How can psychology and cognitive science research help to solve the world’s most pressing problems?

Psychology research often focuses on understanding individuals’ experiences and behaviour. It can be highly interdisciplinary, potentially overlapping with philosophy, ethics and anthropology, statistics and computer science. For these reasons, research in this discipline is potentially relevant to most of our recommended research directions; it can help us answer foundational questions about welfare, understand the impact of altruistic interventions on wellbeing, understand people’s beliefs and misconceptions about global problems, and offer insight into how to encourage more altruistic and rational choices. 

There are many ways we think research in this discipline could be particularly useful from the perspective of improving wellbeing and decreasing suffering. Some of the most promising issues to work on may include factory farming, mental illness and chronic pain. You could explore research questions such as: what motivates individuals to care about animal welfare?; what mental health interventions are most effective in various lower-income settings?; and how can we encourage charitable donors to make more effective donations?

There are also multiple risks that could threaten humanity’s future in the coming decades – such as increasingly powerful artificial intelligence, nuclear war and engineered pathogens – that research could help address. You could work on these problems by exploring questions such as: how can a culture of safety be created among researchers working on dangerous technologies?; what makes people more likely to elect leaders with dangerous personality traits?; and what social, cognitive and emotional factors affect decision-making regarding risks to humanity’s future?

Further insight into these and many more questions is needed to tackle the most pressing global problems. Research on these questions could improve the world through informing the decisions  of policy-makers, research scientists, philanthropists, activists, charities and society in general. Research could also lead to the development of evidence-based tools to support wiser decision-making and improve well-being.

Depending on your subject, degree level and the requirements of your institution, your thesis might take many different forms. It might look like an in-depth critical review — in which you compile and evaluate a large body of evidence on a specific issue, aiming to clarify a detailed question or mechanism. Alternative approaches to your thesis include administering surveys or conducting experiments with human participants, or using computational methods (e.g. involving neural networks) to mathematically model human behaviour.

If you’re writing a thesis in this area and want guidance on choosing for a research question or any other part of the research process, you can apply to our coaching service for advice.

Resources

Examples of work on some of the research directions we recommend

• An interdisciplinary synthesis of research on understanding and promoting well-doing (Lieder et al., 2022) describes research on well-doing in social and personality psychology.
• The Psychology of (In)Effective Altruism is a recent paper by Caviola et al. (2021) on the psychology underlying ineffective giving.
• EA, Psychology and AI Safety is a recent review of researchers in this field and their work.

Research agendas and potential sources for research questions

• The research Agenda from the Effective Altruism Psychology Lab covers a wide array of global problems from the perspective of improving the long-term future. 
• How Effective Altruism Can Help Psychologists Maximise Their Impact (Gainsburg et al. 2022) includes a section about impactful research topics, including research relating to effective giving, animal welfare, institutional decision-making and risks for the long-term future. 
• The research agenda from the Happier Lives institute contains many research ideas relevant to psychology and cognitive sciences, focused on improving wellbeing measures and interventions. See also their report on pain for additional research questions.
• This research agenda from Faunalytics contains many questions related to animal welfare.
• This research agenda from The Good Food Institute contains many questions related to consumer perceptions of alternative proteins.
• The Sentience Institute suggests potential research questions related to artificial sentience and the moral circle.
  

Contributors

This profile was last updated 4/12/2022. Thanks to L. Sophie Gullino for creating this introduction and Matt Coleman for feedback. All errors remain our own.