In a blow to flackery and stereotyping, a study funded by Penn State's Arthur W. Page Center for Integrity in Public Communication discovered that PR people are near the top in ethical thinking compared to other professionals.

The Center's Johnson Legacy Scholars Renita Coleman and Lee Wilkins used the O'Dwyer's database of firms as a sample and something called the Defining Issues Test (DIT) to empirically measure the moral development of working PR pros.

Coleman and Wilkins are J-school professors at U.T. Austin, and University of Missouri-Columbia respectively.

The DIT posed six ethical dilemmas and looked at reasoning in five areas: business concerns, internal motives, truth and respect, religious influences and external influences.

While seminarians and philosophers kicked all-comer ass, PR ranked alongside journalists, nurses and dental students, and beat out orthopedic surgeons, business professionals, accounting students and veterinary students.

Devil took the hindmost with junior high school students scoring even lower than prison inmates, in case you're curious. Funny but not surprising since age and education are key factors in ethical development.

The researchers explain the built-in aspects of the work that account for PR's surprising ethics:

"To accomplish this function (PR), they need to maintain the trust of both parties, but particularly the trust of journalists who are already skeptical of their institutional role and their individual motives.

Consequently, honesty and a lack of willingness to deceive those who receive information are critical in effective public relations practice."

The full paper is published in the July 2009 issue of the Journal of Public Relations Research.

Dick Jones of Dick Jones Communications ethically pitched the results of the study on behalf of the Page Center.

[Unrelated photo via JordanH's Flickr]