SoGive conducts research like this as part of its moral weights process.
Our first such study was last year and focused primarily on how much people value
Saving lives
Doubling consumption
Averting severe depression
Averting animal suffering
We invested less effort in, but also explored
Saving species from extinction
Comparing a life in the far future with a life today
Education
We were interested in comparing them against each other, and in a quantitative comparison (i.e. how much is one valued more than another)
We were motivated to conduct this research because our work is intended to serve a broad audience, and we wanted to incorporate the perspective of the population as a whole.
Because the questions we wanted to answer were quantitative, we posed quantitative questions in the survey. We found that several respondents gave answers which did not seem consistent, when consistency checks where included in the survey. This is a key challenge for this type of work, and suggests that a slightly more indirect approach to answering the questions may be more effective.
SoGive conducts research like this as part of its moral weights process.
Our first such study was last year and focused primarily on how much people value
Saving lives
Doubling consumption
Averting severe depression
Averting animal suffering
We invested less effort in, but also explored
Saving species from extinction
Comparing a life in the far future with a life today
Education
We were interested in comparing them against each other, and in a quantitative comparison (i.e. how much is one valued more than another)
We were motivated to conduct this research because our work is intended to serve a broad audience, and we wanted to incorporate the perspective of the population as a whole.
Because the questions we wanted to answer were quantitative, we posed quantitative questions in the survey. We found that several respondents gave answers which did not seem consistent, when consistency checks where included in the survey. This is a key challenge for this type of work, and suggests that a slightly more indirect approach to answering the questions may be more effective.