The scale of charitable giving in the US is massive. In 2023, over half a trillion dollars was given to US charities, with $374.4 Billion of this (67% of the total) coming from individuals. Yet, relatively little is known in terms of the US public’s awareness of effective giving opportunities, their perception of various potentially impactful cause areas, or their attitudes towards ideas associated with such philanthropic efforts.
Rethink Priorities’ Pulse project seeks to address this gap through highly-powered polling of the US public. This report presents results from the first wave of Pulse, fielded between July and September 2024, and is based on the responses of 4,890 US adults. The full report can be accessed on our website or as a PDF, which includes more detailed methodological and background information.
The report provides insights into the US public’s:
attitudes towards ten major philanthropic cause areas, from global health and development, to farmed animal welfare, to existential risk
awareness of effective altruism and a range of related public figures and organizations
donation-related behavior and use of charity evaluators
views of a charitable ‘giving pledge’
estimates of their own income relative to that of the wider world
concerns about artificial intelligence
We used quota-based sampling and multilevel regression and poststratification to generate estimates for the US public, accounting for Age, Sex, Household income, Educational attainment, Racial identity, Political party identification, US Census region, and State. Detailed methodology behind these results can be found in the full report.
Rethink Priorities will also publish more in-depth investigations into these areas in additional reports. Readers can subscribe to our newsletter to be kept informed of such releases, as well as analyses of subsequent waves of Pulse.
We are also interested in hearing the EA community’s thoughts on valuable additional questions that could be asked in subsequent waves of Pulse.