Moral psychology is a field of study at the intersection of philosophy and psychology. It covers areas such as reasoning, moral development, moral motivation, and the evolutionary origins of morality.
Effective altruists have taken a special interest in several topics moral psychology, including the psychology of effective giving;[1][2][3][4][5][6][7] the psychology of existential risk;[8] the psychology of population ethics;[9] the psychology of the future;[10] the psychology of speciesism;[11][12][13] the psychology of utilitarianism;[14][15] the link between giving and happiness;[16][17] the personality traits of effective altruists;[18] and the psychology of altruistic motivation.[19]
Further reading
Greenberg, Spencer (2021) Episode 046: EA efficacy and community norms with Stefan Schubert, Clearer Thinking, May 29.
Related entries
cognitive bias | effective altruism messaging | effective giving | existential risk | population ethics | psychology | rationality | scope neglect | speciesism | temporal discounting | utilitarianism
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Karlan, Dean, John A. List & Eldar Shafir (2011) Small matches and charitable giving: evidence from a natural field experiment, Journal of Public Economics, vol. 95, pp. 344–350.
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Caviola, Lucius et al. (2014) The evaluability bias in charitable giving: saving administration costs or saving lives?, Judgment and Decision Making, vol. 9, pp. 303–315.
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Caviola, Lucius, Stefan Schubert & Jason Nemirow (2020) The many obstacles to effective giving, Judgment and Decision Making, vol. 15, pp. 159–172.
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Burum, Bethany, Martin A. Nowak & Moshe Hoffman (2020) An evolutionary explanation for ineffective altruism, Nature Human Behaviour, vol. 4, pp. 1245–1257.
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Caviola, Lucius, Stefan Schubert & Joshua D. Greene (2021) The psychology of (in)effective altruism, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, vol. 25, pp. 596–607.
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Schubert, Stefan (2018) Why aren’t people donating more effectively?, Effective Altruism Global, June 8.
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Berman, Jonathan Z. et al. (2018) Impediments to effective altruism: The role of subjective preferences in charitable giving, Psychological Science, vol. 29, pp. 834–844.
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Schubert, Stefan, Lucius Caviola & Nadira S. Faber (2019) The psychology of existential risk: moral judgments about human extinction, Scientific Reports, vol. 9, pp. 1–8.
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Caviola, Lucius et al. (2022) Population ethical intuitions, Cognition, vol. 218.
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Vallinder, Aron (2019) Psychology of the future: Bibliography, unpublished.
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Caviola, Lucius (2019) How We Value Animals: The Psychology of Speciesism, PhD thesis, University of Oxford.
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Caviola, Lucius, Jim A. C. Everett & Nadira S. Faber (2019) The moral standing of animals: towards a psychology of speciesism, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 116, pp. 1011–1029.
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Caviola, Lucius & Valerio Capraro (2020) Liking but devaluing animals: emotional and deliberative paths to speciesism, Social Psychological and Personality Science, vol. 11.
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Kahane, Guy et al. (2018) Beyond sacrificial harm: a two-dimensional model of utilitarian psychology, Psychological Review, vol. 125, pp. 131–164.
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Everett, Jim A. C. & Guy Kahane (2020) Switching tracks? Towards a multidimensional model of utilitarian psychology, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, vol. 24, pp. 124–134.
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MacAskill, William, Andreas Mogensen & Toby Ord (2018) Giving isn’t demanding, in Paul Woodruff (ed.) The Ethics of Giving: Philosophers’ Perspectives on Philanthropy, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 178–203.
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Dalton, Max (2020) Some extremely rough research on giving and happiness, Effective Altruism Forum, September 9.
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E., Elizabeth (2020) Correlations between cause prioritization and the big five personality traits, Effective Altruism Forum, September 24.
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Law, Kyle Fiore, Dylan Campbell & Brendan Gaesser (2021) Biased benevolence: The perceived morality of effective altruism across social distance, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, vol. 53.
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Desvousges, William et al. (2010) Measuring Nonuse Damages Using Contingent Valuation: An Experimental Evaluation of Accuracy, 2nd ed., Research Triangle Park, North Carolina: Research Triangle Institute.
Some of the topics and papers referred to her don’t seem to have a very direct relationship with effective altruism. Should such topics be included, or should these entries focus on topics more directly related to effective altruism?
In general, I think topics that have no clear reference to EA should not be discussed. But I would imagine that this may be sometimes necessary because otherwise the treatment of the subject of the entry may look unacceptably incomplete or fragmentary. In these cases, one may want to briefly discuss those topics and then zoom in selectively on the EA-relevant ones. I’ll try to keep this issue in mind and update as we stumble upon other cases where it arises.
In this particular example, I think it makes sense to keep Bob’s list, since it serves to characterize the discipline, and then we can cover in detail the relevant ones. I don’t think it makes much sense to keep references for the non-relevant topics, though. (But I believe you already removed those.)
No, I haven’t removed any references, but I agree that it’s better to remove references that aren’t directly related to EA.
I think it would be good if this article was integrated with the psychology of effective altruism article.
Here is a potential alternative article.
“Moral psychology is the study of how people think and feel about moral issues. It is a field of study in both philosophy and psychology, and covers many topics, including childhood moral development, how people reason about moral issues, and the evolutionary roots of morality.
Effective altruists have taken a special interest in some applied topics in moral psychology. They include the psychology of effective giving (Caviola et al. 2014; Caviola, Schubert & Nemirow 2020; Burum, Nowak & Hoffman 2020; Caviola, Schubert & Greene 2021); the psychology of existential risk (Schubert, Caviola & Faber 2019), and the psychology of speciesism (Caviola 2019; Caviola, Everett & Faber 2019; Caviola & Capraro 2020). See psychology of effective altruism for more details.”
Note that I’ve just copy-pasted the penultimate sentence from the psychology of effective altruism article (I also cut some of it in order not to make that sentence overly long.)
I included some Wikipedia-links in the first paragraph; if you don’t think that’s a good idea, then please remove them.
Thanks, and sorry for the delay.
I’ve now merged the two articles. The other article should be deleted; but since deleting an entry also removes its associated comments thread, I will leave it up for a week or so, in order to allow others to decide if they want to preserve some of the content in those comments.
(I don’t have a strong opinion on whether the article should be called moral psychology, psychology of effective altruism, or something else. But it looks like we should have just one article, regardless of what we call it.)
Thanks, makes sense.