BROOKE GLADSTONE: Despite some very public media malfeasance and mea culpas, lately, it turns out that we in the press employ an ethical standard that is significantly higher than in most other professions. Really! No, really. That's according to a study co-authored by Renita Coleman, a professor of communications at Louisiana State University. Her findings refute the conventional wisdom that ranks reporters just above car salesmen. Renita Coleman is herself a former journalist, turned academic. Renita, welcome to On the Media.

RENITA COLEMAN: Thank you.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Renita, either journalists really are ethical, or maybe we just test well. So, let's talk about the test. The one that you used was developed around 30 years ago and is composed of a number of hypothetical situations, right? And then there are questions about those situations. So, sketch out one of those scenarios.

RENITA COLEMAN: Yes, that's correct. There's six ethical situations that people are asked to solve, everything from should a man steal a drug for his wife, who will die without it, and the pharmacist, coldhearted as he is, won't give it to him, to you've been living next door to a model citizen for ten years, and then you find out that he's an escaped prisoner - should you turn him in? There's six of those. They're true dilemmas in the sense that there's no one right answer.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So, how do you score the test?

RENITA COLEMAN: Well, we really are not as concerned with what you decide to do in the situation as in what kinds of things play an importance in your decision-making, so if you say that you're interested in what this means for society, but you want to balance individuals' rights, then that's a high-quality ethical reason. If you say, well, I'm going to do this because it will help my career, then that is not as high a quality ethical reason.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Before, when I suggested that maybe we journalists test well, I was only partly kidding. Can it be that journalists are well-trained to sound ethical?

RENITA COLEMAN: No. Well, the psychologists who developed this test did a very good job. They have built in some checks and balances, to make sure that you can't, in their terms, "fake high." There are some statements in there that are written to sound important and to sound highly ethical.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Give me an example.

RENITA COLEMAN: Whether the essence of living is more encompassing than the dignity of dying, I believe is one of them. There's one that's a euthanasia problem. And people will say, oh, that played a tremendous amount of importance in their ethical reasoning, and it's usually chosen by people who don't really understand that sentence, but they think oh, this must be one of the good ones. So, if you check too many of those, we purge you from the data.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: I'm encouraged that journalists performed so well, but now I want to know who fared better and who fared worse?

RENITA COLEMAN: Physicians, seminarians - they fared better. Philosophers fared better than journalists. Nurses, dentists, adults in general, graduate students did not do as well. Age and education are the two primary factors that are involved in higher-quality ethical reasoning. So, people who scored highly had, oh, PhD's or medical degrees. Most of our journalists have bachelor's degrees, so it was really an impressive finding.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: In fact, they scored higher than their education level might have suggested?

RENITA COLEMAN: That's correct.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: You didn't break this down according to religion?

RENITA COLEMAN: Religion correlates with high ethical reasoning, up to a point, and then, as people begin to be more religious, their ethical reasoning gets lower, so it's a curvilinear relationship. So, one of the findings is that relying too much on religious doctrine and rules can actually inhibit good quality ethical reasoning sometimes.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: That's fascinating.

RENITA COLEMAN: Yeah. And we're not the only ones who found that. There's been many studies that have been done that have come to the same conclusion.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Did you learn anything about what it means to think like a journalist?

RENITA COLEMAN: Well, I think we did. We asked journalists if they had done any investigative reporting, and we found that that was correlated with higher-quality ethical reasoning. The whole point is to investigate and expose wrongdoing, so immediately you're making a moral judgment. It's not objective reporting the way beat reporting is. So, we hypothesized that journalists who have some experience with investigative reporting work have thought about moral questions and ethical questions in greater depth, and that has somehow taken them to a higher place.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well, Renita, thank you very much.

RENITA COLEMAN: Sure. Thank you.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Renita Coleman is an assistant professor of communications at Louisiana State University.