Thanks for this post, I found it quite interesting.
You write:
There is also a fair amount of research showing that studying economics causes people to defect more often in prisoner’s dilemmas [14]. Hopefully learning about effective altruism doesn’t lead to a similar behavior change among moral actors.
The abstract of the cited source reads:
Do economics students behave more selfishly than other students? [...] The three mechanisms [that might lead them to do so] were tested by inviting students from various disciplines to participate in a relatively novel experimental game and asking all participants to give reasons for their choices. Compared with students of other disciplines, economics students [...] [emphasis added]
So it sounds like this study showed that economics students defect more often than other students, but not that studying economics causes that. It might be that different kinds of people decide to study economics vs other subjects, and that their pre-existing differences play the causal role here.
Do you know if there’s research more directly supporting your claim? E.g., studies which measure the same students’ behaviours before vs after studying economics? (I only read the abstract of that study, and didn’t look into other studies.)
This may be a relatively minor/tangential point. But it also feels like it might make a decent difference to how much I should predict defection to increase as a result of learning about EA cause-prioritisation ideas.
Thanks, this is a very good comment. I mostly cited that article for the literature review, which includes a few papers that argue for a causal connection between learning economics and free-riding. However, I looked into it more today, and it seems like the entire body of work is inconclusive on this question. Here’s a more recent literature review on that.
I’ll edit that part of the post to be more accurate.
Thanks for this post, I found it quite interesting.
You write:
The abstract of the cited source reads:
So it sounds like this study showed that economics students defect more often than other students, but not that studying economics causes that. It might be that different kinds of people decide to study economics vs other subjects, and that their pre-existing differences play the causal role here.
Do you know if there’s research more directly supporting your claim? E.g., studies which measure the same students’ behaviours before vs after studying economics? (I only read the abstract of that study, and didn’t look into other studies.)
This may be a relatively minor/tangential point. But it also feels like it might make a decent difference to how much I should predict defection to increase as a result of learning about EA cause-prioritisation ideas.
Thanks, this is a very good comment. I mostly cited that article for the literature review, which includes a few papers that argue for a causal connection between learning economics and free-riding. However, I looked into it more today, and it seems like the entire body of work is inconclusive on this question. Here’s a more recent literature review on that.
I’ll edit that part of the post to be more accurate.