Beliefs about the end of humanity: How bad, likely, and important is human extinction?

Abstract

Human extinction would mean the deaths of eight billion people and the end of humanity’s achievements, culture, and future potential. On several ethical views, extinction would be a terrible outcome. How do people think about human extinction? And how much do they prioritize preventing extinction over other societal issues? Across six empirical studies (N = 2,541; U.S. and China) we find that people consider extinction prevention a global priority and deserving of greatly increased societal resources. However, despite estimating the likelihood of human extinction to be 5% this century (U.S. median), people believe the odds would need to be around 30% for it to be the very highest priority. Consequently, people consider extinction prevention to be only one among several important societal issues. People’s judgments about the relative importance of extinction prevention appear relatively fixed and are hard to change by reason-based interventions.

Introducing the Extinction Gambling Task

“…Finally, research on scope insensitivity has shown that people do not value a good in proportion to its scope or size (Kahneman et al, 1999;Maier et al, 2023). In the context of extinction events, scope insensitivity would suggest that people are not sufficiently sensitive to the amount of time that is lost by extinction, especially when this amount is large (Coleman et al, 2023).…”