we focus on individuals who have taken the Giving What We Can Pledge: a pledge to donate at least 10% of your lifetime income to effective charities. In a global survey (N = 536) we examine cognitive and personality traits in Giving What We Can donors and compare them to country-matched controls. Compared to controls, Giving What We Can donors were better at identifying fearful faces, and more morally expansive. They were higher in actively open-minded thinking, need for cognition, and two subscales of utilitarianism (impartial beneficence and instrumental harm), but lower in maximizing tendency (a tendency to search for an optimal outcome). We found no differences between Giving What We Can donors and the control sample for empathy and compassion, and results for social dominance orientation were inconsistent across analyses.
Includes real donation choice question(s), rich survey and psychometric data, including 'mind in the eyes' empathy judgements
Students and nonstudents (local town population)
Consider Lown and XX paper... MITE empathy moderates the impact of political attitude, or something ... dissonance resolution Feldman, Ronsky, Lown https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/pops.12620
mturk + qualtrics
ended up manipulating whether aid was government or charity, and domestic vs foreig; thought those would be moderated by MITE depending on their ideology/attitude? Also consider ... Empathy Regulation and Close-Mindedness Leonie Huddy, Stanley Feldman, Romeo Gray, Julie Wronski, Patrick Lown, and Elizabeth Connors Also asked about domestic welfare and foreign aid attitudes...
sample fairly large ... 1100 or so?