that has an agreed-upon and recognized body of knowledge and guidelines for the application of that knowledge. The guidelines are called ethics. I argued that negotiators need to start developing a set of ethical guidelines, in order to become true professionals. In this editorial, I suggest that negotiators can follow the lead of established professions like psychology in developing their ethics. In the preamble to their ethics guide (APA, 2002), psychologists state that the following principles provide the overarching frame for guiding them in the application of psychological knowledge and practice: