According to a recent poll you are more upstanding and principled than me.
As a journalist, I find myself in a profession that just 24% of respondents to a recent Gallup survey consider to have high or very high ethical standards and honesty. In the same survey dentists fared much better, coming in as the 5th most trusted profession with 62% of respondents ranking your honesty and ethical standards in the high or very high categories.
Nurses came in atop the survey with 85% strongly believing in their integrity. Pharmacists, doctors and engineers came in the next three places above dentists. Police officers, college teachers, clergy, psychiatrists and chiropractors are the professions that rounded out the top 10.
The impressive thing about the top five professions, and what separated them from the next five in the survey, was the number of respondents ranking them at the other end of the trust spectrum. For each of the top 5 professions, just 3 or 4% of respondents ranked them in the low or very low category for honesty and ethical standards. Approximately 10% of respondents placed the next five professions in the low categories, and the number of negative responses grew significantly for the less highly respected professions further down the list.
These results are an impressive statement about the role dentists play in people’s lives. The 62% honesty rating ties the highest mark for dentists in the previous surveys Gallup has conducted on this topic.
The fact that health care providers claimed almost all of the top spots show how much trust the public places in the work you and your colleagues do every day. You provide care that changes and improves patients’ lives in ways both large and small, and that fact is not lost on the general public.
Trust like that is certainly something dentists should both value and work to maintain. It’s definitely something other professions can strive to model.
Me and my journalist colleagues, we came in solidly in the middle of the pack, ranking 12 out of the 22 professions included in the survey. A full 30% ranked journalists in the low or very low categories, which is certainly disappointing. I hope I’m achieving a higher standard than what the public perceives from my colleagues as a whole. Maybe my proximity in working with so many upstanding and outstanding dentists can help bring up my personal and professional trustworthiness and ethical standards.
Of course, it could be worse. I could be a member of Congress. Just one in 10 respondents felt they were highly honest and ethical, with more than 50% ranking them in the low category. They barely beat out car salespeople who ranked as the least trustworthy profession.
In the end honesty and an ethical approach are critical traits to success in almost any job. Someday it would be great to see more people perceive the work of journalists as favorably as they do yours.
What do you think makes the public so respectful and trusting of dentists? Any tips you’d care to impart for me and my journalist colleagues to follow are certainly welcome.