Ethical Assumptions
Ethical assumptions are the assumptions teams make about whether there's any potential harm in offering their proposed solutions. This includes examining who you're serving (and who you're leaving out), how you collect and use data, and whether your solutions might perpetuate existing biases or create unintended negative consequences for underrepresented groups.
Why are ethical assumptions broader than just data privacy?
For a long time, ethical assumptions focused primarily on data collection: What data are we collecting? Are customers comfortable with us having it? Do they understand how we're storing it? How are we using it? Are we selling it to third parties?
But ethical assumptions are bigger than just the data we collect. They also have to do with who we are testing with and who benefits from our solutions.
What's the problem with traditional A/B testing and ethical assumptions?
When teams rely on A/B testing to tell them if an idea works, they tend to look at whether it works for more people in the variable group than in the control group across the whole population.
The problem with this is that a solution could work better in the variable group for everybody in the majority and nobody in underrepresented populations, and it could still pass the A/B test. Teams need to get more sophisticated with testing and understand if solutions work for specific populations, rather than treating everyone in the pool as the same.
What types of issues do ethical assumptions cover?
Ethical assumptions can include assumptions about ideal customer profile (who you're including and leaving out), data collection and usage practices, trust and safety concerns with user-generated content, and social dynamics that might cause harm.
Ethical assumptions are one of five types of assumptions—alongside desirability, viability, feasibility, and usability—that teams need to surface and test when evaluating solutions.
Learn more:
- Assumption Testing: Everything You Need to Know to Get Started
- Rethinking Product Discovery with Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in Mind
Related terms:
- Assumptions
- Desirability
- Viability
- Feasibility
Last Updated: October 25, 2025