In my personal view, very few or none, if you are looking at the association between personality and outcomes. As we note the associations between personality, donation behavior and cause prioritization were “only small”. I think that in itself is an important finding, since some people would expect large influences on things like donation or cause prioritisation.
If you’re talking about the differences in personality between EAs and the general population, I think these are potentially more practically significant (for example, if you’re considering things like influences on outreach / recruitment, or the influence of these differences on the kinds of people EA attracts). Here even small differences could be significant in a non-linear way (for example, if EA is disproportionately appealing to people who are very high in need for cognition, or similar traits, this could have a big effect). Some of these apparent differences between EA and the general population are not obviously small, though the level of confidence we can have for the analyses where we can benchmark to population levels at both the gender and age level (i.e. big 5) do not give us clarity about what the exact magnitude of the differences are. Even with 1600 respondents, the sample size is not so large when you are accounting for age and gender in this way (and we argue that you do need to do this in this case for the results to be interpretable).
I had never thought about it, but I can see some features of the intellectual and practical ecosystem that would select against people with higher neuroticism (at least to the extent it manifested as anxiety and certain other dimensions):
People who are higher in neuroticism might find EA’s attitude toward risk tolerance challenging to accept.
The prevalence of grant-based funding is difficult for many people more temperamentally prone to anxiety to tolerate.
More generally, effectiveness orientation is more anxiety-inducing than a belief in Lake Wobegon charity where all efforts are above average.
So I wonder if the [edit: people who predicted high neuroticism] are conflating EA’s pressures can cause neurotic symptoms with EA attracts relatively more people with neurotic temperaments. My rough (and extreme) analogy might be air-traffic controllers; the work seems very likely to cause anxiety and some other negative emotional states. At the same time, people who are higher in neuroticism may be more likely to choose another career (or be screened out by psychological testing).
Unfortunately, to test these hypotheses, one would probably need to sample an appropriate non-EA population and correlate certain attitudes toward generalized openness to the EA way of thought.
I wonder if the predictors are conflating EA’s pressures can cause neurotic symptoms with EA attracts relatively more people with neurotic temperaments.
My default assumption would be that we’re measuring trait-neuroticism rather than just temporary, locally caused anxiety. That’s partly because personality traits are relatively stable, but also because I’d be surprised if EA were having a large effect on people’s tendency to describe themselves as being “anxious, easily upset” etc. (and that doesn’t seem to be the case in our results on the effect of EA on mental health). Of course, it’s also worth noting that our results in this study tended towards lower neuroticism for EAs.
I do think that whether the results are driven more by EA selecting for people who are higher in emotional stability at the outset, or whether the community is losing people with higher trait-neuroticism, is a significant question however. I agree that we couldn’t empirically tackle this without further data, such as by measuring personality across years and tracking dropout.
Sorry, by predictors I had meant “people who had predicted you would find higher levels of neuroticism,” not your survey questions. Edited my comment to clarify.
In my personal view, very few or none, if you are looking at the association between personality and outcomes. As we note the associations between personality, donation behavior and cause prioritization were “only small”. I think that in itself is an important finding, since some people would expect large influences on things like donation or cause prioritisation.
If you’re talking about the differences in personality between EAs and the general population, I think these are potentially more practically significant (for example, if you’re considering things like influences on outreach / recruitment, or the influence of these differences on the kinds of people EA attracts). Here even small differences could be significant in a non-linear way (for example, if EA is disproportionately appealing to people who are very high in need for cognition, or similar traits, this could have a big effect). Some of these apparent differences between EA and the general population are not obviously small, though the level of confidence we can have for the analyses where we can benchmark to population levels at both the gender and age level (i.e. big 5) do not give us clarity about what the exact magnitude of the differences are. Even with 1600 respondents, the sample size is not so large when you are accounting for age and gender in this way (and we argue that you do need to do this in this case for the results to be interpretable).
I think this is also notable, whatever the effect size, because people have often predicted a directionally opposite result.
I had never thought about it, but I can see some features of the intellectual and practical ecosystem that would select against people with higher neuroticism (at least to the extent it manifested as anxiety and certain other dimensions):
People who are higher in neuroticism might find EA’s attitude toward risk tolerance challenging to accept.
The prevalence of grant-based funding is difficult for many people more temperamentally prone to anxiety to tolerate.
More generally, effectiveness orientation is more anxiety-inducing than a belief in Lake Wobegon charity where all efforts are above average.
So I wonder if the [edit: people who predicted high neuroticism] are conflating EA’s pressures can cause neurotic symptoms with EA attracts relatively more people with neurotic temperaments. My rough (and extreme) analogy might be air-traffic controllers; the work seems very likely to cause anxiety and some other negative emotional states. At the same time, people who are higher in neuroticism may be more likely to choose another career (or be screened out by psychological testing).
Unfortunately, to test these hypotheses, one would probably need to sample an appropriate non-EA population and correlate certain attitudes toward generalized openness to the EA way of thought.
My default assumption would be that we’re measuring trait-neuroticism rather than just temporary, locally caused anxiety. That’s partly because personality traits are relatively stable, but also because I’d be surprised if EA were having a large effect on people’s tendency to describe themselves as being “anxious, easily upset” etc. (and that doesn’t seem to be the case in our results on the effect of EA on mental health). Of course, it’s also worth noting that our results in this study tended towards lower neuroticism for EAs.
I do think that whether the results are driven more by EA selecting for people who are higher in emotional stability at the outset, or whether the community is losing people with higher trait-neuroticism, is a significant question however. I agree that we couldn’t empirically tackle this without further data, such as by measuring personality across years and tracking dropout.
Sorry, by predictors I had meant “people who had predicted you would find higher levels of neuroticism,” not your survey questions. Edited my comment to clarify.