How little we know...
Motivating our project; feel free to be brief and link external content. "How little we know"
Introduction
... raises two related questions:
I. “Why don’t we give more to the most effective charities and to those most in need?” and
II. “Why are we not more efficient with our giving choices?”
To address this, we must understand what drives giving choices, and how people react to the presentation of charity-effectiveness information
In slightly more detail
There are two related and largely unresolved puzzles:
Why are people not more generous with the most highly effective causes? and
When they give to charity why do they not choose more effective charities?
There is some evidence on this but it is far from definitive. We do not expect there to be only a single answer to these questions; there may be a set of beliefs, biases, preferences, and underlying circumstances driving this. We would like to understand which of these are robustly supported by the evidence, and will have a sense of how important each of these are in terms of the magnitude of driving and absence of effective giving. There has been only a limited amount of research into this and it has not been systematic, coordinated, nor heavily funded.
We seek to understand because we believe that there is potential to change attitudes, beliefs, and actions (primarily charitable giving, but also political and voting behaviour and workplace/career choices). Different charitable appeals, information interventions and approaches may substantially change peoples charity choices. We see potential for changing the “domain” of causes chosen (e.g., international versus US domestic) as well as the effectiveness of the charities chosen within these categories. (However, we have some disagreement over the relative potential for either of these.)
(Lack of) previous synthesis on this
Academic work:
@loewensteinScarecrowTinMan2007
introduction to @Berman2018, @baron2011heuristics)
@greenhalghSystematicReviewBarriers2020 (qualitative, focuses on largest philanthropists only)
Non-academic/unpublished:
'Behavior and Charitable Giving' (Ideas42, 2016),
'The Psychology of Effective Altruism' (Miller, 2016, slides only).
Ideas42 wrote (ibid)
We did not find many field-based, experimental studies on the factors that encourage people to choose thoughtfully among charities or to plan ahead to give.
Definitions - "Efficiency" versus impact
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