I'm going talk about the psychology of effective altruists, and specifically on why people
don't donate effectively.
And before I start, I should point out, that this is joint work that I'm pursuing together
with my colleagues, Lucius Caviola, who is a PhD student at Oxford University, and it's
done under the leadership of Nadira Faber, who is the head of the Social Behavior and
Ethics lab, which both me and Lucius work at.
Let's start with presenting the puzzle of ineffective giving.
The puzzle of ineffective giving is that people donate large sums to charity; this is evidence
that they actually want to help others.
Yet a large proportion of donations are very ineffective, at least if effective altruists
are right.
This seems to defeat the very purpose of giving.
The donations aren't actually helping others, at least not nearly as much as they could.
So, this is a puzzle, and this gives rise to my first question, which is, "Why don't
people donate effectively?"
And then following from that, is my second question, comes my second question, which
is, "How can we make people donate more effectively?"
But I'll first focus on the 'why' question, and then there are two main explanations and
the first is that people don't donate effectively because they actually don't really want to.
They don't want to donate effectively.
Instead they have some other goal with their giving, such as trying to obtain some positive
emotion or improve their reputation, or something like this.
Whereas the other kind of explanation - it says that people want to donate effectively,
but they don't know how to do it because they suffer from false beliefs or cognitive biases
or something like that.
So that's the belief based explanation.
So on one hand we have the preference based explanations and on the other hand we have
the belief based explanations.
So in this talk I will provide some evidence for both of these kind of different explanations,
and in particular I'll present some research of our own which pertains primarily to the
belief based explanations.
But I'll start by focusing on the preference based explanations and delve a little bit
more deeply into them.
So there are two kinds of preference based explanations on our conceptualization.
The first has to do with warm glow.
It says that when people are donating, they're optimizing for warm glow rather than effectiveness.
Warm glow is a positive emotion that they obtain, for instance, from showing empathy
or generosity.
And in particular, they obtain warm glow from sort of giving spontaneously, and a bit capriciously,
and this is obviously not something that is very conducive to effectiveness.
So, therefore, warm glow giving often tends not to be very effective.
Another preference based explanation has to do with reputation or signaling.
The people signal certain traits in order to improve their reputation.
And they do this because when we donate, other people, third parties, they're sort of observing
us and they're judging us.
They're judging our character traits, and if it's the case that we, for instance, display
empathy, spontaneous empathy, then we, people tend to think that "well this is a good person",
so they reward that, whereas they may not reward effective donations to the same extent.
I should also clarify that warm glow giving, that explanation and the reputational signaling
explanation, they aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.
When people are engaging in signaling behavior, they may very well at the same time obtain
the warm glow.
Let's briefly cover some evidence, so, evidence of warm glow giving.
So, there is one paper that was recently published in Psychological Science, which is a prestigious
psychology journal, where it was shown that people donate to pet projects, projects that
they feel strongly about, even when told that other charities or other projects are more
effective.
So specifically in this case, they were told that arthritis research is more effective
than cancer research, and still the majority choose to donate to cancer research.
And then, on the signaling or reputation based giving, it has been show by a number of effective
altruist aligned researchers that deliberate donors are seen as having a worse moral character
than donors who give sort of spontaneously and empathetically.
And no wonder then that people don't donate deliberately but rather donate spontaneously.
So, the next question then is if the problem is people's preferences, what can we do to
improve their giving and make it more effective.
Well one thing that we can do is to try to change the norms and culture of giving.
And specifically we may try to improve the third parties' judgments so that don't reward
ineffective giving, but rather reward effective giving.
And here there are two strategies.
One is to try to improve everyone's judgments.
So to get everyone on board with effective giving and get everyone to reward other people
donating effectively.
Maybe that's not super tractable, because many people seem to not to have really a disposition
in favor of effective giving.
So another approach might be to sort of selectively pick those people who already have views which
are sort of conducive to effective giving, and sort of bring them together and form an
effectiveness minded culture where everyone is rewarding everyone else for donating effectively.
And to some extent that seems to be exactly what the effective altruist community is doing,
sort of re-rewarding each other for donating effectively, rather than sort of spontaneously
and capriciously.
But, let's move on to the belief based explanations.
They also come in different forms.
So, one has to do with cognitive biases.
So, there are many biases which affect the effectiveness of giving.
One very well known bias is scope neglect, which is that people tend often to be insensitive
to the size of the opportunity to help.
So in some well known studies, one group of people were asked how much they would donate
to help 200 birds, and another group was asked how much they would donate to help 2000 birds.
And here they would donate similar amounts, even though in the second case they could
help ten times more.
And this seems to be a fairly pervasive phenomenon, which obviously reduces the effectiveness
of your donations.
And then, another kind of bias has to do with people often focusing on overhead or administration
costs, rather than effectiveness, when they evaluate different charities.
So this is something that my colleague Lucius has published a paper on, together with his
colleagues, so I will present that in some detail in a minute.
But first I will talk a little bit about another kind of belief based explanation which hasn't
got to do with general cognitive biases, but rather has to do with false beliefs and ignorance
about specific facts of relevance for charity effectiveness.
There's much less research on this, so this is going to be somewhat more speculative,
inevitably, but we think we have some reason to believe that people have these kinds of
false beliefs and ignorance.
So, some potential false beliefs about a charity's effectiveness might be that, for instance,
charities just don't differ much in terms of effectiveness.
So this is something we've actually started studying, so I will present a study of relevance
for this in a minute.
Another is that differences in effectiveness are mostly driven by differences regarding
overhead, or that charity effectiveness can't be measured.
So, if it's the case that people suffer from these kinds of false beliefs, and it is also
the case that this is something that drives ineffective giving, then it seems like we
might have sort of a straightforward intervention.
We just inform them about the fact that, you know, these misconceptions are misconceptions
in order to dispel them, and that way we might perhaps improve donation behavior.
So I will talk more about that later in this talk.
But now let's move onto our own research.
So, there's this paper from 2014 by Lucius and his colleagues on overhead aversion.
And so the issue here is that when donors are evaluating charities, they might use different
criteria.
So one is the overhead ratio.
The percentage of money that goes into administration.
And another is cost effectiveness.
That is the positive outcome per dollar donated.
For instance, the number of lives saved.
And, of course, effective altruists think that what one should look at is cost effectiveness,
but in fact people often look at overhead.
So, why is that?
Well one reason might be that in separate evaluation, as psychologists say, when you're
just presented with an individual option, in this case an individual charity, separately,
it can be very hard to evaluate the effectiveness of a charity if you don't know anything about
effectiveness.
So, like, how effective is a charity with, say, like, 100 lives for a million dollars?
You have no way to tell.
Whereas if you're being told that this charity has a 50 percent overhead ratio, you can immediately
grasp that this is a high level of overhead and for that reason people often focus on
overhead in separate evaluation.
Or at least this was Lucius and his colleague's hypothesis, so they ran a study when they
had two different charities, one charity which had higher level of overhead and a higher
level of effectiveness than the other charity.
And then they compared them in two modes, as it were.
One was separate, where like one group was presented with only charity A, the opportunity
to donate to charity A. The other group was only presented with the opportunity to donate
to charity B.
And then there was also joint evaluation.
So, a third group was presented with the opportunity to either donate to charity A or to charity
B, and then the idea was that in separate evaluation, people would, in line with what
I said before, they would go for the low overhead charity, on aggregate, that the two groups
would do so because that would be easier to evaluate.
Whereas in joint evaluation, the group that could, was presented with the choice of either
donating to charity A or charity B, then they would be able to compare both effectiveness
and the overhead, and they would also realize that like, effectiveness is what really matters
and therefore they would go for the more effective charity.
And this hypothesis was actually supported.
So it seems then that people do focus on effectiveness when charities are appropriately comparable.
They don't do so when they're just presented with the individual charities, but they do
so when charities are appropriately comparable.
So the policy implication might be that we should sort of increase the comparability
of charities.
We should present multiple charities at the same time and sort of make it easy to compare
the relative cost effectiveness.
So, let's move on to another study that we're currently running that, that rather has to
do with the misconception about charity effectiveness and specifically, it has to do with misconception
about the variants of effectiveness across different charities.
So, here we've run two studies so far, and in the first study we started, what the difference
is in terms of effectiveness between the most effective and an average charity.
And this is something that Spencer Greenberg already studied in a pilot study and the result
there was that the median ratio was 1.6.
This is much lower than what EAs think, so we wanted to replicate this finding and publish
it in an academic journal.
And then in the second study we wanted to see whether correcting this misconception
increases people's tendency to prioritize effectiveness.
So, study one then, participants were asked about the relative effectiveness of the most
effective and the average charity and Spencer's results were replicated here.
The median was 1.5, so very close to what Spencer found.
So the most effective charity was said to be on average, 1.5, or according to the median
person, 1.5 times more effective than the average charity.
So, the next question was whether this would have an effect on people's donation behavior.
So the way we studied this was as follows: participants were asked about how they would
donate $100, and they could split this money between the most effective and an average
charity and then we know, since previous studies, that when presented with the choice to split,
people often do so, even though arguably, you shouldn't, you should just donate everything
to the most effective charity.
But what we thought was, if people were told that the most effective charity is, say, 100
times more effective than an average charity, then this splitting tendency would be reduced,
and they would donate almost everything to the most effective charity.
So we had five different conditions, and in four of them, they were informed about the
relative effectiveness of the most effective and an average charity.
So, this ranged from 1.05x to 100 times much more effective was the most effective charity
relative to the average charity and in the control conditions they were not given any
information about the relative effectiveness.
But this hypothesis was not supported.
Actually, telling them that the most effective charity was 100 times more effective than
an average charity didn't have that much of an effect.
They continued to donate 30 dollars out of this hundred dollars to the less effective,
the average charity.
Which is, was quite surprising to us that even though this charity is only one percent
as effective as the most effective charity, they still go on to want to donate 30 percent
to the average charity.
And overall, there were quite small differences across these different conditions, so this
manipulation didn't have that much of an effect.
So, what's the upshot?
Well, people do underestimate the variance in charity's effectiveness, so our hypothesis
that they suffer from this misconception, that was true.
That obviously, like this was something that Spencer had already studied.
But informing them about this doesn't make a big difference to their giving behavior.
So what might be the explanation?
Well, one might be that getting rid of one misconception might not be sufficient because
of additional obstacles.
So, for instance, this splitting preference might be very strong or there might be some
sort of scope insensitivity factor which has an effect here.
So, let me sum up.
So, I had two questions.
One was: "why don't people donate effectively?"
And then there were two responses to that.
One was they don't want to - that was the preference based explanation - and the second
was they want to but they don't know how.
This was the belief based explanation.
And so far we haven't amassed enough evidence to say which one of these is the more important,
so more research is needed.
And on the second question, "how can we make people donate more effectively?"
Well the response to that question will depend on what the response to the first question
is, right?
So if the preference based explanation is right, then we saw that better norms might
be one way to go, whereas if the belief based explanation is right, then sort of better
framings which don't trigger these cognitive biases might be the way to go.
For instance, we saw that, like, increasing the comparability of different charities might
help people to avoid cognitive biases.
And then we saw another approach might be just to inform people in order to dispel misconceptions,
and then hope this will improve their donation behavior.
But in the study that we ran, we saw that this didn't have that much of an effect and
we speculated that this might be because there are some additional misconceptions which present
additional obstacles to effective giving.
So in the light of that, in of there being sort of many misconceptions and it being very
difficult, perhaps, to fix them all, we might think whether there is some kind of hack by
which we can sort of circumvent all of these different misconceptions.
And one such hack might be to encourage deference to experts, so rather than having people figuring
out for themselves all the relevant factors for assessing the relative difference, the
relative effectiveness of different charities, we just have them defer to experts.
And this is a model which has a great precedent, one might add, namely in science.
So in science, I for instance - and all of you, I'm sure - are sort of ignorant about
many scientific facts in many scientific fields, but you can still sort of act on scientific
knowledge appropriately because you defer to scientific experts, or scientists.
And perhaps, and this model seems to work very well in science, so perhaps this is the
way to go also with respect to charitable giving.
So with that, I end.
So, if you want to run studies in these fields or have study ideas please contact us, and
we're also looking to diversify our donor base, so if you want to help out with that,
please contact us.
Thank you very much.