Evidence of Poor Cross-Cultural Interactions in the EA community

By Yi-Yang @ 2024-07-24T03:09 (+51)

Edit (2024-07-25): added strength of evidence to each evidence, but want to point out that I wasn't being strategic with my research (e.g., no clear hypothesis, not really doing updating in a Bayesian way, etc).

Summary

In this project, I investigated non-Western EAs’ perception of CCIs they had with Westerners, specifically:

1. How often non-Westerners experienced CCI issues;
2. What kinds of subtle acts of exclusion (SAEs) they had experienced;
3. How their CCIs compare between EA and non-EA settings.

To do that, I collected an array of evidence from seven sources (e.g., anecdotes from interviews and a focus group, and some statistics from three surveys not done by me). And based on the evidence on CCIs I have collected so far, I believe that poor CCIs are likely to be a common but minor problem for most non-westerners in the EA community.

At the organisational or community level, I would not flag CCI issues as something to be heavily prioritised (moderate confidence), but I would recommend EA-aligned organisations and organisers to start or maintain interventions that are sensible or if the trade-offs are acceptable, like some of the ones listed here by AmAristizabal.

At the individual level, I recommend:

1. Checking out some of the vignettes shared by non-Western EAs here and here
2. Read more examples of SAEs here
3. Read some of my low-confidence takes on what non-Western and Western folks could do to improve CCIs

Background

I noticed that I was feeling annoyed in some of my cross-cultural interactions (CCIs) in the EA community, but I couldn’t tell for sure whether these interactions had exclusionary elements in them. These are more subtle, and are not the overt racist behaviours that I’m more familiar with.

Hence, I started this investigation out of a desire to sanity check myself (“Am I misinterpreting things? Or has anyone else experienced the same thing?”). I would also be happy if this project is useful to others too, perhaps by making non-Western folks feel less perplexed or less alone.

In this project, I investigated non-Western EAs’ perception of CCIs they had with Westerners, specifically:

1. How often non-Westerners experienced CCI issues;
2. What kinds of subtle acts of exclusion (SAEs) they had experienced;
3. How their CCIs compare between EA and non-EA settings.

This investigation was done pretty informally and in a non-strategic way (e.g. I wasn’t really explicitly thinking about this in a Bayesian probability way), but it does consist of an array of evidence from seven sources that I think, when combined, are pretty informative.

Evidence compiled

Evidence that might indicate less negative CCIs

1. EA Survey 2022 [very weak evidence]

According to the Rethink Priorities team who lead the EA Survey 2022 project, survey respondents who identified as more non-Western scored slightly better than survey respondents who identified as more Western in terms of:

• Satisfaction (mean): 7.55 (N=219)  versus 7.17 (N=2251) out of 10.00 points
• Retention (mean): 5.51 (N=144) versus 5.42 (N=1736) out of 7.00 points
• Mental health (mean): 3.49 (N=143) versus 3.27 (N=1528) out of 5.00 points

The above three metrics aren’t exactly what I’m looking for, that is belongingness. It might be the case that non-Westerners do experience CCI issues but still get a lot of value from EA or belongingness in their local EA groups.

Evidence that might indicate more negative CCIs

1. My personal experience [weak evidence]

Firstly, I've noticed Western folks “hijacking” (most likely unconsciously or unintentionally) norms in spaces where non-Western folks traditionally belong, are the majority, or a mix of both. I’ve noticed at least one such behaviour in an EA setting before.

Here are a few non-EA-related examples (to preserve anonymity):

• A discussion group in Malaysia I was a part of has a norm about raising one’s hands and letting the moderator pick the next speaker to make speaking time more fair. Western folks tend to not follow this norm, and tend to have an outsized speaking time (>50%) despite there being only 10-20% of them. To be fair, the moderator did not enforce this norm well. I don’t know how other folks in the group felt about this.
• It’s a norm to not greet (or at most give a slight acknowledgement) to strangers in a lift or a corridor at an apartment in Malaysia. I noticed Western folks violating this norm many times. And I noticed Malaysians (including me) greeting back, sometimes reluctantly and sometimes in a way that isn’t a big deal.

Secondly, I’ve also noticed my relationships with Western folks are more likely than not asymmetric, i.e., I spent more effort and time building relationships with them as compared to vice versa. My experience in the broader EA community seems to mirror this too.

2. Focus group study of Non-Western EAs’ experiences with Western EAs [moderate evidence]

Here’s the summary of a report of a focus group I ran in a retreat just before EAGxPhilippines (read more here).

3. Community Health Survey 2023-2024 [extremely weak evidence]

David Moss published the following graph in relation to the Community Health Survey:

It seems like non-Whites are slightly more concerned about Justice, Equity, Inclusion and Diversity (JEID) issues compared to Whites. However, the sample size is pretty low, and more Asian. And I don’t think this exactly means “non-Whites experience more JEID issues than Whites”, which is the thing I’m more concerned with.

4. [redacted]’s experience [weak evidence]

In the past year or so, [redacted] published a post that highlighted some of their negative experiences in the EA community, including ones that are CCI-related. The post got around a few hundred karmas (if I’m remembering correctly), but the author had removed the post recently.

5. Feedback surveys from EA Globals in 2023 [extremely weak evidence]

In 2023, EA Global feedback survey respondents who identified as more non-Western gave slightly lower scores in response to the question “This event was a place where I felt welcome” (on a scale of 1 to 5, 5 being highest).than survey respondents who identified as more Western: 4.30 versus 4.54 out of 5.00 points.

• However, the sample size of non-Western respondents is very small, only 20. These are survey respondents who shared ethnicity information (i.e., there are probably more non-Western respondents but they weren’t captured because I was filtering for those who gave information about their ethnicity.
• Furthermore, like EA Survey 2022, non-Western respondents gave a higher satisfaction score (mean): 9.20 versus 8.80 out of 10.00 points.

6. Interviews to understand Non-Western EAs’ perception of cross cultural interactions they had with Western EAs [somewhat strong evidence]

Here’s the summary of a qualitative study I did (read more here):

And here are a few vignettes that I want to highlight. I recommend reading more here.

Limitations

1. There were too many variables to control for (e.g., social status differences, personality, interviewees’ social skills, my own interview skills, etc), and I expect the qualitative data I collected to be noisy.
2. There’s probably some selection bias--almost all of my interviewees are also EA conference attendees.
3. There’s also probably some survivorship bias--people who are most putoff by negative CCIs or who may have experienced the worst CCIs may have already left the EA community, and I should be reaching out to them instead.
4. The “Western” and “non-Western” categorisation can be somewhat arbitrary--there may be folks who are somewhere in the middle that were not selected for.
5. Without even considering how memory retrieval can sometimes be a hit-or-miss, SAEs are already hard to detect. I expect there to be misinterpretations of what actually happened by my interviewees (e.g., some people are just generally rude). And I don’t think I did a good job of steering interviewees towards giving me an empirical observation of what happened.
6. I’m an ethnic Chinese from South-eastern Asia and I noticed a very strong bias towards interviewing more folks from Southeast Asia and East Asia, which isn’t very representative of actual demographics in the EA community. Although I was somewhat semi-systemic with who I picked, it still surprised me.
7. There were potentially other kinds of information I didn’t search for that might be more decision-relevant to various EA stakeholders, like how bad a negative CCI was, how it affected their involvement in EA, what specific changes they would like to see, or the base rates of SAEs in large communities and compare that to EA.

Conclusion

Based on the evidence on CCIs I have collected so far, I believe that poor CCIs are likely to be a common but minor problem for most non-westerners.

• Why common?
  • 81% (17 out of 19) of the interviewees in this study experienced at least one broadly harmful CCI incident.
  • And even if one only selects for interviewees who experienced SAEs caused by other Western EAs, that number is pretty high: 48% (10 out of 19).
• Why minor?
  • Satisfaction scores (from EA Survey 2022 and EAG exit surveys in 2023) are quite high, and are in fact higher than what Western EAs scored.
  • From my interviews:
    • An overwhelming number of them thought their CCIs were almost all neutral or positive.
    • A slight majority of them do think that EA spaces are better for them compared to other spaces.
    • I got the "vibe" that most of the interviewees felt that their poor CCI experiences were pretty minor.
    • 1-2 interviewees had mentioned that they are considering distancing themselves from EA, but poor CCIs were only a minor complaint to them compared to, for example, feelings of disconnect brought on by EA’s elitist culture.

Recommendations

At the organisational or community level, I would recommend EA-aligned organisations and organisers to start or maintain interventions that are sensible or if the trade-offs are acceptable, like some of the ones listed here by AmAristizabal. However, I would not flag CCI issues as something to be heavily prioritised (moderate confidence).

At the individual level, I recommend:

1. Checking out some of the vignettes shared by non-Western EAs
2. Reading more examples of SAEs here
3. Reading some of my low-confidence takes on what non-Western and Western folks could do to improve CCIs

Further research

What more could be done here? Here are some possible paths that I’m more optimistic about (in no particular order):

1. Test out various interventions or theories of change that could reduce rates of poor CCIs and improve belongingness for non-Western folks.
   1. Someone I trust mentioned that they’re more optimistic about such work.
2. Interview folks working in organisations that have a lot of CCIs, are very mission focused, and have a somewhat of an elitist culture (e.g., United Nations, foreign affairs ministries, etc) and find out more about the best practices they implemented.
3. Conduct a larger survey among EAs to make more accurate the frequency of poor CCIs or SAEs, and the negative effects from such poor CCIs.
4. Search for and interview non-Western folks who were previously very engaged and had distanced themselves from EA (to counter survivorship bias).
5. Interview non-Westerners and learn how poor CCIs affected their involvement in EA, what specific changes they would like to see, and which existing efforts if missing will cause more poor CCIs.

I’m less optimistic about doing literature reviews on this topic, since two people I trust mentioned that they’re less optimistic about such work.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the following people for their valuable feedback (in alphabetical order): Catherine Low, Charlotte Darnell, Chin Ze Shen, Joseph Lemien, and Mo Putera.

And thank you to the EA Survey team from Rethink Priorities and the CEA events team for the statistics.

And thank you to all my anonymous interviewees for sharing your experiences with me.

Appendix

Definitions

Western and non-Western

The kind of CCI I’m most interested in is between Westerners and non-Westerners, but forming racial categorisations seems difficult.

Like what Scott Alexander proposes here, I buy into the idea that a person’s ethnic identity could be mapped into a space that has multiple axes like: genetics, culture, language, geography, etc. So, the more Western a person is the closer they are to the centre of this space, and the more non-Western a person is the further they are from the centre.

This makes categorisations more nuanced, but also more challenging. For example, the compromise I made, especially when it came to getting statistics, was to only use these three factors in figuring out how Western or non-Western a person is:

1. Nationality, i.e., a person’s primary citizenship
2. Current residence, i.e., a person’s current primary location of residence
3. Racial identity, i.e., a person’s race they identify with most (e.g., Black, White, etc)

For my specific investigation, I propose that a Westerner is someone who:

1. Has a nationality in countries that are typically associated as Western.
2. Is primarily living in a country that is typically associated as Western.
3. Is White or mixed-race

Using the United Nations’ M49 geoscheme, I labelled countries from the following geographical subregions as “Western”: Australia and New Zealand, Northern America, Northern Europe, Southern Europe, and Western Europe.

Subtle acts of exclusions (SAEs)

I decided to use the term, “subtle acts of exclusion” from Jana and Baran’s book of the same title, because I find it easy to understand and convey. To make their term a bit more specific, I extended it to “subtle acts of exclusion that are any one of prejudicial, unjust, or both” (but I’ll keep the original SAE acronym as it is). What do I mean?

• Subtle: You might have experienced some social situation in the past where you’ve received mixed or conflicting cues (either verbal or non-verbal) that caused you to have two or more interpretations of what happened.  
  • So you get the “vibe” that a person just did something that makes you feel excluded, but you’re also unsure whether they meant to exclude you.
  • This is different from the more overt kinds of discrimination, e.g., lynching, using slurs, etc, where it’s pretty clear they mean to hurt or discriminate against you.
• Exclusion: I’m pointing to actions that signal to someone that they don’t belong in a group, or they’re not socially accepted in a group.
• Prejudicial, unjust, or both: I think some acts of exclusion are or can be good (e.g., I prefer to hang out with people who can fulfil my need for respect), but the acts of exclusion I’m pointing to are generally “bad”:
  • The exclusion is caused by prejudice or preconceived opinions that are not true (e.g., I exclude people with green hair because they are known to steal peanuts); or
  • The exclusion is done unjustly or in ways that morally bad (e.g., I exclude people with blue hair because I believe their existence is evil); or
  • The exclusion is done with prejudice and unjustly.

I also think it’s important to be clear about a few things regarding SAEs:

• SAEs can happen either intentionally or unintentionally, and either consciously or unconsciously. In fact, I’m generally more interested in SAEs that are unintentional and unconsciously, since this is the type that I think is happening more often in EA settings.
  • I’m also guessing such SAEs are outputs of our fast, automatic, instinctual, heuristic-like decision making process (i.e., System 1). Some folks may also point to the phenomenon of implicit bias.
• In its original definition, SAEs are done by someone else unto a victim. However, for this piece of writing, I’ve stretched the definition to also include SAEs that are done by the victim unto the victim themself.
• In the context of this writing, I’m using SAE as a broader term that contains the more academic but less intuitive-at-a-glance terms: microaggression and internalised racism. If you’re interested to know more, I’ve compiled a list of examples and nonexamples of microaggressions and internalised racism here.