Moral psychology is a field of study at the intersection of philosophy and psychology. It covers areas such as reasoning, moral development, moral motivation, and the evolutionary origins of morality.
Effective altruists have taken a special interest in several topics moral psychology, including the psychology of effective giving;[1][2][3][4][5][6][7] the psychology of existential risk;[8] the psychology of population ethics;[9] the psychology of the future;[10] the psychology of speciesism;[11][12][13] the psychology of utilitarianism;[14][15] the link between giving and happiness;[16][17] the personality traits of effective altruists;[18] and the psychology of altruistic motivation.[19]
Greenberg, Spencer (2021) Episode 046: EA efficacy and community norms with Stefan Schubert, Clearer Thinking, May 29.
cognitive bias | effective altruism messaging | effective giving | existential risk | population ethics | psychology | rationality | scope neglect | speciesism | temporal discounting | utilitarianism
Karlan, Dean, John A. List & Eldar Shafir (2011) Small matches and charitable giving: evidence from a natural field experiment, Journal of Public Economics, vol. 95, pp. 344–350.
Caviola, Lucius et al. (2014) The evaluability bias in charitable giving: saving administration costs or saving lives?, Judgment and Decision Making, vol. 9, pp. 303–315.
Caviola, Lucius, Stefan Schubert & Jason Nemirow (2020) The many obstacles to effective giving, Judgment and Decision Making, vol. 15, pp. 159–172.
Burum, Bethany, Martin A. Nowak & Moshe Hoffman (2020) An evolutionary explanation for ineffective altruism, Nature Human Behaviour, vol. 4, pp. 1245–1257.
Caviola, Lucius, Stefan Schubert & Joshua D. Greene (2021) The psychology of (in)effective altruism, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, forthcoming.
Schubert, Stefan (2018) Why aren’t people donating more effectively?, Effective Altruism Global, June 8.
Berman, Jonathan Z. et al. (2018) Impediments to effective altruism: The role of subjective preferences in charitable giving, Psychological Science, vol. 29, pp. 834–844.
Schubert, Stefan, Lucius Caviola & Nadira S. Faber (2019) The psychology of existential risk: moral judgments about human extinction, Scientific Reports, vol. 9, pp. 1–8.
Caviola, Lucius et al. (2022) Population ethical intuitions, Cognition, vol. 218.
Vallinder, Aron (2019) Psychology of the future: Bibliography, unpublished.
Caviola, Lucius (2019) How We Value Animals: The Psychology of Speciesism, PhD thesis, University of Oxford.
Caviola, Lucius, Jim A. C. Everett & Nadira S. Faber (2019) The moral standing of animals: towards a psychology of speciesism, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 116, pp. 1011–1029.
Caviola, Lucius & Valerio Capraro (2020) Liking but devaluing animals: emotional and deliberative paths to speciesism, Social Psychological and Personality Science, vol. 11.
Kahane, Guy et al. (2018) Beyond sacrificial harm: a two-dimensional model of utilitarian psychology, Psychological Review, vol. 125, pp. 131–164.
Everett, Jim A. C. & Guy Kahane (2020) Switching tracks? Towards a multidimensional model of utilitarian psychology, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, vol. 24, pp. 124–134.
MacAskill, William, Andreas Mogensen & Toby Ord (2018) Giving isn’t demanding, in Paul Woodruff (ed.) The Ethics of Giving: Philosophers’ Perspectives on Philanthropy, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 178–203.
Dalton, Max (2020) Some extremely rough research on giving and happiness, Effective Altruism Forum, September 9.
E., Elizabeth (2020) Correlations between cause prioritization and the big five personality traits, Effective Altruism Forum, September 24.
Law, Kyle Fiore, Dylan Campbell & Brendan Gaesser (2021) Biased benevolence: The perceived morality of effective altruism across social distance, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, vol. 53.
Desvousges, William et al. (2010) Measuring Nonuse Damages Using Contingent Valuation: An Experimental Evaluation of Accuracy, 2nd ed., Research Triangle Park, North Carolina: Research Triangle Institute.