All of Lucius Caviola's Comments + Replies

Thanks Ben!

13.6% (3 people) of the 22 students who clicked on a link to sign up to a newsletter about EA already knew what EA was.

And 6.9% of the 115 students who clicked on at least one link (e.g. EA website, link to subscribe to newsletter, 80k website) already knew what EA was.

Another potentially useful measure (to get at people’s motivation to act) could be this one:

“Some people in the Effective Altruism community have changed their career paths in order to have a career that will do the most good possible in line with the principles of Effective Altru... (read more)

We've asked them about a few 'schools of thought': effective altruism, utilitarianism, existential risk mitigation, longtermism, evidence-based medicine, poststructuralism (see footnote 4 for results). But very good idea to ask about a fake one too!

(Note that we also asked participants who said they have heard of EA to explain what it is. And we then manually coded whether their definition was sufficiently accurate. That's how we derived the 7.4% estimate.)

We considered this too. But the significant correlations with education level and income held even after controlling for age. (We mention this below one of the tables.)

I see that it may seem surprising at first glance that education doesn't correlate positively with our two scales. (Like David, I am not sure if the negative correlation will hold up.) It seems surprising because we know that most existing highly engaged EAs are highly educated (and likely have high cognitive abilities). But what this lack of positive correlation shows is simply that high education (and probably also high cognitive abilities) is not required to intuitively share the core moral values of EA.

As we point out in the article, there are likely s... (read more)

Just to add to what David said: It's difficult to say  whether our NYU business sample or our MTurk sample is more representative of our primary target audience. The best way to find out is to do a large representative survey, e.g., amongst students at a top uni (of all study subjects - not just business).

 

Yes, it was initially quite surprising that so many donors are willing to support the matching system. We found similar results when we tested it with MTurk participants (who were given a small bonus which they could give or keep; see Study 7). One possibility is that it's a kind of intergenerational reciprocity tendency, where people who benefited from the generosity of previous donors want to pay it forward to the next ones.

Thanks!

Perhaps, but we are uncertain. It depends on whether we can find a scalable strategy for reaching donors who are amenable to EA but not yet engaged with effective altruism. Such a strategy might come from paid advertising, further earned media coverage (our strategy so far), or from the formation of institutional relationships (e.g. with businesses, universities, or wealth managers) who offer guidance or incentives for charitable giving.

Yes, we've recently introduced our donors to GWWC. (Results of that campaign are not in yet.)

Thanks, Linch.

First, you’re right that several EA psychology researchers are studying how people donate to charity. But most of them (including myself) are also studying other EA-related topics, such as the psychology of xrisk and longtermism, moral attitudes towards animals, etc. My hunch is that only a minority of currently ongoing EA psychological research projects have charitable giving as their primary topic of interest.

Second, as David pointed out, donation choices are a useful behavioral outcome measure when studying the public’s beliefs, attitudes ... (read more)

I don't think our findings suggest that people have a preference for populations with higher variance in welfare (i.e. greater differences in how how happy they are). All else equal, people probably have a strong preference for fair welfare distribution (even in the US). But sometimes they may choose the option that contains more welfare variance because this population has a higher average or total level (or for some other reasons).

I agree with you that it would be very interesting to do a cross cultural study. I don't have a specific hypothesis about cro... (read more)

Thanks, these are great points!

As for your first question about the philosophical implications of this psychological research: In general, the primary goal of our project was a descriptive one and it would require a separate project (ideally lead by philosophers) to figure out what the possible normative implications are.  I also believe that we need much more empirical research to understand in greater detail what exactly the psychological mechanisms are that drive people's population ethical views. I see this as a very first exploration.

That said, I... (read more)

You are right that if someone only cares about their favorite charity, then donating through GM doesn't give them any value. After all, GM never helps you to get more value for your favorite charity than you could get by donating directly to your favorite charity. But we also don't claim that we do that. On our website, we say: "Give to both your favorite charity and a super-effective charity recommended by experts. We'll add to your donations." (The EA newsletter text frames things slightly differently and perhaps that's indeed not the optimal w... (read more)

Yes, it's a similar idea to the "Matching as donor coordination" idea I describe in this post.  (Feel free to contact me if you have any thoughts.)

Thanks for these really helpful suggestions, Peter!

We are planning to test some of things you suggest. We kept our post-donation survey short because we wanted to focus on our main research question and not try to do too many things at once. But if we end up having a lot of donors, we might send them a survey via email to find out more about their demographics, beliefs and preferences. We're not planning to do A/B testing at this point. But if we're starting to get lots of donors, we'd definitely consider doing A/B testing to optimize the user experience a... (read more)

This is a good point and we've considered it. I agree that there are advantages to allowing matchers to support only specific causes (or charities). 

But there are also downsides. In addition to the ones you list below, the matching system would be somewhat less honest. Since the matcher would per default have donated to that cause/charity anyway, you as a donor don't really influence where the matcher's funding goes to. With our current system, in contrast, you do influence to which specific charity/cause the matcher's funding goes to. But this comes ... (read more)

It would be great to do that at a later point. Note that you already now can donate from anywhere in the world, but donations are only tax-deductible in the US.