RP: "How many people have heard of EA" survey

Asks respondents to tick terms and people that they are familiar with (EA/non, real/rare/fake). If they have heard of EA, we follow-up with open-ended questions to detect actual understanding. We also ask about socio-demography and politics. Administered to a ‘national sample’.

(We will follow up with attitude surveys among those who have heard of EA.) We use Bayesian models to generate the posterior distributions of

• share who know/understand EA within different groups,

• weighted to be nationally representative (of each group).

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Wild Animal Welfare/Suffering attitudes

Various survey projects ongoing

EA Attitudes and Longtermist Attitudes

• Developing measures of attitudes towards EA/Longtermism

• Conducting large national surveys looking at predictors of these attitudes (including differences across groups)

• Standard ‘message testing’ (what arguments/framings work best for outreach (including differences across groups)

__

See

Rethink Priorities #ea-attitudes-and-longtermist-attitudes

RP has a remit and some funding to pursue this.

23 May 2022 update: After a long period with little relevant data, some work is underway from other groups: See sections below

Caviola et al

Sample, Design, & Measures. We recruited a national online sample of 530 Americans. Participants read and reflected on an introduction to evidence based giving, and then completed our main outcomes of effective giving. Participants then completed a series of measures of their beliefs, behaviors, values, traits, sociodemographics, etc. The instrument, measures, and data are available upon request.

• Was this a 'representative sample'? How were they recruited?

• Note they 'read about EA first' ... perhaps making them vulnerable to demand effects?

• DR: I've requested this data, but I think the authors are having trouble finding the time to dig this up

Primary Measures. To measure effective giving, we assessed several attitudes and behaviors; this summary presents results from a novel 7-item scale, the Support for Effective Giving scale (SEGS) [ ⍺ = .92], and an effective giving behavior allocation.

The items in SEGS assess general interest, desire to learn more, support for the movement, and willingness to share information with others, identify as an effective altruist, meet others who support the movement, and donate money based on effective giving principles. To approximate giving behavior, we presented participants with short descriptions of three causes Deworm the World Initiative, Make a Wish Foundation, and a local high school choir and had them allocate $100 between these groups and/or keeping it themselves.

• Was the allocation purely hypothetical or incentivized in some way, perhaps 'one response was chosen'?

Secondary Measures.

To measure beliefs, behaviors, and traits of people who endorse effective giving, we employed measures of: perceived social norms, charitable donation beliefs and behaviors, self perceptions, empathy quotient ( EQ ) , empathic concern & personal distress ( IRI ), the five moral foundations ( MFQ 20 ) , the five factor personality model ( TIPI ), goal & strategy maximization ( MS S ), updated cognitive reflection tests ( CRT ), sociodemographics (e.g., age, gender & racial identity, income), politics & religion, familiarity with ‘the effective altruism ’ movement , and state residence

So far, the best overall model predicts 41% of the variance in support for effective giving.

Summarized in posts...

.... After participants read a general description of EA, they completed measures of their support for EA (e.g., attitudes and giving behaviors). Finally, participants answered a collection of questions measuring their beliefs, values, behaviors, demographic traits, and more.

The results suggest that the EA movement may be missing a much wider population of highly-engaged supporters. For example, not only were women more altruistic in general (a widely replicated finding), but they were also more supportive of EA specifically (even when controlling for generosity). And whites, atheists, and young people were no more likely to support EA than average. If anything, being black or Christian indicated a higher likelihood of supporting EA.

Moreover, the typical stereotype of the “EA personality” may be somewhat misguided. Many people – both within and outside the community – view EAs as cold, calculating types who use rationality to override their emotions—the sort of people who can easily ignore the beggar on the street. Yet the data suggest that the more empathetic someone is (in both cognition and affect), the more likely they are to support EA. Importantly, another key predictor was the psychological trait of ‘maximizing tendency,’ a desire to optimize for the best option when making decisions (rather than settle for something good enough).

Farmed/overall

Faunalytics

This is possibly the best meta-resource as well as a source of original research

Sentience institute

Our Animals, Food and Technology (AFT) survey tracks attitudes towards animal farming and animal product alternatives in the US. In 2020, as in the 2017 and 2019 iterations, we found significant opposition to various aspects of the animal farming industry, with a majority of people reporting discomfort with the industry, and strong support for a range of quite radical policy changes, such as banning slaughterhouses. The trend in attitudes between 2017 and 2020 is relatively stable, though slightly negative (not statistically significant). Notably, the number of people who consider animal farming to be one of the most important social issues fell from 2017 to 2019, and remained at this lower level in 2020.

Rethink Priorities

Some replication work on the above

Various work including

__ DR: I'm awaiting permission to share the list.

Paper: The moral standing of animals

Wild animal suffering

ACE

ACE - Wild Animal Suffering Survey 1

ACE - Wild Animal Suffering Survey 2

Other

#wild-animal-welfare-suffering-attitudes (Rethink Priorities, in progress)

"Scientists’ Attitudes Toward Improving the Welfare of Animals in the Wild"

Who gives effectively? Unique characteristics of those who have taken the Giving What We Can Pledge

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.

Tangential: 'Omnibus' lab survey at University of Exeter

• 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

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?