Objective: I am interested in working with others to develop and host a web-survey, or series of web-surveys, for the purpose of revealing why might people decide to change the cause-areas they currently work on, or are interested in. Additionally, what factors contribute to an individual changing their cause-area prioritization?
The aim of this survey would be to determine how both objective metrics (e.g. the cause-area's scale, tractability, and neglect as measured by an EA-affiliated organization) for a cause-area's importance and personal values (subjective interest in a cause-area) influence cause-area switching.
I suspect that in the process of obtaining answers to the above questions, the following questions will also have to be addressed; these can be thought of as secondary objectives of the survey.
My goal with this post is to collect feedback and ideas on the survey, especially in terms of this survey's potential effectiveness, or on whether / how it should be conducted.
I am open to feedback on any dimension of this proposal, and welcome any criticisms. I am looking for thoughts concerning the framing of the objectives, the structure and content of the survey questions, and considerations regarding the scope, potential impact, and implementation of the survey. Feedback of the form, "It might be better to phrase this question this way.", "This has basically been done before, see: [x]", "[x] is not clear enough; try rephrasing like this: [y]", etc... would be great as well.
It is first worth seeing whether any work pertaining to this topic has been performed before, in order to avert wasting effort and resources. Research on cause-area prioritization, on people's motivations for making donations, and on what people define as cause-areas are topics which I believe are directly related to, or run tangential to, this one, and are therefore important to consider in an initial search for existing work on cause-area switching.
This search is not comprehensive, but I believe it is a decent start. It covers a large swath of territory, and didn't require too much effort on my end.
I searched "survey cause" into the search bar on this forum and found the four existing EA cause-area surveys, including the one published recently (July 29).
I searched "What do people donate to" on Google Scholar and found these two articles on the topic. Everything considered, I have not read up too much on the psychological underpinnings of altruism in humans.
Below are the immediate resources I thought to look to for work on defining cause-areas. I spent the least time searching for resources on this topic; I may synthesize information from more sources in a future edit.
For any of the previous topics, feel free to refer me to more resources.
My evaluation is that a survey on cause-area switching would be novel, and would provide useful information, despite there being some overlap with existing cause-priorization surveys.
I believe that it would be most effective to employ scales and listings similar or identical to those employed by existing cause-priorization surveys; this keeps things consistent and should permit for cross-analyses.
Here I paraphrase sections of some of the resources I have included above.
EA 2020 Survey - describes a real change in people's cause areas, but does not consider factors that drive this shift :
Comparing ratings across separate EA surveys, we observe a decrease in support for global poverty over time, and an increase in support for animal welfare and AI risk.
EA 2o20 Survey - describes a factor - COVID - that influenced one shift in people's cause-area prioritization:
One result that may be of particular interest, however, is support for Biosecurity (and pandemic preparedness), given the pandemic. This increased from 4% in 2018 and 2019 to 6% in 2020.
EA 2020 Survey - describes cause-rating / engagement difference between gender; differences in cause-area switching might also correspond to differences in gender:
...suggesting that the relationship between engagement and cause ratings varies by gender, though the overall pattern is quite similar.
EA Survey 2020 - describes cause-area preference over time, but does not consider factors that drive this shift:
[see section: Cause preferences over time]
I think it would be useful to
My hope is that some responses from this survey can be grouped with responses from other EA cause-priorization surveys, and that the new data - the characterizations of cause-area switching - can be used to inform trends, such as cause-area preference shifts over time, found in the previous surveys.
Here is a list of general objectives for this survey (not ordered by importance, but by their appearance in the survey):
I am open to more considerations of this nature.
For (2): Should these be EA pruned cause-areas (cause areas promoted by EA affiliated organizations), general cause areas (something people might list in a short answer response question), or a mixture of both?
For (4): This might not be necessary. I included this because I can imagine a scenario where people unaffiliated with EA believe the selection of cause-areas EA has generated is way off-base, and because of this, become suspicious about the survey and the movement as a whole. If people had the opportunity to append cause-areas or remove cause-areas, this might reduce this problem, and might make a small group of people more inclined to answer honestly and complete the survey.
For (6): These should be made more precise.
Imagine that the word "Person" is the first word in each piece of the sequence. Here, a sequence denotes a portion of the survey that could consist of just a single question or of several related questions. The order of the sequence follows the order of the question sets in the survey.
Here are some considerations (in the form of questions) for the potential survey questions I list soon. Ideally, these questions should be asked of each survey question. Please provide suggestions for these meta-questions, should any come to mind.
The sets of questions are aggregated by objective. Again, there is a loose order to the objectives here, but this is subject to change, depending on the suggestions. Within each objective, the questions are unordered. There is some redundancy in the questions; I do this to increase the size of the space of potential questions - there might be slight changes in response based on the phrasing of a particular question.
[<cause-areas>] : insert all (esp. from EA Survey) cause-areas pruned by EA affiliated orgs.
Here I describe my initial plans and ideas for executing the survey, and for maximizing its reach and impact.
Myself: Given my circumstances, I am 75% confident that I will be able to submit a survey on this topic to at least two of the following departments [Economics, Neuroscience, Computer Science, Mathematics, Sociology, Anthropology, Philosophy] in my college. Additionally, I am somewhat confident that I will be able to convince EA groups at two other colleges in the area to host this survey in at least one department. I am not sure how well surveys fair at my college, but my estimate is that a double-digit amount of people (out of the ~3000 people attending my college) will take the survey. The survey would likely be presented as "An Altruism Survey".
My friends: My non-EA affiliated friends and family will likely take the survey. A subset of my friends will likely propose this survey to at least one of the departments in their college, but I don't have an estimate for how this will pan out.
The same forums and sites that the EA Survey used to disseminate their surveys can be used for this survey.
At this current moment in time, I would not know how to scale the survey or maximize / diversify participation.
I believe a survey of this nature will confer useful information for global priorities research and for building effective altruism. Understanding the factors that influence people's cause-area switching could be important for promoting interest, engagement, and action in cause-areas that are quantitatively evaluated to be pressing, or in need of further research, but which the general public or EA community doesn't find pressing.
I am motivated to conduct this survey with others out of (1) curiosity and (2) a desire to build effective altruism.
Thank you for reading this everyone; I hope something interesting, and potentially impactful arises from this post. This idea was spurred by the post: Research into people's willingness to change cause areas? Thank you again, Davis_Kingsley.
I assume the list of questions you've shared here represents questions you could ask, not questions you plan to ask. In your shoes, I'd try to keep this survey to ~10 total questions unless you can offer people some incentive to finish it.
Maybe the best minimal version of the survey is meant to determine whether people not involved in EA (a good portion of your expected audience, it sounds like) actually think of what they do as "cause area switching" at all. I'd guess that very few people outside of EA think of their giving in those terms, and that most of what looks like "switching" is actually just people supporting whatever charity seems appealing to them at the moment, even if it's not the previous "most appealing charity".
(e.g. if someone says they used to support Oxfam and now they support the ACLU, I think that will almost always be about the ACLU's work seeming generically important, vs. Oxfam's work seeming less important or the donor running an actual comparison.)
Given your target audience, pruning the survey to only include popular cause areas in EA seems like a bad idea. I haven't thought about this much, but instinctively, I'd allow people to define their own areas, or ask them to report which charities they've supported and handle the categorization yourself.