1 Introduction: Effective giving, responses to analytical ‘effectiveness information’
This project aims to robustly measure and synthesize evidence about how charitable giving responds to the presentation of analytical ‘impact per dollar’ information.
Why do we care about this? From our academic-style abstract:
While hundreds of billions of dollars are donated to charity each year, the effectiveness of these charities differs by orders of magnitude, even within similar categories. Furthermore, many individuals do not donate substantially even though they believe that the cost of saving a life is small. Our collaborative and dynamic synthesis considers this ‘puzzle’.
For people to systematically choose the most efficient charities they must be aware of the differences in effectiveness, suggesting a role for advertising and publicity. The EA movement and organizations like GiveWell and SoGive are increasingly presenting these to larger and more mainstream settings. However, we have limited evidence on how potential donors react to quantitative measures of charitable impact. We survey and meta-analyze this evidence below, also incorporating ‘our new evidence’.
Charity Navigator’s use of Impact Matters data might be considered an impact megasure, but so far, it has not been used prominently, nor in a way that allows meaningful comparisons. See discussion here
There is a puzzle: people make inefficient giving choices, and give little to highest-impact causes*
*See “Presenting the puzzle” in Increasing effective charitable giving web-book/ That work offers a Conceptual breakdown of ‘barriers’
It has been claimed1 that ‘innumerate empathy’ is a key barrier to promoting effective giving. Previous work2 concludes that emotional reactions to suffering leads to helping behavior, but this ’doesn’t scale’ with need, and few people actually ‘research effectiveness before giving’. In a ‘dual process’ model of cognition, analytical impact information may disrupt empathic giving.
Here, we are analysing a variety of giving experiments, across various contexts.
Preliminary suggestive results: Analytical info doesn’t seem to substantially disrupt emotional-empathic giving (but there may still be a lack of power to detect small effects), and may enhance it. There seem to be heterogeneous effects by type of donor (Karlan), but this needs further examination (as it’s an ex-post hypothesis). The ‘right’ empathic images can drive effective giving. In less precise comparisons, overstated analytical effectiveness information seems to boost giving, at least relative to more realistic effectiveness information.
Unfold for a further discussion (from (Bergh and Reinstein 2020) abstract)
1.1 Definition of ‘effective giving’ for our purposes, motivation*
Please see Definitions - “Efficiency” versus impact from ‘Barriers’ web book for a more in-depth presentation of this.
We define the impact, also referred to as the effectiveness of a charity, as follows:
: The beneficial outcome achieved by charity with total donations
This is an ultimate outcomeL Lives saved, QALY added, etc.
We are not referring to intermediate ‘outputs’ such as ‘nets provided’ nor ‘paintings purchased’
(Total or marginal) impact per dollar = output per dollar impact per output
Steinberg & Morris, 2010 wrote about marginal vs average effectiveness.
:::
Impact of a donation:
for the marginal donor
- GiveWell and others attempt to measure this
We have a strong empirical case that (in-depth discussion here):**
is much larger for most impactful vs. most popular charities.
1.2 Raises questions
- “Why don’t we give more to the most effective charities and to those most in need?”,
and
- “Why are we not more efficient with our giving choices?”
Is this a ‘Puzzle’?
1.3 Barriers and the use of analytical effectiveness information
We give a breakdown and assesment of potential barriers to effective giving in the aforementioned ‘barriers’ book.
Unfold for a peek at our proposed definitions:
1.4 Presenting analytical effectiveness information: The key issues
Obstacles/aversion to doing evaluations; analytical/empathetic clash
- Reluctant to evaluate (taboo tradeoffs, ‘social v. market norm’, …)
- The evaluation process switches off empathy the present focus
1.4.1 ‘Processing of effectiveness information’ and spontaneous/deliberate responses
Heuristic (fast) spontaneous generosity?
Deliberative (slow) thoughtful giving … or ‘calculated greed’
Also: relational models theory (Fisk, ’91); Motivated reasoning (e.g., Exley ’19) all suggests analytical information less giving
Further discussion and channels (unfold; needs cleanup)