💡
EA market testing (public)
  • Introduction/overview
    • Introduction & explanation
    • 👋Meet the team
    • 📕Content overview
    • Progress/goals (early 2023)
      • EAMT progress & results
      • Goals, trajectory, FAQs
  • 🀝Partners, contexts, trials
    • Introduction
    • Giving What We Can
      • Pledge page (options trial)
      • Giving guides - Facebook
      • Message Test (Feb 2022)
      • YouTube Remarketing
    • One For the World (OftW)
      • Pre-giving-tues. email A/B
        • Preregistration: OftW pre-GT
    • The Life You Can Save (TLYCS)
      • Advisor signup (Portland)
    • Fundraisers & impact info.
      • ICRC - quick overview
      • CRS/DV: overview
      • 📖Posts and writings
    • University/city groups
    • Workplaces/orgs
    • Other partners
    • Related/relevant projects/orgs
  • 🪧Marketing & testing: opportunities, tools, tips
    • Testing Contexts: Overview
    • Implementing ads, messages, designs
      • Doing and funding ads
      • Video ads/Best-practice guidelines
      • Facebook
      • Targeted ad on FB, with variations: setup
    • Collecting outcome data
      • Facebook ads interface
        • Pivot tables
      • Google analytics interface
      • Google A/B, optimize interface
      • Reconciling FB/GA reports
      • Survey/marketing platforms
    • Trial reporting template
  • 🎚Research Design, methodology
    • Methods: Overview, resources
    • "Qualitative" design issues
    • Real-world assignment & inference
      • Geographic segmentation/blocked randomization
      • Difference in difference/'Time-based methods'
      • Facebook split-testing issues
    • Simple quant design issues
    • Adaptive design/sampling, reinforcement learning
    • 'Observational' studies: issues
    • Analysis: Statistical approaches
  • 🧮Profiling and segmentation project
    • Introduction, scoping work
    • Existing work/data
      • Surveys/Predicting EA interest
      • Awareness: RP, etc.
      • Kagan and Fitz survey
      • Longtermism attitudes/profiling
      • Animal welfare attitudes: profiling/surveying
      • Other data
    • Fehr/SOEP analysis... followup
      • Followup with Thomas Ptashnik
    • Further approaches in progress
      • Profiling 'existing traffic'
  • 📋(In)effective Altruistic choices: Review of theory and evidence
    • Introduction...
    • The challenge: drivers of effective/ineffective giving
      • How little we know...
    • Models, theories, psych. norms
    • Tools and trials: overview
      • Tools/interventions: principles
      • Outcomes: Effective gift/consider impact)
        • (Effectiveness information and its presentation)
        • (Outcome: Pledge, give substantially (& effectively))
          • (Moral duty (of well-off))
        • Give if you win/ conditional pledge
      • Academic Paper Ideas
  • Appendix
    • How this 'gitbook' works
      • Other tech
    • Literature: animal advocacy messaging
    • Charity ratings, rankings, messages
    • "A large-scale online experiment" (participants-aware)
  • Innovationsinfundraising.org
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On this page
  • Introduction
  • In slightly more detail
  • (Lack of) previous synthesis on this
  • Definitions - "Efficiency" versus impact

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  1. (In)effective Altruistic choices: Review of theory and evidence
  2. The challenge: drivers of effective/ineffective giving

How little we know...

Motivating our project; feel free to be brief and link external content. "How little we know"

PreviousThe challenge: drivers of effective/ineffective givingNextModels, theories, psych. norms

Last updated 2 years ago

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Introduction

From :

... 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:

  1. Why are people not more generous with the most highly effective causes? and

  2. 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

As () state: “We donate billions of dollars to charities each year, yet much of our giving is ineffective. Why are we motivated to give, but not motivated to give effectively?”

Our main ‘policy’ audience includes both effective nonprofit organisations and ‘effective altruists’. The EA movement is highly-motivated, growing, and gaining funding. However, it represents a niche audience: the ‘hyper-analytic but morally-scrupulous’. EA organisations have focused on identifying effective causes and career paths, but have pursued neither extensive outreach nor ‘market research’ on a larger audience (see , ). `

introduction to : "on how both incorrect beliefs and preferences for ineffective charities contribute to ineffective giving"

"

Overall, these have not been detailed or systematic. While , is probably the strongest, most relevant, and most insightful (and has some connection to the structure presented in the '' project), it does not drill deeply into the strength of the evidence and the relative importance of each factor. However, this may stem from a small amount of available evidence to survey.

A working definition is provided and discussed I (Reinstein) provide a critical discussion of some standard economic models of giving in this context

📋
Burum, Nowak, and Hoffman
2020
Charity Science
Gates Foundation/Ideas42
Caviola et al, 2021 (abstract pictured above)
Caviola et al
Charitable Fundraising and Smart Giving (undergraduate thesis)
"Behavioral Insights To End Global Poverty" (Princeton report for TLYCS, Jan 2021)
Caviola et al, 2021
Barriers
HERE
HERE
EA Barriers Project (Reinstein) on "Presenting the Puzzle"
EA Barriers Project
Increasing effective charitable giving: The puzzle, what we know, what we need to know next - 4  Breakdown of barriers