Joel Tan🔸 comments on Are 1-in-5 Americans familiar with EA?

[Joel Tan🔸]

Strongly agree. Given the question design (“Are you familiar with effective altruism?”), there’s clear risk of acquiescence bias—on top of the fundamental social desirability bias of wanting to not appear ignorant to your interviewer.

[NickLaing]

For sure, and just misunderstanding error could account for a lot of positive responses too—people thinking they know it when they don’t.

[David_Moss]

Agreed. As we note in footnote 2:

There are many reasons why respondents may erroneously claim knowledge of something. But simply put, one reason is that people like demonstrating their knowledge, and may err on the side of claiming to have heard of something even if they are not sure. Moreover, if the component words that make up a term are familiar, then the respondent may either mistakenly believe they have already encountered the term, or think it is sufficient that they believe they can reasonably infer what the term means from its component parts to claim awareness (even when explicitly instructed not to approach the task this way!).

For reference, in another check we included, over 12% of people claim to have heard of the specific term “Globally neutral advocacy”: A term that our research team invented, which returns no google results as a quote, and which is not recognised as a term by GPT—a large-language model trained on a massive corpus of public and private data. “Globally neutral advocacy” represents something of a canary for illegitimate claims of having heard of EA, in that it is composed of terms people are likely to know, and the combination of which they might reasonably think they can infer the meaning or even simply mistakenly believe they have encountered.

I think this is one reason why “effective altruism” gets higher levels of claimed awareness than other fake or low incidence terms (which people would be very unlikely to have encountered).