Important EA-related questions EA would like to know from general public

Great that you're doing this, thanks so much for raising this here!

Not sure if you're already aware of this, but you might want to be aware of other studies that have looked at similar questions. In particular the Money For Good study in the US and the equivalent in the UK were interesting, albeit somewhat dated. (I have the raw data for the UK study). You might want to have a look so that you can use consistent question wording whether the questions overlap.

Some questions that we at SoGive would be interested to know more about:

• The last time you gave to charity, what triggered you to give? (a) someone asked me (b) I decided myself [could break (a) down further, perhaps] [Note, this has been studied before, but to my knowledge not recently. Also I've never seen an analysis of the correlates of self-driven giving]
• For the donor population, I'd like to understand the split between what we at SoGive call Organisation-loyal, Cause-specific, and Open-minded donors (hopefully the labels are self-explanatory but if not please ask). We would be interested to know specifically to what extent are those preferences moderate preferences (defined as: if the person is choosing a charity to donate to, they will follow that preference) and to what extent are they strong preferences (i.e. if someone else asks them to donate, they will say no unless the donation target is consistent with their preference). We at SoGive currently have some thoughts on this, which I can expand on if you're interested.
• In terms of cause areas, it would be useful to know whether moral-circle thinking is a good model for explaining cause preferences. E.g. if someone is happy to support people in the developing world, are they more likely to support animals? Or those in the far future? (see also the research we conducted on attitudes to the far future)
• A deeper understanding of why people never donate would be interesting. Self-reported answers tell us something, but there is some evidence that donors (at least some of the time) are non-donors because they just don't want to give and are looking for excuses ("motivated reasoning"). I wrote about this here, and referenced some studies, e.g. this, this and this (which were mentioned to me by a contact at Rethink Charity). Something which tried to quantify this (i.e. how many non-donors will never give, and how many non-donors would give if their needs were better met) would be really interesting, but possibly too hard for the scope of your study.

Some researchers are doing some interesting work on how people give -- the names Beth Breeze and Cat Walker spring to mind, although there are others as well. But you may well be too time-constrained to wade through all their work, in which case I suggest you just take a look at the Money for Good studies mentioned earlier.

More generally, very happy to discuss further. If you are willing to have a chat, let me know: sanjay [at] sogive.org

I think questions about support for EA ideas in the general population would doubtless be interesting.

Unfortunately I think it is pretty difficult to ask questions about EA to the general public in an adequate manner. Since almost everyone is unfamiliar with EA ideas, statements of EA ideas are apt to be interpreted in line with more common folk ideas, rather than as expressing the EA ideas intended. For example, many statements of EA ideas ("We should only donate to the best effective charities" "We should do the most good we can do") can be interpreted completely platitudinously, so you find almost everyone agreeing with these statements even though almost no-one actually agrees with the ideas they are supposed to express. I think similar difficulties apply to asking whether people think those in the far future should be valued equally (see here and here)

Another specific problem is that almost no-one interprets "cost-effectiveness" correctly. I've run a number of studies examining how people think about thinking about cost-effectiveness in charitable decision-making, and I've found not only that most people naturally interpret "cost-effectiveness" to overhead ratios, but that even if you stipulate what cost-effectiveness means, and look at only those people who pass multiple comprehension checks putatively indicating correct understanding of the definition of cost-effectiveness, large percentages still cannot select which is the most "cost-effective charity" out of a pair of charities (A vs B) which save more lives with a given sum of money vs save fewer lives with the same sum of money but spend less on overhead costs.

I discuss this and some of the things I broadly think a good operationalization of EA should include here

That said, I'd be interested if you would ask people whether they agree or disagree with some statements along the lines of: "Some charitable causes are objectively better than others." "You can't compare whether different charitable causes are better or worse than each other."

I might be too late, but I was just cleaning through some notes of mine and found some questions related to this from various research agendas that I found interesting:

• Why do people donate to ineffective charities?
• Why do people want to donate directly and not too overhead?
• Why do people care about future people more than current people?
• How do social norms and expectations influence giving?

Some of these can be incorporated into your current questions (e.g. in the most important qualities when giving, you can mention low overhead). Maybe you can also have people choose or rank who they want to benefit from their giving the most (e.g. their community, animals, future generations, etc.).

Not sure if this is helpful, but glad that you're doing this regardless. :)

I may be too late to the game (been away and @DavidJanku only recently alerted me to this ) but some quick thoughts:

The current version seems to have many questions that will tell you about how people either 'consciously answer this question to themselves' or how they want to present themselves. It may not reveal their true motivations. There's a lot of work point in this direction.

I would try to focus more on very specific questions that permit less constructed justification and 'lying to oneself.'

It may be very helpful to present simple and yet that ask for a hypothetical response such as "which of the following charities would you be more likely to donate to?" and "how does the following information make you feel?" (although the latter may also offering for motivated reasoning). My recent paper with Robin Bergh some of this but with real donation choices; it still would be interesting to consider hypothetical choices and responses.

I have a wiki/hub that attempts to summarize much of the evidence on Charitable giving, with a particular focus on the consideration of effectiveness.

See INNOVATIONSINFUNDRAISING.ORG. There is also an underlying database I can share (with more detail and recent updates) if you message me at daaronr AT gmail.com

I have also done a lot of work recently summarizing the evidence on "How do people respond to effectiveness information".

E.g., pasting some text from a recent grant application:

So far, we have limited evidence on these questions, and the existing evidence is far from systematic or consistent Mixed results, e.g.,- Small et al vs Karlan, Parsons, and Reinstein et al work with Donor Voice; a Previous studies have largely relied on hypothetical and small-scale lab-based experiments(Metzger & Günther, 2015, Berman et al., 2018, Verkaik, 2016). Only a few large scale natural field experiments have been run. Karlan and Wood (2017) simultaneously varied emotional and cost-effectiveness information, with the latter presented largely qualitatively and in a particular ‘scientific’ credentials frame. Parson (2007) presented accounting information (uninformative about per-dollar effectiveness). In contrast, our field experiment project aims at large sample sizes in real donation environment, testing a set of particularly relevant and practical framings of real per-dollar impact information in the presence/absence of an emotional appeal (further measuring interaction effects, as in Bergh and Reinstein, 2019).

Please message me for more detail.

Post updated, see UPDATE2

Some of the proposals have been accepted, more about the response here.