In search of effective altruists

Abstract

The effective altruism movement argues that people wanting to do the most good they can should donate to charities fighting poverty in poor countries overseas, rather than to charities helping people in need in wealthy countries. This is because there is greater need in the developing world meaning it is possible to save lives or improve living conditions at reasonably low cost. However, most people living in developed countries prefer to donate to charities helping people in need in their own country, rather than charities helping people in need in the developing world. This paper analyses why this might be. We conduct a discrete choice experiment to determine the relative importance people place on the effectiveness of a donation, the need of recipients, and whether the donation will be spent at home or overseas. We find that many people place more weight on where the donation will be spent than on how effective it will be. We also find that a significant number of people are not aware, or do not believe, a donation will be more effective in the developing world.

COVID-19 and Pro-Sociality: How Do Donors Respond to Local Pandemic Severity, Increased Salience, and Media Coverage?

“…15 In the first step, participants were asked to divide the additional budget of £1 between their own account and a donation to Save the Children by using a slider 16 (see Figure A1 and A2 in the Appendix for the exact implementation). In the second step, we asked participants to 10 This literature includes studies by Adena et al (2019), Alger et al (2020), Brown et al (2017), Gallier et al (2019), Genç et al (2021, Grimson et al (2020), Meer (2014), andWhillans et al (2017).…”

COVID-19 and pro-sociality: How do donors respond to local pandemic severity, increased salience, and media coverage?

“…This literature includes studies byMeer (2014),Brown et al (2017),Whillans et al (2017),Adena et al (2019),Gallier et al (2019),Alger et al (2020),Grimson et al (2020),Genç et al (2021).11 We concentrated on participants living in England and excluded participants living in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland because COVID-19 cases were only reported for larger geographical units in those latter territories.…”

Charitable Giving by the Poor: A Field Experiment in Kyrgyzstan

“…The experimental literature has documented that social distance affects generosity, see, for example, the seminal study on dictator games by Hoffman et al (1994). In the context of the charitable giving and fundraising literatures, some studies find an effect of geographical proximity on charitable giving for middle-income donors (Genç et al 2019;Grimson, Knowles, and Stahlmann-Brown 2020); others find that donors are largely unaffected by geographical proximity (Brown, Meer, and Williams 2017;Meer 2014). However, it is unclear whether preferences relate to the location of the charity or the location of the charitable output.…”