Ethical Principles
Causal Map Ltd provides software and services to help researchers understand complex systems. We conduct our work according to the following ethical standards.
Core Commitments
- Global Equity: We provide lower rates for partners in Global Majority countries to ensure our tools are accessible where they are often needed most.
- Modern Slavery: We maintain a zero-tolerance approach to modern slavery and human trafficking in our business and supply chains.
- Systemic Partnerships: We support the Social Equity and Community Partnerships Initiative (SECPI) to foster stronger, more equitable partnerships between funders and community-based evaluators.
- AI Transparency: We work to mitigate algorithmic bias and deliberately reduce the use of "black boxes." We prefer "radical zero-shot" coding that stays close to original stakeholder voices rather than forcing them into preconceived categories.
- Evidence Provenance: Every causal claim in our system must be linked to a verbatim quote. We do not allow the AI to "hallucinate" or assume connections without direct evidence from the source text.
Practical Ethics
- The Right to be Wrong: We value the "nuggets" of causal perception shared by stakeholders, even if they are factually incorrect. Understanding what people believe is essential for making sense of their actions within a system.
- Participant Status: We prioritise the human dignity of participants over our own reputation or that of our clients. We report unanticipated or negative outcomes as clearly as positive ones.
- Data Protection: We implement privacy by design. Our full policy is available at causalmap.app/privacy-policy.