Just a quick note: Your finding about population ethics—i.e. that many prefer smaller populations—is consistent with findings reported in the following paper.
Among other things, Spears also finds that women prefer smaller populations more strongly than men.
I learned all of this from an unpublished literature review by David Althaus, which might be interesting for your purposes if you haven’t seen it. [ETA: Actually David has publicly linked to the lit review—see subsection “An experimental study of population ethics and policy”, pp. 23ff., for a summary of Spears (2017) - in this EA Forum post.]
(I’m not mentioning this to argue for any view. I’m very sympathetic to the total view in population ethics, and I agree with your interpretation that many subjects simply failed to understand the scenario in the intended way.)
Interesting, thanks for publishing!
Just a quick note: Your finding about population ethics—i.e. that many prefer smaller populations—is consistent with findings reported in the following paper.
Among other things, Spears also finds that women prefer smaller populations more strongly than men.
I learned all of this from an unpublished literature review by David Althaus, which might be interesting for your purposes if you haven’t seen it. [ETA: Actually David has publicly linked to the lit review—see subsection “An experimental study of population ethics and policy”, pp. 23ff., for a summary of Spears (2017) - in this EA Forum post.]
(I’m not mentioning this to argue for any view. I’m very sympathetic to the total view in population ethics, and I agree with your interpretation that many subjects simply failed to understand the scenario in the intended way.)
Thanks for the pointer!