Congratulations Lucius, these are pretty amazing results. I am quite surprised that on the extensive margin 38% of people contributed to the matching system. What were your priors about contributions and did this also surprise you?
benleo
Interesting. I wonder if the mechanism is similar to making a donation when there is matching. As in, people think they are giving more money to the cause because their donation is ‘doubled’. By providing matching funds they might believe they are going to bring more money in. Alternatively, if they see GM as a public good itself (and like this idea), they have some preference to fund it for that sake.
Would love to know more about this!
Thanks for sharing your proposal Michael. The institute looks great. Finding ways to incentivise replication is something I consider to be really important.
A couple of questions. I am curious what probability you would place on the Institute significantly increasing acceptances of replications in top journals? More abstractly, I wonder if a dedicated instituted could help change social norms in academia around replication. Do you have any thoughts about this?
Lastly, did you receive any feedback from FTX?
Now I really want to call it EaE(con)^2
Should we tell people they are morally obligated to give to charity? [Recent Paper]
That’s very fair! I’m not familiar with the norms for EA Forum title posts. What do you think a better title would be?
In that case, a better title would probably be something like “Tell people why they should donate, not that they morally obligated to.”*
I had a strong prior that telling people they were morally obligated to donate would not have a positive effect and if anything backfire. So I have actually updated a bit in the other direction regarding the backfire effect.
However, given we have evidence that moral demandingness didn’t produce any positive outcomes, I would currently tell people not to use them and instead stick to moral arguments (which may even be underused given how effective they are).
In saying that, further research is needed, as there isn’t much of a literature at the moment.
*Can I change the title?
Thanks Ariel. That’s a great question.
We checked a number of different correlations cross both studies, including altruistic type, how utilitarian they are, guilt, how manipulated they felt, agreeableness, and a number of demographic characteristics including religion.
We didn’t find anything in our regression analysis that stood out. However, we reported everything in the appendix, which can be accessed in the paper. Alternatively, I can send it to you.
I guess another question is who is the obligation coming from? In our experiments it was either from us or GWWC. With regards to religion, if it is in scripture or communicated by a religious figure (such as a rabbi or a priest), maybe it holds more weight? Also, the norms regarding giving are different to secular norms.
We didn’t measure how convinced they were by the argument (in hindsight we probably should have), but we did ask how obligated they felt and obligations ratings were significantly higher in the Moral Argument treatment than the control. That correlation may be explained by finding the argument more convincing, but we don’t have any concrete evidence (from this study) to strongly update our beliefs.
Thanks Scott, that’s a really good point.
One of the variables we thought about manipulating was “who is the demand coming from”? The use of language here “I”, “We” and other expressions could easily make a difference (social norms are usually presented in terms of “X% of people believe”).
Unfortunately, we didn’t have the budget to test whether how much of a difference (if any) this made. It would definitely be worth following up on if we were able to get the funding.
In experiment 1, condition on them donating they actually donated significantly less in the Moral Demandingness condition (but this didn’t replicate in E2).
Can you DM me about the model, I am happy to run that analysis. We ran mean equivalence tests to provide evidence of the bounds of the null result, but I believe what you are suggesting is quite different.
In experiment 1, condition on them donating they actually donated significantly less in the Moral Demandingness condition (but this didn’t replicate in E2).
Can you DM me about the model, I am happy to run that analysis. We ran mean equivalence tests to provide evidence of the bounds of the null result, but I believe what you are suggesting is quite different.
Thanks David, that would be great! I’ll check to see if there is a way to run it on STATA, but if not I can just run it on R.
Thanks Catherine. We just used the platform Prolific for subject recruitment.
This is fantastic news!
As an experimental economist, I hope this has spillovers to our field (as well as others).
At the feedback level (referee reports, presentations etc), I believe there is significantly more value to be gained when discussing the experimental design itself before any data is collected.
Congrats to Hauke, Chris, and all others involved.
This is a fantastic idea. Congratulations to all involved.
Out of curiosity, does GD have any data on whether other religions donate a portion of their tithe/tzdaka/etc to GD?
Participants donated their own money. They received a bonus of £1 and could choose how much of it they wanted to keep or donate.
The reference classes I look at generate a prior for AGI control over current human resources anywhere between 5% and 60% (mean of ~16-26%).
Thanks for this Zach. I found it quite thought provoking, especially the quoted sentence.
Based on your model, AGI controlling human resources is much more likely to occur than extinction. Given that, what events do you think we should be worried about with losing autonomy over resources (and potentially institutions) and are you more concerned about that after this work?
I’m also impressed by this post. HLI’s work has definitely shifted my priors on wellbeing interventions.
We strive to be maximally philosophically and empirically rigorous. For instance, our meta-analysis of cash transfers has since been published in a top academic journal. We’ve shown how important philosophy is for comparing life-improving against life-extending interventions. We’ve won prizes: our report re-analysing deworming led GiveWell to start their “Change Our Mind” competition. Open Philanthropy awarded us money in their Cause Exporation Prize.
It’s also great to see the organisation taking philosophical/empirical concerns seriously. I still have some concerns/questions about the efficacy of these interventions (compared to Givewell charities), but I am confident in HLI continuing to shed light on these concerns in the future.
For example, projects like the one below I think are really important.
Develop the WELLBY methodology, exploring, for instance, the social desirability bias in SWB scales
and
building the field of academic researchers taking a wellbeing approach, including collecting data on interventions.
I had the same intuition as RhysSouthan that most people who acquire the second vote in a Demeny voting structure would use the two votes for the same party/candidate/policy . I think an important facet here is that the salience of the vote being for the ‘future generation’ may nudge people on the margin to use both votes for the policy/party that best benefits the future generation, whereas without receiving the second vote they may not have voted this way. The Kochi University of Technology Research Institute of Future Design have some papers that show making future generations salient increases pro-social behaviour towards future generations. Thus, I think this the above hypothesis is plausible. Also, as Tyler showed above, even marginal changes of the second vote (from the first) that benefits future generations would be a good thing. I do think motivated reasoning is a big concern here though ( people manipulating their beliefs to think that their vote is good for future generations, when in fact it is not), and it would be interesting to see if there is any evidence of this.
The same institute actually just published a paper using a lab experiment to investigate the psychological effects of Demeny Voting. (I need to re-read the paper, as it has changed from their working paper version, which I read recently). However, the paper investigates the voting behaviour of people who do not receive the second vote (single-ballot voters). They hypothesise that these single-ballot voters may be more likely to use their vote for the benefit of future generations in a Demony Voting structure due to either:
a) The cost of behaving ethically decreases as their vote has less impact on the overall outcome. However, they do not find any evidence of this in their data (NPV Treatment: Demony voting, but participants are not told why a second vote was allocated to some people). The authors argue that single ballot voters may perceive the voting structure to be unfair, inducing them to vote more egotistically in this treatment.
b) A bandwagon effect (conformity): These voters expect that more votes will be used on the policy that benefits future generations, as a result of others getting a second vote (and told to use it for the interest of future generations) “promoting the ethical voting of single ballot voters.”
They find evidence supporting the bandwagon effect. When people are told why a second vote is given in a Demony Voting structure (PV treatment), single ballot voters are more likely to vote for the policy that benefits the future compared to the NPV treatment. (Note: I am not sure a bandwagon effect is the best model to explain this result).
The authors contend that “these results suggest that the success of the new voting scheme suggested by Demeny should depend on whether the rationale behind giving some voters a second ballot is explained and understood.”
It is important to highlight that this is a single lab experiment, and external validity concerns are legitimate (to the authors credit they make sure to talk about this at the end of the paper). Field experiments, the use of observational data, and further lab experiments are all necessary to get a better understanding of how Demony Voting affects voter’s behaviour, but it’s exciting to see academics interested in what I believe is an important question.