The EA Behavioral Science Newsletter #6 (September 2022)

September 2022 (#6)

Introducing the new Effective Altruism Psychology Lab at NYU
A new Effective Altruism Psychology Lab, led by Lucius Caviola and Joshua Lewis, has been set up to study the psychology of effective altruism. 

Their primary research agenda "Psychology for Effectively Improving the Future" outlines research questions aimed at generating insights about human psychology and behavior that can guide and assist the longtermism project. They also conduct research on effective giving, EA community building, and cause areas like animal welfare. 

Several positions are available:
 

• Research Assistant (at NYU Stern or remote option)
• Research Coordinator in Developmental Psychology
• Post-doctoral Research Scientist at NYU Stern

To feature in the Researchers Directory (a list of EA psychology/behavioral science researchers) on their website, contact [email protected]. To be listed, you must be a professional psychologist or behavioral scientist who has published research and demonstrated a commitment to the ideas of effective altruism.

• Psychologists for EA Facebook group
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📖 23 publications

📝 7 preprints & articles

💬 8 forum posts

🎧/🎦 7 podcasts/videos

💰 3 funding opportunities 

💼 6 job opportunities

🗓 3 events

👨‍🔬 Falk Lieder profiled

An interdisciplinary synthesis of research on understanding and promoting well-doing 

Lieder, F., Prentice, M., & Corwin-Renner, E. R. 

Social and Personality Psychology Compass (2022)
 

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People's intentional pursuit of prosocial goals and values (i.e., well-doing) is critical to the flourishing of humanity in the long run. Understanding and promoting well-doing is a shared goal across many fields inside and outside of social and personality psychology. Several of these fields are (partially) disconnected from each other and could benefit from more integration of existing knowledge, interdisciplinary collaboration, and cross-fertilization.

To foster the transfer and integration of knowledge across these different fields, we provide a brief overview with pointers to some key articles from each field, highlight connections, and introduce an integrative model of the psychological mechanisms of well-doing. We identify some gaps in the current understanding of well-doing, such as the paucity of research on well-doing with large and long-lasting positive consequences. Building on this analysis, we identify opportunities for high-impact research on well-doing in social and personality psychology, such as understanding and promoting the effective pursuit of highly impactful altruistic goals.

Forecasting: Theory and Practice.

Fotios Petropoulos et al.,

International Journal of Forecasting (2022)

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Forecasting has always been at the forefront of decision making and planning. The uncertainty that surrounds the future is both exciting and challenging, with individuals and organisations seeking to minimise risks and maximise utilities. The large number of forecasting applications calls for a diverse set of forecasting methods to tackle real-life challenges. This article provides a non-systematic review of the theory and the practice of forecasting. We provide an overview of a wide range of theoretical, state-of-the-art models, methods, principles, and approaches to prepare, produce, organise, and evaluate forecasts. We then demonstrate how such theoretical concepts are applied in a variety of real-life contexts.

We do not claim that this review is an exhaustive list of methods and applications. However, we wish that our encyclopedic presentation will offer a point of reference for the rich work that has been undertaken over the last decades, with some key insights for the future of forecasting theory and practice. Given its encyclopedic nature, the intended mode of reading is non-linear. We offer cross-references to allow the readers to navigate through the various topics. We complement the theoretical concepts and applications covered by large lists of free or open-source software implementations and publicly-available databases.
 

Predicting the moral consideration of artificial intelligences.

Janet V.T. Pauketat, Jacy Reese Anthis

Journal of Consumer Behaviour (2022)

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Understanding the moral consideration of AIs as moral patients is increasingly critical given their rapid integration into daily life and the projected proliferation of advanced AIs. We present the results from a preregistered online survey with 300 U.S. Americans on the psychological predictors of the moral consideration of AIs to develop psychological theory surrounding this phenomenon. We tested an array of psychological predictors inspired by the literature on human-human and human-animal relations: perspective (future orientation, construal level), relational (social dominance orientation, sci-fi fan identity), expansive (human-centric norms, anthropomorphism, global citizenship, openness to experience, techno-animism), technological (affinity for technology, substratism, human-AI overlap, realistic threat, identity threat), and affective (emotions felt towards AIs). 

The strongest predictors were substratism, sci-fi fan identity, techno-animism, and positive emotions. We also identified three conceptual dimensions of moral consideration with an exploratory factor analysis of eight moral consideration indices drawn from prior literature: mind perception, psychological expansion, and practical consideration. Additionally, the temporal existence of AIs impacted moral consideration: AIs existing in the future were attributed more emotional capacity and more value as feeling entities than were current AIs. These results illustrate nuances in the moral consideration of AIs and lay the foundation for future research.

Other publications

• Give where you live: A social network analysis of charitable donations reveals localized prosociality
  Cassandra M. Chapman, et al., Journal of Consumer Behaviour (2022)
• Ethics of Artificial Life: The Moral Status of Life as It Could Be, O Witkowski, E Schwitzgebel, ALIFE 2022: The 2022 Conference on Artificial Life (2022)
• Daily reminders about the animal-welfare, environmental and health consequences of meat and their main and moderated effects on meat consumption, Ida Strande Ottersen, Nora C.G. Benningstad & Jonas R.Kunst, Cleaner and Responsible Consumption (2022)
• Psychological inoculation improves resilience against misinformation on social media, Jon Roozenbeek et al., Science Advances (2022)

Leveraging machine learning to automatically derive robust decision strategies from imperfect models of the real world, Mehta, A., Jain, Y. R., Kemtur, A., Stojcheski, J., Consul, S., Tosic, M., & Lieder, F., Computational Brain & Behavior (2022)

Why People Do What They Do: An Interdisciplinary Synthesis of Human Action Theories, Harold N. Eyster, Terre Satterfield and Kai M.A. Chan, Annual Reviews (2022)

Individuals of high socioeconomic status are altruistic in sharing money but egoistic in sharing time, Ulf Liebe, Nicole Schwitter & Andreas Tutić, Scientific Reports (2022)

Brain stimulation and other biological non-pharmacological interventions in mental disorders: An umbrella review,  Stella Rosson et al., Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews (2022)

Knowledge overconfidence is associated with anti-consensus views on controversial scientific issues,  Nicholas Light et al., Science Advances (2022)

Predictors and consequences of intellectual humility, Tenelle Porter et al., Nature Reviews Psychology (2022)

Meating Conflict: Toward a Model of Ambivalence-Motivated Reduction of Meat Consumption Shiva Pauer et al., Foods (2022)

The asymmetric effect of narratives on prosocial behavior 
Adrian Hillenbrand & Eugenio Verrinac, Games and Economic Behavior (2022)

The Effects of Exposure to Information About Animal Welfare Reforms on Animal Farming Opposition: A Randomized Experiment, Jamie Harris, Ali Ladak & Maya B. Mathur, Anthrozoös (2022)

Promoting plant-based food choices: Findings from a field experiment with over 150,000 consumer decisions, Daniel L. Rosenfeld, Carole Bartolotto & Janet Tomiyama, Journal of Environmental Psychology (2022)

Review: Do green defaults reduce meat consumption?, Johanna Meier, Food Policy (2022)

The Influence of Proportion Dominance and Global Need Perception on Donations, Danit Ein-Gar & Amir Give’on, Frontiers in Psychology (2022)

To veg or not to veg? The impact of framing on vegetarian food choice, Dario Krpan & Nanne Houtsma, Journal of Environmental Psychology (2020)

Help Is in Your Blood—Incentive to “Double Altruism” Resolves the Plasma Donation Paradox, Petra Gyuris et al., Frontiers in Psychology (2021)

The evolution of cognitive biases in human learning, Peter S.Park, Journal of Theoretical Biology (2022)

Private costs of carbon emissions abatement by limiting beef consumption and vehicle use in the United States , Brandon R. McFadden ,Paul J. Ferraro,Kent D. Messer, PLOS ONE (2022)

• Compassionate Mind Training Can Increase Moral Expansiveness: A Randomised Controlled Trial, James Kirby, Charlie R. Crimston, April Hoang (2022)
   
• Poor but not by choice(s): The persistence of cognitive biases across economic groups, Kai Ruggeri et al. (2022)

Boosting human decision-making with AI-generated decision aids, Becker, F., Skirzynski, J., van Opheusden, B., & Lieder, F. (2022)
 

Evaluating Life Reflection Techniques to Help People Select Virtuous Life Goals, Prentice, M., Gonzalez Cruz, H., & Lieder, F. (2022)

Give physicians' views to improve COVID vaccine uptake,  Nina Mažar, Nature News and Views (2022)
 

How to win an election in 10 easy steps: an effective altruist's guide, Trevor Klee

Moral Universals: A machine-reading analysis of 256 societies, Mark Alfano, Marc Cheong & Oliver Scott Curry (2022)

• Doing research on promoting prosocial behavior might be 100 times as cost-effective at increasing well-being as providing psychotherapy, Falk Lieder
• Psychological Obstacles to Doing Good (Better), Michel Justin
• Estimating the cost-effectiveness of scientific research  Falk Lieder, Joel McGuire and Emily Corwin-Renner
• Why Effective Altruism Should Put a Higher Priority on Funding Academic Research, Stuart Buck
• Emphasize Vegetarian Retention, Ozy Brennan
• Introducing the Impactful Animal Advocacy Community newsletter, Sofia Balderson
• [Cause Exploration Prizes] Social and Behavioral Science R&D - EA Forum, Anna Harvey, Stuart Buck
• Leveraging Defaults and Social Norms in EA giving. Dan Epstein

• Animal welfare research and interventions (watch/listen), Neil Dullaghan with Luke K. Freeman on the Giving What We Can podcast
• impact-driven research and career development, Michael Aird with Luca R. and Fin Moorhouse on the Hear This Idea podcast
   
• Science of Scaling, Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak at EA Global: SF 2022
• Priorities in AGI governance research, Jade Leung at EA Global: SF 2 
• Farmed animal advocacy: Where are we, and what’s next?, Zoë Sigle at EA Global: SF 22
• Making it easier for great charities to exist, Joey Savoie and Luke Freeman on the Giving What We Can podcast

• There are large grants available for ambitious research in the social sciences in the UK (closing 20 September 2022)
• Open Philanthropy is funding academics for the development of EA-adjacent university courses and providing early-career funding for individuals interested in improving the long-term future
• A list of EA funding opportunities by Michael Aird
• The FTX Future Fund is funding a range of research opportunities
• See EA funds for other opportunities

• Three positions at the new EA Psychology Lab
  • Research Assistant (at NYU Stern or remote option)
  • Research Coordinator in Developmental Psychology
  • Post-doctoral Research Scientist at NYU Stern
• Future Academy is looking for i) team members or contractors interested in working on practical research related to EA/longtermist community building, with a focus on behavioural science and ii) are happy to get in contact with people who want to run “experiments” that require access to (lots of) participants/a concrete program. Contact Vilhelm ([email protected]) for more information
• Animal Ask are seeking a research volunteer to start work with their research team in their analysis of various corporate or government animal welfare policies [closes 11/9].
• See the EA internship board for volunteering and internship opportunities
• See the 80000 Hours Job board, and the Effective Altruism Job Postings Facebook group for EA job opportunities
   
• See Habit Weekly's jobs board for behavioral science job opportunities
• See the Effective Thesis website for coaching, research, and supervision opportunities; sign up for their research opportunities newsletter.

• EAGxBerlin 2022
  16 – 18 September 2022
• EA Global: Washington, D.C. 2022
  23 – 25 September 2022
• EAGxVirtual 2022
  21 – 23 October 2022
• See EA global for future events
   

What is your background?
 

Cognitive science, psychology, mathematics, machine learning, and computational neuroscience

What is your research area?

My mission is to lay the scientific foundations for motivating and enabling people to embark on highly impactful altruistic projects and pursue them effectively. This includes research on understanding and improving goal-setting and decision-making, motivation, goal-pursuit, values, moral reasoning, wisdom, learning from experience, and rationality. My lab’s multidisciplinary approaches include computational and mathematical modeling, online and field experiments, machine learning, questionnaires, and experience sampling. We translate the insights of our basic research into (intelligent) digital tools for improving decision-making and fostering the effective pursuit of altruistic goals, and evaluate the resulting interventions in field experiments.

What are you planning to focus on in the future?
 

I am committed to identifying and focusing on the psychological questions that are most crucial for the long-term flourishing of humanity. To identify those questions, my collaborators and I are extending cause prioritization research to the behavioral sciences (new collaborators welcome). The first step is to develop a general method for estimating the expected value of the cost-effectiveness of research on a given topic in units of subjective well-being per dollar. The second step is applying this method to prioritize and choose from behavioral science questions crucial for Effective Altruism.

In parallel to this meta-science project, my psychological research will focus on:

1. Developing interventions for directing more people towards choosing and effectively pursuing highly impactful altruistic goals.

2. Investigating how people can learn to think, feel, and decide according to the virtues of EA.

3. Developing scalable digital interventions that foster this type of character development.

Moreover, I am highly interested in the causes, psychological mechanisms, and consequences of the effective pursuit of impactful altruistic goals and psychological obstacles to effective altruism and how they can be overcome.

 

Do you want help or collaborators, if so who?

For any of the projects and topics outlined above, I would be thrilled to have more academic and applied EA collaborators at any stage of their career. My research is highly interdisciplinary and spans the full range from foundational basic research to practical applications. So, it doesn't matter if your background is in psychology, economics, cognitive science, computer science, mathematics, statistics, ML/AI, education, HCI, or a related discipline.

I am also looking for graduate students, postdocs, a lab manager, a web developer, and research assistants to join the new Rational Altruism Lab I will start at UCLA in Fall 2023. Potential projects include investigating how people can learn to make crucial decisions more wisely and developing interventions for motivating people to set goals with a high positive social impact and helping them pursue those goals effectively. If you are interested in joining the lab at some point, please do not hesitate to contact me.
 

Do you want to share some of your work?
 

1. Lieder, F., Prentice, M., & Corwin-Renner, E. R. (2022). An interdisciplinary synthesis of research on understanding and promoting well-doing. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, e12704. https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12704

2. Callaway, F., Jain, Y. R., van Opheusden, B., Krueger, P. M., Das, P., Iwama, G., Gul, S., Becker, F., Griffiths, T. L., & Lieder, F. (2022). Leveraging artificial intelligence to improve people’s planning strategies. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119(12), e2117432119. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2...

3. Doing research on promoting prosocial behavior might be 100 times as cost-effective at increasing well-being as providing psychotherapy

 

[You can contact Falk at [email protected]]

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Want to be profiled? Submit a profile here

• Psychologists for EA Facebook group
• Researcher directory and Slack [researchers only]
• Subscribe to the newsletter
• Suggest feedback or content
• Volunteer to support the newsletter