I think this is actually quite a complex question.
Definitely! I simplified it a lot in the post.
If the chance is high enough, it may in fact be prudent to front-load your donations, so that you can get as much out of yourself with your current values as possible.
Good point! I hadn’t thought of this. I think it ends up being best to frontload if your annual risk of giving up isn’t very sensitive to the amount you donate, it’s high, and your income isn’t going to increase a whole lot over your lifetime. I think those first two things might be true of a lot of people. And so will the third thing, effectively, if your income doesn’t increase by more than 2-3x.
If we take the data from here with 0 grains of salt, you’re actually less likely to have value drift at 50% of income (~43.75% chance of value drift) than 10% (~63.64% of value drift). There are many reasons this might be, such as consistency and justification effects, but the point is the object level question is complicated :).
My guess is that the main reason for that is that more devoted people tend to pledge higher amounts. I think if you took some of those 10%ers and somehow made them choose to switch to 50%, they’d be far more likely than before to give up.
But yeah, it’s not entirely clear that P(giving up) increases with amount donated, or that either causally affects the other. I’m just going by intuition on that.
<<My guess is that the main reason for that is that more devoted people tend to pledge higher amounts.>>
That could account for part of it, though, according to this article, “multiple studies have demonstrated that people perform better when goals are set higher and made more challenging.” I haven’t looked into this in more detail, but I’ve heard other social scientists who research behaviour change make similar claims (e.g. on this podcast).
My guess is that there’s a sweet spot of challenge/demandingness that is optimal, and that that sweet spot varies substantially by the individual.
(PS thanks for this post, I’ve had similar thoughts before and like the theoretical demonstration in expected value terms of the risk of giving up.)
Definitely! I simplified it a lot in the post.
Good point! I hadn’t thought of this. I think it ends up being best to frontload if your annual risk of giving up isn’t very sensitive to the amount you donate, it’s high, and your income isn’t going to increase a whole lot over your lifetime. I think those first two things might be true of a lot of people. And so will the third thing, effectively, if your income doesn’t increase by more than 2-3x.
My guess is that the main reason for that is that more devoted people tend to pledge higher amounts. I think if you took some of those 10%ers and somehow made them choose to switch to 50%, they’d be far more likely than before to give up.
But yeah, it’s not entirely clear that P(giving up) increases with amount donated, or that either causally affects the other. I’m just going by intuition on that.
<<My guess is that the main reason for that is that more devoted people tend to pledge higher amounts.>>
That could account for part of it, though, according to this article, “multiple studies have demonstrated that people perform better when goals are set higher and made more challenging.” I haven’t looked into this in more detail, but I’ve heard other social scientists who research behaviour change make similar claims (e.g. on this podcast).
My guess is that there’s a sweet spot of challenge/demandingness that is optimal, and that that sweet spot varies substantially by the individual.
(PS thanks for this post, I’ve had similar thoughts before and like the theoretical demonstration in expected value terms of the risk of giving up.)