Do you have research underpinning these statements? You are an expert in the field of behavior so I would be interested in anything that can back this up. Perhaps also if anything like this is echoed in various EA-related surveys?
Few people who give to charity make any serious effort to do the most good they can with the donation. Few people who engage in political activism are seriously trying to do they most good they can with their activism. Few people pursuing an “ethical career” are trying to do the most good they can with their career.
The reason I am asking is that this is counter to my own experience with non-EA altruists. And I think if you are wrong, there might be hope for growing the EA movement much larger as people already agree with us—we then “just” need to show them that we have also been thinking about this and might have a few research outputs they might want to look at before making a donation or career move.
A resource I keep coming back to is the 2010 Money for good study from Hope Consulting. They found that only about 3% of people donate based on organizations’ relative performance (see slide 41).
At the time that study came out, I figured the best thing for EA was to lean into that 3%. Is that still true? As the movement has grown, I’m not really sure.
See also ‘How Donors Choose Charities’ (Breeze, 2013), where even unusually engaged donors are explicit about basing their donations on personal preference and often donating quite haphazardly, with little deliberation.
See also ‘Impediments to Effective Altruism’ (Berman et al, 2018 [full paper]), where people endorsed making charitable decisions based on subjective preferences and often did not elect to donate to the most effective charities, even when this information was available.
I’ve only skimmed this article, but also Coupet and Schehl (2021) claims “Much of the nonprofit performance theory suggests that donors are unlikely to base donation decisions on nonprofit production”.
Oh, I’m not a social scientist. It’s just an inference to the best explanation in response to commonly observed behaviour, e.g. all those who “go and donate to local children’s hospitals and puppy shelters, while showing no interest in learning about neglected tropical diseases or improving factory-farmed animal welfare.”
That said, just because the EA project is (currently) unusual doesn’t mean that we can’t hope that that might change! Sometimes people initially fail to pursue a goal simply because it hasn’t even occurred to them, or they haven’t thought about it in the right way to see why it’s actually pretty appealing. So introducing the ideas, and making clear their intrinsic appeal, could still potentially sway many people who didn’t previously have the EA project among their goals.
Do you have research underpinning these statements? You are an expert in the field of behavior so I would be interested in anything that can back this up. Perhaps also if anything like this is echoed in various EA-related surveys?
The reason I am asking is that this is counter to my own experience with non-EA altruists. And I think if you are wrong, there might be hope for growing the EA movement much larger as people already agree with us—we then “just” need to show them that we have also been thinking about this and might have a few research outputs they might want to look at before making a donation or career move.
A resource I keep coming back to is the 2010 Money for good study from Hope Consulting. They found that only about 3% of people donate based on organizations’ relative performance (see slide 41).
At the time that study came out, I figured the best thing for EA was to lean into that 3%. Is that still true? As the movement has grown, I’m not really sure.
See also ‘How Donors Choose Charities’ (Breeze, 2013), where even unusually engaged donors are explicit about basing their donations on personal preference and often donating quite haphazardly, with little deliberation.
See also ‘Impediments to Effective Altruism’ (Berman et al, 2018 [full paper]), where people endorsed making charitable decisions based on subjective preferences and often did not elect to donate to the most effective charities, even when this information was available.
See also this review by Caviola et al (2021).
I’ve only skimmed this article, but also Coupet and Schehl (2021) claims “Much of the nonprofit performance theory suggests that donors are unlikely to base donation decisions on nonprofit production”.
Oh, I’m not a social scientist. It’s just an inference to the best explanation in response to commonly observed behaviour, e.g. all those who “go and donate to local children’s hospitals and puppy shelters, while showing no interest in learning about neglected tropical diseases or improving factory-farmed animal welfare.”
That said, just because the EA project is (currently) unusual doesn’t mean that we can’t hope that that might change! Sometimes people initially fail to pursue a goal simply because it hasn’t even occurred to them, or they haven’t thought about it in the right way to see why it’s actually pretty appealing. So introducing the ideas, and making clear their intrinsic appeal, could still potentially sway many people who didn’t previously have the EA project among their goals.