(tldr: We might not be psychologically capable of handling highly emotionally compelling portrayals of our largest-scope, most important cause areas.)
Eleni & Luis—this is a fascinating and thoughtful post, and raises some insightful pros and cons of EA adopting more mainstream emotionally appealing marketing & PR methods.
As someone who’s worked in psychology for almost 40 years, and done a fair amount of consulting with market research companies, ad agencies, and consumer product companies, I support the general idea of some EAs becoming a bit more familiar with the psychology of persuasion, marketing, and influence.
However, I want to point out another possible downside of turning our rational interest in tractable, neglected, scope-sensitive problems into more emotionally compelling images and narratives.
The key problem is that a lot of EA deals with such large-scope problems (e.g. animal suffering, nuclear war, pandemics, longtermist cosmic stakes) that any emotionally impactful, truly compelling, highly memorable presentation of these problems could be extremely depressing, psychologically paralyzing, and traumatically damaging. It would be like being trapped in the ‘Total Perspective Vortex’ in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series.
I think the current EA messaging/influence strategies embody a tacit understanding that we’re willing to engage with large-scope problems that would seem utterly overwhelming if we really felt the true suffering impact of the problems we’re fighting against, all day, every day.
Other charities have the luxury of presenting their relatively small-scale cause areas using emotionally compelling narratives, precisely because ordinary people can handle the scale of those problems without losing their sanity. For example, the Make a Wish Foundation highlights the suffering of individual kids with terminal illnesses; that’s sad, tragic, and poignant, but emotionally engaging with their plight isn’t psychologically crippling.
By contrast, any truly emotionally compelling portrayals I’ve seen of truly large-scope, high-stakes, global-scale or cosmic-scale EA cause areas might be so traumatizing to most people that they’d become counter-productive. Just as our brains didn’t evolve to reason clearly about how to reduce suffering beyond the scale of prehistoric hominid clans, our brains might not be prepared to handle emotionally compelling presentations of suffering beyond that scale.
Consider some specific examples.
Wild animal suffering: In my ‘Psychology of Effective Altruism’ class, I’ve learned that I simply can’t assign students the Brian Tomasik essay on wild animal suffering, because it can induce serious depression, extreme anxiety, and even panic attacks. It’s just too emotionally compelling, and the scale of the problem is too overwhelming. Similar considerations apply for sharing with students any truly compelling depictions of animal suffering under factory farming. (Vegan activists have learned from bitter experience that there’s an optimal degree of factory farming gore that they can show to non-vegans to convince them to give up meat, and that degree is non-zero, but it’s not very high.)
S-risks: the Black Mirror episode ‘White Christmas’, which depicts a future in which uploaded criminals are tormented in virtual hells for many subjective millennia, is simply too distressing for most people to handle; it haunts their dreams for weeks. I still wish I’d never seen it. (The Iain M. Banks novel ‘Surface Detail’ (2010) raises similar issues.) The S-risks of virtual hells are very important to consider, but it might be most productive to consider those issues at a somewhat abstract, rational level, rather than a truly visceral level.
Nuclear war: Most people have seen science fiction movie depictions of global thermonuclear war, which induce varying levels of fear, horror, disgust, and dread. But very few movies, TV series, books, etc really try to capture the full scope and scale of the impact on a nuclear holocaust on billions of people. Any such attempt would simply be too depressing and horrifying to engage with. (Consider also movies like The Road (2009) that try to do an unflinchingly realistic portrayal of post-apocalyptic life—they’re often praised by critics, but rarely re-watched by ordinary folks.)
In short, I think a distinctive strength of EA is that we can set aside the highly emotive portrayals of the largest-scope cause areas that we rationally know are most important. We can keep the suffering impacts of these cause areas off to the side, in our peripheral vision, so to speak, with some degree of awareness—but without the paralyzing level of emotional response that we’d feel if they were always front and center in our imaginations.
I would caveat this point in two ways.
First, there can still be crucial roles for positive, inspirational, optimistic portrayals of success in solving various large-scope problems—e.g. how awesome life would be if we solved longevity, achieved nuclear security, promoted happier animal lives, and secured a great long-term future for our descendants. I think Nick Bostrom’s Letter from Utopia is a good example of this genre. We need more such fictions and inspiring tales of success. Engaging with our positive emotions can be great; relying on negative emotions elicited by accounts of mass suffering can be much trickier.
Second, at the outreach level of recruiting talent and money, some slightly more emotionally compelling narratives and influence methods could be useful. We just have to pitch them very carefully—eliciting an optimal degree of concern that’s somewhere in the middle between apathetic indifference and paralyzing horror. And discovering those optimal degrees of concern, as the original post mentioned, is very much a matter for empirical psychological research, rather than armchair reasoning.
First off, there is a point worth clarifying here. Scope insensitivity makes it impossible to have feelings that adequately scale with the number of beings affected, and I don’t think that there is much that can be done here (sidenote: this Wait But Why post and its sequel are the best ways I’m aware of to try to get an intuitive sense for the magnitude of large numbers). On the other hand, we can get a very good sense for the intensity of suffering in situations that are presented to us, which is what you point out as being the problematic part.
My sense is that it would be a really bad idea to try to get people to have a very intuitive grasp of intense suffering, for all of the problems you point out. I think that maybe the idea here is to try to give people some sense for it, but in a very small dose, which is sufficient to allow people to relate to other’s suffering but not nearly enough to cause them harm. Of course, there isn’t a right level for everyone (I think that watching the White Christmas/Black Museum episodes of Black Mirror was an adequate level of this for me, in that sense), but I think that a small enough dose here would be beneficial, and my claim is that this dose can be higher than simply “hundreds of thousands of people die of malaria every year”. Make-a-Wish does make some effort into describing the children’s situation, but they don’t go as far as describing the details of their suffering in a way that could be traumatizing, even though that’s possible to do in many cases.
And yes, there are definitely ways to frame this in a more positive and inspirational way, which I strongly favor!
(tldr: We might not be psychologically capable of handling highly emotionally compelling portrayals of our largest-scope, most important cause areas.)
Eleni & Luis—this is a fascinating and thoughtful post, and raises some insightful pros and cons of EA adopting more mainstream emotionally appealing marketing & PR methods.
As someone who’s worked in psychology for almost 40 years, and done a fair amount of consulting with market research companies, ad agencies, and consumer product companies, I support the general idea of some EAs becoming a bit more familiar with the psychology of persuasion, marketing, and influence.
However, I want to point out another possible downside of turning our rational interest in tractable, neglected, scope-sensitive problems into more emotionally compelling images and narratives.
The key problem is that a lot of EA deals with such large-scope problems (e.g. animal suffering, nuclear war, pandemics, longtermist cosmic stakes) that any emotionally impactful, truly compelling, highly memorable presentation of these problems could be extremely depressing, psychologically paralyzing, and traumatically damaging. It would be like being trapped in the ‘Total Perspective Vortex’ in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series.
I think the current EA messaging/influence strategies embody a tacit understanding that we’re willing to engage with large-scope problems that would seem utterly overwhelming if we really felt the true suffering impact of the problems we’re fighting against, all day, every day.
Other charities have the luxury of presenting their relatively small-scale cause areas using emotionally compelling narratives, precisely because ordinary people can handle the scale of those problems without losing their sanity. For example, the Make a Wish Foundation highlights the suffering of individual kids with terminal illnesses; that’s sad, tragic, and poignant, but emotionally engaging with their plight isn’t psychologically crippling.
By contrast, any truly emotionally compelling portrayals I’ve seen of truly large-scope, high-stakes, global-scale or cosmic-scale EA cause areas might be so traumatizing to most people that they’d become counter-productive. Just as our brains didn’t evolve to reason clearly about how to reduce suffering beyond the scale of prehistoric hominid clans, our brains might not be prepared to handle emotionally compelling presentations of suffering beyond that scale.
Consider some specific examples.
Wild animal suffering: In my ‘Psychology of Effective Altruism’ class, I’ve learned that I simply can’t assign students the Brian Tomasik essay on wild animal suffering, because it can induce serious depression, extreme anxiety, and even panic attacks. It’s just too emotionally compelling, and the scale of the problem is too overwhelming. Similar considerations apply for sharing with students any truly compelling depictions of animal suffering under factory farming. (Vegan activists have learned from bitter experience that there’s an optimal degree of factory farming gore that they can show to non-vegans to convince them to give up meat, and that degree is non-zero, but it’s not very high.)
S-risks: the Black Mirror episode ‘White Christmas’, which depicts a future in which uploaded criminals are tormented in virtual hells for many subjective millennia, is simply too distressing for most people to handle; it haunts their dreams for weeks. I still wish I’d never seen it. (The Iain M. Banks novel ‘Surface Detail’ (2010) raises similar issues.) The S-risks of virtual hells are very important to consider, but it might be most productive to consider those issues at a somewhat abstract, rational level, rather than a truly visceral level.
Nuclear war: Most people have seen science fiction movie depictions of global thermonuclear war, which induce varying levels of fear, horror, disgust, and dread. But very few movies, TV series, books, etc really try to capture the full scope and scale of the impact on a nuclear holocaust on billions of people. Any such attempt would simply be too depressing and horrifying to engage with. (Consider also movies like The Road (2009) that try to do an unflinchingly realistic portrayal of post-apocalyptic life—they’re often praised by critics, but rarely re-watched by ordinary folks.)
In short, I think a distinctive strength of EA is that we can set aside the highly emotive portrayals of the largest-scope cause areas that we rationally know are most important. We can keep the suffering impacts of these cause areas off to the side, in our peripheral vision, so to speak, with some degree of awareness—but without the paralyzing level of emotional response that we’d feel if they were always front and center in our imaginations.
I would caveat this point in two ways.
First, there can still be crucial roles for positive, inspirational, optimistic portrayals of success in solving various large-scope problems—e.g. how awesome life would be if we solved longevity, achieved nuclear security, promoted happier animal lives, and secured a great long-term future for our descendants. I think Nick Bostrom’s Letter from Utopia is a good example of this genre. We need more such fictions and inspiring tales of success. Engaging with our positive emotions can be great; relying on negative emotions elicited by accounts of mass suffering can be much trickier.
Second, at the outreach level of recruiting talent and money, some slightly more emotionally compelling narratives and influence methods could be useful. We just have to pitch them very carefully—eliciting an optimal degree of concern that’s somewhere in the middle between apathetic indifference and paralyzing horror. And discovering those optimal degrees of concern, as the original post mentioned, is very much a matter for empirical psychological research, rather than armchair reasoning.
Thanks for the detailed comment, Geoffrey!
First off, there is a point worth clarifying here. Scope insensitivity makes it impossible to have feelings that adequately scale with the number of beings affected, and I don’t think that there is much that can be done here (sidenote: this Wait But Why post and its sequel are the best ways I’m aware of to try to get an intuitive sense for the magnitude of large numbers). On the other hand, we can get a very good sense for the intensity of suffering in situations that are presented to us, which is what you point out as being the problematic part.
My sense is that it would be a really bad idea to try to get people to have a very intuitive grasp of intense suffering, for all of the problems you point out. I think that maybe the idea here is to try to give people some sense for it, but in a very small dose, which is sufficient to allow people to relate to other’s suffering but not nearly enough to cause them harm. Of course, there isn’t a right level for everyone (I think that watching the White Christmas/Black Museum episodes of Black Mirror was an adequate level of this for me, in that sense), but I think that a small enough dose here would be beneficial, and my claim is that this dose can be higher than simply “hundreds of thousands of people die of malaria every year”. Make-a-Wish does make some effort into describing the children’s situation, but they don’t go as far as describing the details of their suffering in a way that could be traumatizing, even though that’s possible to do in many cases.
And yes, there are definitely ways to frame this in a more positive and inspirational way, which I strongly favor!