Philanthropy surveys
There is a community of people known as effective altruists (EAs) who focus on the science of charities. Charity Science team members have conducted two different surveys of this community: one involved in-depth interviews of a few particularly dedicated effective altruists, and the other was a general 'EA Survey', which is now repeated annually. The EA Survey is conducted by Tom Ash as one of the projects he runs under the broad umbrella of Charity Science after he joined us in April 2014. The results and analysis of the survey were handled by board member Peter Hurford and can be found here. Below, we describe our earlier in-depth interviews.
Motivation
Effective altruists care about strategically helping more people, and we wanted to find out what patterns there were among theme. We particularly wanted to know about those most dedicated to effective altruism, as they had a disproportionate amount of impact.
Hypothesis
This was largely an exploratory survey, rather than one which set out to test a hypothesis. We did however have a few hypotheses:
- EAs are better at imagining suffering and think of consequences that are far away in time or space far more commonly than others do.
- How much you donate and volunteer will positively influence how many EA friends you have.
Methodology
We surveyed people in-person over Skype. It was a convenience sample, where we asked whether the interviewee knew any others they'd say were dedicated EAs. If they knew any, we'd ask whether they thought those people would be interested in taking the survey and, if so, whether they introduce us to them. This worked remarkably well and we had a 90% acceptance rate.
Results
We had a sample size of 42. The average age of the participants was 25 years old, and 75% of them were male. Most had left-leaning parents. There was a 0.4 correlation between the percentage of salary people donated and the amount of hours they volunteered. The frequency or intensity of visualizing distant poverty had no relation to donation percentage or volunteer hours.
The effective altruists we interviewed generally had an undergraduate or graduate degree and their parents typically had a high income for their country.
The average percentage of the interviewees' friends who were EA was 17.5%, but this figure ranged from 0% to 100%. The number of EA friends influenced how many hours a person volunteered, but not the percentage of their income they donated.
The effective altruists we interviewed generally had an undergraduate or graduate degree and their parents typically had a high income for their country.
The average percentage of the interviewees' friends who were EA was 17.5%, but this figure ranged from 0% to 100%. The number of EA friends influenced how many hours a person volunteered, but not the percentage of their income they donated.
Conclusion
On average, the most dedicated of the EA movement are young, well educated, and come from an affluent background.