Do we have strong evidence that “average donors” even have “cause areas,” as an accurate/descriptively useful mapping of how they understand the world? My young and pre-EA self feels so distant from me that it’s barely worth mentioning, but I vaguely recall that teenage me donated to things as disparate as earthquake relief in Sichuan, local beggars, LGBT stuff and probably something something climate change.
I don’t think I ever consciously considered until several years later how dumb it was to a) donate to multiple things at the tiny amounts I was donating at the time and b) to have multiple cause areas of very varying cost-effectiveness and theories of change.
As is suggested by this report, even donors who are very proactive, are often barely reflecting about where they should give at all. They are also, often, thinking about the charity sector in terms of very coarse-grained categories (e.g. my country/international charities, people/animal charities). On the other hand, they often are making sense of their donations in terms of causes and an implicit hierarchy of causes (including particular, personal commitments, such as to heart disease because a family member died from that, and so on). They also view charitable donation as highly personal and subjective (e.g. a matter of personal choice) [there is some evidence for this in here and unpublished work by me and my academic colleagues].
I think the overall picture this suggests is that people are sometimes thinking in terms of causes, but rarely explicitly deliberating about the optimal cause or set of causes.
To address the original question: I think this suggests that trying to get people to “change causes” by giving them reasons as to why certain causes are best may be ineffective in most cases, as people rarely deliberate about what cause is best and may not even be aiming to select the best cause. On the other hand, as many donors give fairly promiscuously or indiscriminately to charities across different cause areas, it’s plausible you could get them to support different causes just by making them salient and appealing.
I (very anecdotally) think there are lots of people who are interested in donating to quite specific cause areas, e.g. “my father died of cancer so I donate to cancer charities” or “I want to donate to help homelessness in my area”—haven’t studied that in depth though.
Do we have strong evidence that “average donors” even have “cause areas,” as an accurate/descriptively useful mapping of how they understand the world? My young and pre-EA self feels so distant from me that it’s barely worth mentioning, but I vaguely recall that teenage me donated to things as disparate as earthquake relief in Sichuan, local beggars, LGBT stuff and probably something something climate change.
I don’t think I ever consciously considered until several years later how dumb it was to a) donate to multiple things at the tiny amounts I was donating at the time and b) to have multiple cause areas of very varying cost-effectiveness and theories of change.
I think there’s definitely something to this.
As is suggested by this report, even donors who are very proactive, are often barely reflecting about where they should give at all. They are also, often, thinking about the charity sector in terms of very coarse-grained categories (e.g. my country/international charities, people/animal charities). On the other hand, they often are making sense of their donations in terms of causes and an implicit hierarchy of causes (including particular, personal commitments, such as to heart disease because a family member died from that, and so on). They also view charitable donation as highly personal and subjective (e.g. a matter of personal choice) [there is some evidence for this in here and unpublished work by me and my academic colleagues].
I think the overall picture this suggests is that people are sometimes thinking in terms of causes, but rarely explicitly deliberating about the optimal cause or set of causes.
To address the original question: I think this suggests that trying to get people to “change causes” by giving them reasons as to why certain causes are best may be ineffective in most cases, as people rarely deliberate about what cause is best and may not even be aiming to select the best cause. On the other hand, as many donors give fairly promiscuously or indiscriminately to charities across different cause areas, it’s plausible you could get them to support different causes just by making them salient and appealing.
Yeah—I think this paper also supports that.
I (very anecdotally) think there are lots of people who are interested in donating to quite specific cause areas, e.g. “my father died of cancer so I donate to cancer charities” or “I want to donate to help homelessness in my area”—haven’t studied that in depth though.