EA - Should we tell people they are morally obligated to give to charity? [Recent Paper] by benleo

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Should we tell people they are morally obligated to give to charity? [Recent Paper], published by benleo on February 21, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.SUMMARYIn this post, we summarise a recently published paper of ours that investigates how people respond to moral arguments, and morally demanding statements, such as “You are morally obligated to give to charity” . The paper is forthcoming in the [Journal of Behavioural and Experimental Economics]. (If you want an ungated copy, please get in touch with either Ben or Philipp).We ran two pre-registered experiments with a total sample size of n=3700 participants.We compared a control treatment to a moral argument treatment, and we also varied the level of moral demandingness to donate after they read the moral argument. We found that the moral argument increased the frequency and amount of donations. However, increasing the levels of moral demandingness did not translate into higher or lower giving.BACKGROUNDThe central motivation for our paper was the worry that many have expressed, including a number of philosophers (e.g., Kagan, 1989; Unger, 1996; De Lazari-Radek and Singer, 2010) that having highly morally demanding solicitations for charitable giving may result in reduced (not increased) donations. This possibility of a backfire effect had been raised many times in a variety of contexts but had not been tested empirically. In our paper, we attempted to do just that in the context of donations to Give Directly.EXPERIMENT DESIGNIn our first study (n=2500), we had five treatments (control, moral argument, inspiration, weak demandingness, and strong demandingness). In the Control condition, we showed participants unrelated information about some technicalities of UK parliamentary procedure. In the Moral Argument condition, we presented participants with a text about global poverty and the ability of those living in Western countries to help (see figure 2). For the Inspiration, Weak Demandingness, and Strong Demandingness conditions, we used the same text as in the moral argument condition, but added one sentence to each.Inspiration: For these reasons, you can do a lot of good if you give money to charities-such as GiveDirectly-to alleviate the suffering of people in developing countries at a minimal cost to yourself.Weak Demandingness: For these reasons, you should give money to charities-such as GiveDirectly-to alleviate the suffering of people in developing countries at a minimal cost to yourself.Strong Demandingness: For these reasons, you are morally obligated to give money to charities-such as GiveDirectly-to alleviate the suffering of people in developing countries at a minimal cost to yourself.In this study, we were interested in two comparisons. First, we compared the control and the moral argument conditions to look at the effect of moral arguments on charitable giving. Second, we compared the moral argument with each of the three moral demandingness conditions to investigate whether increasing levels of moral demandingness lead to an increase or reduction in charitable giving. In our second study (n=1200), we narrow down our research question by looking only at the conditions of control, moral argument, and strong demandingness. We test the same two main questions as in our first study. The key difference is that the Moral Argument (and demandingness) was presented to participants via the Giving What We Can Website (see Figure 3). This was done to mitigate experimenter demand effects, as well as to provide a more natural vehicle for the information to be delivered.In both studies, after reading the randomly allotted text, participants could choose to donate some, none, or all of their earnings (20 ECUs, where 1 ECU=£0.05) to the charity GiveDirectly.RESULTSThe main results of experiment 1 ...