Altruistic decision-making
How can we encourage effective action to help others?
Why is this a pressing problem?
There are many barriers that can decrease the extent to which people effectively help others, such as narrow self-interest, cognitive biases, mistaken beliefs, and misaligned incentives.
A better understanding of the reasons people do or don’t take the most effective altruistic actions available to them could be useful in a number of ways. For example, it could:
inform the development of interventions to help people correct for their cognitive biases, such as tendencies to over- or under-weight low-probability outcomes.
help people cultivate the characteristics that make them more altruistic, care more deeply about the suffering of distant others and non-human animals, and act more effectively.
identify ways to decrease the ‘value-action gap’ between altruistic feelings and actions.
identify causes of value drift (which can lead to people becoming less motivated to take altruistic actions over time).
help decision-makers identify the most effective strategies for increasing altruistic behaviour and values.
More concretely, further research on these questions could help further a number of causes, such as promoting concern for farmed and wild animals and future digital beings, safeguarding the long-term future, encouraging people to take effective action to alleviate global poverty, preventing malevolent leaders from gaining power, and informing attempts to broaden humanity’s moral circle.
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Caviola, L., Schubert, S., & Greene, J. D. (2021). The psychology of (in) effective altruism. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 25(7), 596-607.
Cushman, F., Kumar, V., & Railton, P. (2017). Moral learning: Psychological and philosophical perspectives. Cognition, 167, 1-10.
Jaeger, B., & van Vugt, M. (2022). Psychological barriers to effective altruism: An evolutionary perspective. Current Opinion in Psychology, 44, 130-134.
Lieder, F., Prentice, M., & Corwin-Renner, E. R. (2022). An interdisciplinary synthesis of research on understanding and promoting well-doing. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 16( 9), e12704.
Lieder, F., Prentice, M. (2022). Life Improvement Science. In F. Maggino (Eds.) Encyclopedia of Quality of Life and Well-Being Research. Springer, Cham.
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You could also look at this directory of researchers working on the psychology of effective altruism or reach the newsletter of the EA behavioural science community to find connections.
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Contributors: This introduction was last updated 26/05/2023. Thanks to Matti Wilks, Izzy Gainsburg and Falk Lieder for helpful feedback. All errors remain our own. Learn more about how we create our profiles.
