I’ve given it a moderate skim-read, and here are my thoughts (reprising some of our Slack conversation)
It’s a very important question, and seems well done—great design choices in several important ways (the writing could be a bit clearer though, IMO). I always wanted to do a study like this, it is long overdue.
While “what applies to policy attitudes doesn’t necessarily apply to giving(*), and these things may differ based on context”
… this does seem like a fairly relevant context, and it does involve some outcomes that are approximately direct giving. I might provide some cause to update our beliefs against ‘debiasing’ as a powerful motivator here.
(*) And I suspect that the EA, and global health/poverty communities cares at least as much about support for global aid and pro-poor poverties as we do about giving
Also, as @davidmoss notes “it’s kind of a trope in debiasing research that changing people’s beliefs usually doesn’t do anything” … indeed there has been previous work finding similar ‘debiasing doesn’t matter’ in the field of support for international aid iirc. I guess saw this as ‘folk wisdom’ needing further confirmation … and here is further confirmation … perhaps. (I’ll comment on the empirics in another thread)
Context and value
I’ve given it a moderate skim-read, and here are my thoughts (reprising some of our Slack conversation)
It’s a very important question, and seems well done—great design choices in several important ways (the writing could be a bit clearer though, IMO). I always wanted to do a study like this, it is long overdue.
While “what applies to policy attitudes doesn’t necessarily apply to giving(*), and these things may differ based on context” … this does seem like a fairly relevant context, and it does involve some outcomes that are approximately direct giving. I might provide some cause to update our beliefs against ‘debiasing’ as a powerful motivator here.
(*) And I suspect that the EA, and global health/poverty communities cares at least as much about support for global aid and pro-poor poverties as we do about giving Also, as @davidmoss notes “it’s kind of a trope in debiasing research that changing people’s beliefs usually doesn’t do anything” … indeed there has been previous work finding similar ‘debiasing doesn’t matter’ in the field of support for international aid iirc. I guess saw this as ‘folk wisdom’ needing further confirmation … and here is further confirmation … perhaps. (I’ll comment on the empirics in another thread)