Charity could do the most good if every dollar donated went to causes that produced the greatest welfare gains. In line with this proposition, the effective-altruism movement seeks to provide individuals with information regarding the effectiveness of charities in hopes that they will contribute to organizations that maximize the social return of their donation. In this research, we investigated the extent to which presenting effectiveness information leads people to choose more effective charities. We found that even when effectiveness information is made easily comparable across options, it has a limited impact on choice. Specifically, people frequently choose less effective charity options when those options represent more subjectively preferred causes. In contrast to making a personal donation decision, outcome metrics are used to a much greater extent when choosing financial investments and when allocating aid resources as an agent of an organization. Implications for effective altruism are discussed.
Abstract We test how donors respond to new information about a charity's effectiveness. Freedom from Hunger implemented a test of its direct marketing solicitations, varying letters by whether they include a discussion of their program's impact as measured by scientific research. The base script, used for both treatment and control, included a standard qualitative story about an individual beneficiary. Adding scientific impact information has no effect on average likelihood of giving or average ...
Marketers and researchers alike typically regard products as differentiated by quality (modeled via vertical differentiation) or taste (modeled via horizontal differentiation). This research examines consumer beliefs about product differentiation. For a wide variety of product pairs, different consumers hold divergent beliefs about whether each pair is a matter of quality (such that one product is objectively better) or taste (such that one product is a better match with their own personal prefe...
Last. Ayelet Gneezy(UCSD: University of California, San Diego)H-Index: 14
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Donors tend to avoid charities that dedicate a high percentage of expenses to administrative and fundraising costs, limiting the ability of nonprofits to be effective. We propose a solution to this problem: Use donations from major philanthropists to cover overhead expenses and offer potential donors an overhead-free donation opportunity. A laboratory experiment testing this solution confirms that donations decrease when overhead increases, but only when donors pay for overhead themselves. In a ...
We describe the ``evaluability bias'': the tendency to weight the importance of an attribute in proportion to its ease of evaluation. We propose that the evaluability bias influences decision making in the context of charitable giving: people tend to have a strong preference for charities with low overhead ratios (lower administrative expenses) but not for charities with high cost-effectiveness (greater number of saved lives per dollar), because the former attribute is easier to evaluate than th...
#2Emma Levine(UPenn: University of Pennsylvania)H-Index: 10
Last. Deborah A. Small(UPenn: University of Pennsylvania)H-Index: 30
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Theories that reject the existence of altruism presume that emotional benefits serve as ulterior motives for doing good deeds. These theories argue that even in the absence of material and reputational benefits, individuals reap utility from the feelings associated with doing good. In response to this normative view of altruism, this article examines the descriptive question of whether laypeople penalize emotional prosocial actors. Six studies find that emotion serves as a positive signal of mor...
Abstract We study whether using prosocial incentives, where effort is tied directly to charitable contributions, may lead to better performance than standard incentive schemes. In a real-effort task, individuals indeed work harder for charity than for themselves, but only when incentive stakes are low. When stakes are raised, effort increases when individuals work for themselves but not when they work for others and, as a result, the difference in provided effort disappears. Individuals correctl...
How do people balance intuition and reason when making decisions? We report 6 studies that indicate that people are cued by the features of the decision problem to follow intuition or reason when making their choice. That is, when features of the choice resemble features commonly associated with rational processing, people tend to decide on the basis of reason; when features of the choice match those associated with intuitive processing, people tend to decide on the basis of intuition. Choices t...
#1Deborah A. Small(UPenn: University of Pennsylvania)H-Index: 30
Natural disasters and other traumatic events often draw a greater charitable response than do ongoing misfortunes, even those that may cause even more widespread misery, such as famine or malaria. Why is the response disproportionate to need? The notion of reference dependence critical to Prospect Theory (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979) maintains that self-utility, or benefit to self, is not absolute level of wealth but rather gain or loss relative to a reference point. Four studies show that sympathy...
How do lay individuals think about the objectivity of their ethical beliefs? Do they regard them as factual and objective, or as more subjective and opinion-based, and what might predict such differences? In three experiments, we set out a methodology for assessing the perceived objectivity of ethical beliefs, and use it to document several novel findings. Experiment 1 showed that individuals tend to regard ethical statements as clearly more objective than social conventions and tastes, and almo...
Abstract null null Prosocial acts typically take the form of time- or money-donations. Do third-parties differ in how they evaluate these different kinds of donations? Here, we show that people view time-donations as more morally praiseworthy and more diagnostic of moral character than money-donations, even when the resource investment is comparable. This moral preference occurs because people perceive time-donations as signaling greater emotional investment in the cause and therefore better mor...
The most effective charities are hundreds of times more effective than typical charities, yet few donors prioritize effectiveness. Why is that? How might we increase the effectiveness of charitable giving? We review the motivational and epistemic causes of (in)effective giving. Many donors view charitable giving as a matter of personal preference, which favors decisions based on emotional appeal rather than effectiveness. In addition, while many donors are motivated to give effectively, they oft...
Helping behaviors are often driven by emotional reactions to the suffering of particular individuals, but these behaviors do not seem to be upregulated when many people need help. In this article, ...
#1Hanna Zagefka(RHUL: Royal Holloway, University of London)H-Index: 22
Are disaster relief appeals more successful if they emphasize the material cost of disaster events in terms of economic damages and need for shelter, food, and health care, or if they emphasize the human cost in terms of psychological suffering and trauma caused? Although giving patterns seem to suggest that large-scale events that cause widespread material damage (e.g., the Asian Tsunami of 2004) are more successful at eliciting donations than smaller scaled events, it is argued that this patte...
The effective altruism movement argues that people wanting to do the most good they can should donate to charities fighting poverty in poor countries overseas, rather than to charities helping peop...
Empirical evidence suggests that self-reported prosociality and donations increase with age. The majority of this research was conducted using monetary donations as outcome measures. However, on average older adults hold a significant advantage in financial and material assets compared to younger adults, effectively lowering the subjective cost of small monetary donations. Are older adults also more prosocial when donating a nonmonetary resource that is of equal or even higher value for them com...
We test the conjecture that sustainable investing (SI) is driven by altruistic motives by examining the responses of charitable giving and SI flows to exogenous shocks to altruism. We find that while philanthropy responds strongly and significantly, SI flows do not. In addition, two further types of shocks to the reputation and tax shield benefits of philanthropy do not result in an increase in SI either. Our results contribute to understanding the channels behind SI and suggest that altruism is...
Nonprofits offer services to disadvantaged populations, mobilize collective action, and advocate for civil rights. Conducting this work requires significant resources, raising the question: how do ...