Note: I suggest not reading this comment until you've taken the survey.
Maybe some of this is intentional, but I found this really hard to answer. I appreciate your work with the definitions but they don't seem to point to clear categories to me. Eg you said "NON-ALTRUISTIC makes little determined effort to help others, beyond voting, ordinary kindness and decency to those around them, impulse donations at the grocery store checkout, and similar".
But if you make impulse donations at the checkout, that means you donate less than 1% of your income to charity. If you use someone's pronouns or avoid slurs out of ordinary kindness and decency, you're trying to avoid using problematic language. If you throw something in the recycling box because that's what everyone else does and you don't want to look inconsiderate, you're recycling. All three of these are in the definition that suggests this makes someone altruistic, and I'm pretty sure I don't know anyone who doesn't do them.
Also I feel like volunteering intermittently is a much much stronger signal of someone's intentions to be kind, compared to recycling or trying to avoid problematic language.
I have ended up ticking 'altruistic' for every single group mentioned including myself, even though I started off thinking I would qualify as very altruistic for having taken the 10% pledge. It doesn't really match my feeling, but the definitions you provided boxed me in.
Additionally I felt silly filling out options like 'Your siblings', 'Your primary romantic partner', 'Your religious leader' etc when those are people who don't exist in my case. I guess you didn't want to give people an 'n/a' option in case they used it as a proxy for 'I don't know how to evaluate this group of people'.
I agree that the division between ALTRUISTIC and NON-ALTRUISTIC is pretty difficult to apply, for the reasons you mention. I based most of my answers on my judgement that the median American is probably ALTRUISTIC, but it could easily be the case that they’re actually NON-ALTRUISTIC depending on your interpretation of the ambiguity with impulse donations and “ordinary kindness and decency”.
Agreed. In addition, I feel like "being heavily involved in a church" and "being a missionary" aren't really fairly placed. Virtually every adult mormon man and most women have been missionaries, for example. Catholics and Muslims, literally the two biggest religious groups in the world, are supposed to donate 10% to charity, their church.
Also I'm 22, my friend group is broke, still students and also non-religious. Maybe we will donate more when we get real adult job.
Maybe this is just the bitter atheist in me talking though.
The survey seems to be partly measuring something like "of those who live in a context where they are told they should be active in their religion, how many actually are active in that religion?" I agree that will tend to bias towards measuring religious people as more altruistic, since e.g. secular political protests and donations aren't as heavily encouraged as religious donations/missions in their respective contexts.
Yeah I also had this problem! I know several vegetarians and several people who donate 1-10% of their income, but none who had both of those and a third thing.
Seems strange that it's quite easy to meet the criteria for extremely altruistic without meeting the criteria for very altruistic. Like you just donate a kidney OR be a foster parent and do nothing else. It seems worse than donating 9%, being vegan, AND volunteering 10 hours per week.
I dunno, I agree with Ozy's categories here. I do believe that donating a kidney is waaaay more altruistic than donating+veganism+volunteering. You can't undo it, and it will make your life slightly worse for the rest of your life. In contrast, you can stop donating, being vegan, or volunteering at any time!
On the other hand, you could say I'm making a conscious decision every day to be vegan, whereas donating a kidney is only ~6 months of saying "yes" (in the evaluation process) and then it's over and you never have to make that decision again... buuut I still like my own argument better 😅
I found guessing between Very and Baseline pretty difficult; I would guess that a lot of people I interact with have 1%+ charitable donations and some altruistic considerations in career choice, but it's hard to know what would count for the third item or whether it's met.
By these definitions, though, I'd guess that the groups are sized Baseline > Very > Non > Extreme, with the vast majority of nons being mediocre rather than evil.
Really needs an N/A option!! I don't have siblings and don't currently attend religious services so I put non-altruistic for them but this will surely skew the results, there aren't That few only children and religiously unobservant people
This was hard! I'm worried that I'm way too uncharitable, my best guess in most categories was Non-Altruistic, but I get so little signal for a lot of these that I really wouldn't know.
There's a very non-zero chance I am actually the Worst Person and those people I'm not super close to are in quietly volunteering/praying/donating.
I guess I'm projecting just a few people onto a lot more people, so I at the risk of complicating the survey, I would have felt better if I could indicate when I'm guessing and when I'm pretty sure.
you've got 'ALTRUISTIC' for people who meet three of the lowest standard-things and 'NON-ALTRUISTIC' for people who do no more than the needful; doesn't this imply a 'SEMI-ALTRUISTIC' category for people who do one or two of those things, or do these people just get lumped in with NON-ALTRUISTIC because they don't do three?
As jvb says, you need an N/A; I don't have siblings or go to services, and I have no idea how much my teachers donated to charity and genuinely have no clue what my favorite authors do. (I've stopped reading fiction but I can think back to the old list I was keeping.) As you say you can skip it but then if I accidentally click one (easy to fat-finger on my phone) I have to restart the whole survey.
You also might want to differentiate between 'NON-ALTRUISTIC' and 'EGOISTIC' or 'SOCIOPATHIC'; a lot of people don't even bother with "voting, ordinary kindness and decency to those around them, impulse donations at the grocery store checkout, and similar". Indeed, I myself often fail at ordinary kindness and decency and impulse donations at the store checkout! There's a difference between, say, Joe Average and Jeffrey Epstein.
I also wonder about the 'Elmer Gantry problem' (or SBF for you kids) with people whose professed altruism doesn't match their actual actions.
I don't want to put in another group because I want to keep the groups large enough that there's some chance people know which group their acquaintances are in.
My first draft of the survey kept the groups very vague, but my test audience wanted to know specifically how many things you had to do to be VERY ALTRUISTIC. Unfortunately, if the definitions are more specific, they will end up classifying some people a way that some respondents would prefer not to classify them.
There is objectively a difference between Joe Average and Jeffrey Epstein but there is not a difference in terms of my research question.
Since he gave ~10% of his income to charity every year, was heavily involved in political activism, and was more than happy to let young women sleep over on his property, I think we can safely, uncontroversially conclude that Epstein would be considered VERY ALTRUISTIC, and that there is a strong moral argument that Joe Average should try to be more like Jeffrey Epstein!
Gotcha. (And yes, I can definitely see EA people wanting to know what makes you VERY ALTRUISTIC. I've dealt with enough rationalists.) All right, guess me and everyone I know is NON-ALTRUISTIC. Useful as a data point I guess.
Yup, I find it a bit unfair that someone who donates and volunteers is only baseline because they don't do a third thing. And yes, MANY people do not do the actions still attributed to the non-altruist.
One of the questions asks me about the median value of a set of two (my parents). One is ‘altruistic’ and one is ‘NON-ALTRUISTIC’ which are categories right next to each other. I think it should be clearer how to answer in this case.
I think you pick the midpoint when taking the median of two: if both are on the high ends of their categories, pick the higher, if they're both on the lower, pick the lower. If it's really really close, go with your gut.
Tbh, the definitions seem wonky to me, and I ended up not completing the survey due to a combination of that and the fact that there was a lot of ambiguity about which people I know do/don't fit into some of the listed categories.
Defining altruism as the desire to help others seems fine, but then the specific levels of altruism are defined in terms of having *actually done* things that help others, not in terms of *desire* to do so (and those could be very different). Some of the specific examples measure things other than altruism (e.g. becoming a missionary could measure altruism, or it could measure belonging to a religion where becoming a missionary is the default expectation) and some of them seem inconsistent with the level of altruism that they're supposed to represent (e.g. "working more than forty hours a week at a stressful and demanding job that they believe helps others" seems not *that* extreme to me, and I would pretty confidently predict that the number of people who have done it is quite a bit higher than the number of people who have given up their car for environmental reasons, even though the latter is presented as an example of a lower tier of altruism than the former).
More broadly, defining degrees of altruism in terms of specific examples of altruism seems unnecessarily confusing. If you've defined altruism decently well (which you have), then you can just define the levels of altruism with percentiles (e.g. extremely altruistic = 95th-100th, very altruistic = 75th-95th, altruistic = 50th-75th, non-altruistic = 0th-50th) and specify what population those percentiles are relative to (e.g. everyone in the world, everyone in your country, or whatever).
1. What should people do if they do not currently have a given category in their life, but had it in the past, for example a boss, co-workers, or a romantic partner? Should they leave the category blank, or complete it based on the last available instance, even if that was many years ago? If using a past instance, should it be the most recent one, the longest-lasting one, or something else?
2. I think some of the definitions are off, even if I understand the intended gradation. In particular, placing foster parents in the same category as people who donate more than 10% of their income or donate a kidney seems like a category error. While foster parents are often altruistically motivated, they are also frequently driven by practical, logistical, and financial considerations. Grouping foster parents with kidney donors feels misplaced.
3. I am unsure about the religious categories. It seems to me that many religious actions may not be driven primarily by altruism, but by obedience to religious commandments or a desire to serve God. For example, praying for people may be motivated more by religious duty than by helping others directly. However, I do not understand religiosity from the inside, so I may be mistaken.
Well, that was absurd. Several categories had zero people in them, most of the other categories I have absolutely no information on, and the definitions were weird. Whereas 11% is "EXTREMELY ALTRUISTIC", if someone donates 10% to "charity" and does nothing else altruistic, they don't seem to qualify for either VERY ALTRUISTIC or ALTRUISTIC. (In my case, my parents and much of my extended family are Mormon, so they are probably in this mystery zone, with the "charity" being the Church.)
I was rather surprised by the definition of "extremely altruistic" as including anyone demonstrating the following: "becoming a foster parent, becoming a missionary, founding a charity".
The charity one is a bit of a cheap shot by me, because lots of things get charitable status when they don't deserve them, but that's an issue with the system. But can't the other two be done out of normal self-interest? Like: I want to foster kids because I can't have kids and I wish I could? Or: I want to be a missionary so I'll get into the good afterlife instead of the bad one?
imo this skews way too highly towards differentiating 99th percentile altruistic people from 90th percentile altruistic people. I ended up saying "not altruistic" for almost every category, and I barely qualify as altruistic, despite having donated stem cells, 10% of my income every year, etc
Me too, I answered "altruistic" for the vast majority of the people on the periphery that I have met. Though maybe that reflects on my circles growing up, which heavily skewed towards not-highly-effective non-profit/volunteer groups.
Note: I suggest not reading this comment until you've taken the survey.
Maybe some of this is intentional, but I found this really hard to answer. I appreciate your work with the definitions but they don't seem to point to clear categories to me. Eg you said "NON-ALTRUISTIC makes little determined effort to help others, beyond voting, ordinary kindness and decency to those around them, impulse donations at the grocery store checkout, and similar".
But if you make impulse donations at the checkout, that means you donate less than 1% of your income to charity. If you use someone's pronouns or avoid slurs out of ordinary kindness and decency, you're trying to avoid using problematic language. If you throw something in the recycling box because that's what everyone else does and you don't want to look inconsiderate, you're recycling. All three of these are in the definition that suggests this makes someone altruistic, and I'm pretty sure I don't know anyone who doesn't do them.
Also I feel like volunteering intermittently is a much much stronger signal of someone's intentions to be kind, compared to recycling or trying to avoid problematic language.
I have ended up ticking 'altruistic' for every single group mentioned including myself, even though I started off thinking I would qualify as very altruistic for having taken the 10% pledge. It doesn't really match my feeling, but the definitions you provided boxed me in.
Additionally I felt silly filling out options like 'Your siblings', 'Your primary romantic partner', 'Your religious leader' etc when those are people who don't exist in my case. I guess you didn't want to give people an 'n/a' option in case they used it as a proxy for 'I don't know how to evaluate this group of people'.
You can skip lines that don't apply to you, as it says in the survey.
Thanks. I nearly couldn't find it:
"If a category doesn't apply to you, skip it. DO NOT SKIP JUST BECAUSE YOU DON'T KNOW. MAKE YOUR BEST GUESS."
The bold part after it distracted me and I didn't notice it! Sorry for missing that.
Oops yeah I answered all of them even if they didn't apply
I agree that the division between ALTRUISTIC and NON-ALTRUISTIC is pretty difficult to apply, for the reasons you mention. I based most of my answers on my judgement that the median American is probably ALTRUISTIC, but it could easily be the case that they’re actually NON-ALTRUISTIC depending on your interpretation of the ambiguity with impulse donations and “ordinary kindness and decency”.
Agreed. In addition, I feel like "being heavily involved in a church" and "being a missionary" aren't really fairly placed. Virtually every adult mormon man and most women have been missionaries, for example. Catholics and Muslims, literally the two biggest religious groups in the world, are supposed to donate 10% to charity, their church.
Also I'm 22, my friend group is broke, still students and also non-religious. Maybe we will donate more when we get real adult job.
Maybe this is just the bitter atheist in me talking though.
The survey seems to be partly measuring something like "of those who live in a context where they are told they should be active in their religion, how many actually are active in that religion?" I agree that will tend to bias towards measuring religious people as more altruistic, since e.g. secular political protests and donations aren't as heavily encouraged as religious donations/missions in their respective contexts.
Yeah I also had this problem! I know several vegetarians and several people who donate 1-10% of their income, but none who had both of those and a third thing.
I also found that basically every category would be categorized as altruistic.
Seems strange that it's quite easy to meet the criteria for extremely altruistic without meeting the criteria for very altruistic. Like you just donate a kidney OR be a foster parent and do nothing else. It seems worse than donating 9%, being vegan, AND volunteering 10 hours per week.
I dunno, I agree with Ozy's categories here. I do believe that donating a kidney is waaaay more altruistic than donating+veganism+volunteering. You can't undo it, and it will make your life slightly worse for the rest of your life. In contrast, you can stop donating, being vegan, or volunteering at any time!
On the other hand, you could say I'm making a conscious decision every day to be vegan, whereas donating a kidney is only ~6 months of saying "yes" (in the evaluation process) and then it's over and you never have to make that decision again... buuut I still like my own argument better 😅
I found guessing between Very and Baseline pretty difficult; I would guess that a lot of people I interact with have 1%+ charitable donations and some altruistic considerations in career choice, but it's hard to know what would count for the third item or whether it's met.
By these definitions, though, I'd guess that the groups are sized Baseline > Very > Non > Extreme, with the vast majority of nons being mediocre rather than evil.
Really needs an N/A option!! I don't have siblings and don't currently attend religious services so I put non-altruistic for them but this will surely skew the results, there aren't That few only children and religiously unobservant people
Apparently you can skip those lines.
This was hard! I'm worried that I'm way too uncharitable, my best guess in most categories was Non-Altruistic, but I get so little signal for a lot of these that I really wouldn't know.
There's a very non-zero chance I am actually the Worst Person and those people I'm not super close to are in quietly volunteering/praying/donating.
I guess I'm projecting just a few people onto a lot more people, so I at the risk of complicating the survey, I would have felt better if I could indicate when I'm guessing and when I'm pretty sure.
I am interested in perceptions more than in reality!
Some thoughts:
you've got 'ALTRUISTIC' for people who meet three of the lowest standard-things and 'NON-ALTRUISTIC' for people who do no more than the needful; doesn't this imply a 'SEMI-ALTRUISTIC' category for people who do one or two of those things, or do these people just get lumped in with NON-ALTRUISTIC because they don't do three?
As jvb says, you need an N/A; I don't have siblings or go to services, and I have no idea how much my teachers donated to charity and genuinely have no clue what my favorite authors do. (I've stopped reading fiction but I can think back to the old list I was keeping.) As you say you can skip it but then if I accidentally click one (easy to fat-finger on my phone) I have to restart the whole survey.
You also might want to differentiate between 'NON-ALTRUISTIC' and 'EGOISTIC' or 'SOCIOPATHIC'; a lot of people don't even bother with "voting, ordinary kindness and decency to those around them, impulse donations at the grocery store checkout, and similar". Indeed, I myself often fail at ordinary kindness and decency and impulse donations at the store checkout! There's a difference between, say, Joe Average and Jeffrey Epstein.
I also wonder about the 'Elmer Gantry problem' (or SBF for you kids) with people whose professed altruism doesn't match their actual actions.
Anyway, should be interesting to read!
I don't want to put in another group because I want to keep the groups large enough that there's some chance people know which group their acquaintances are in.
My first draft of the survey kept the groups very vague, but my test audience wanted to know specifically how many things you had to do to be VERY ALTRUISTIC. Unfortunately, if the definitions are more specific, they will end up classifying some people a way that some respondents would prefer not to classify them.
There is objectively a difference between Joe Average and Jeffrey Epstein but there is not a difference in terms of my research question.
Since he gave ~10% of his income to charity every year, was heavily involved in political activism, and was more than happy to let young women sleep over on his property, I think we can safely, uncontroversially conclude that Epstein would be considered VERY ALTRUISTIC, and that there is a strong moral argument that Joe Average should try to be more like Jeffrey Epstein!
There's your Elmer Gantry problem!
Also, like Epstein, Joe Average shouldn't kill himself.
Gotcha. (And yes, I can definitely see EA people wanting to know what makes you VERY ALTRUISTIC. I've dealt with enough rationalists.) All right, guess me and everyone I know is NON-ALTRUISTIC. Useful as a data point I guess.
Yup, I find it a bit unfair that someone who donates and volunteers is only baseline because they don't do a third thing. And yes, MANY people do not do the actions still attributed to the non-altruist.
One of the questions asks me about the median value of a set of two (my parents). One is ‘altruistic’ and one is ‘NON-ALTRUISTIC’ which are categories right next to each other. I think it should be clearer how to answer in this case.
I think you pick the midpoint when taking the median of two: if both are on the high ends of their categories, pick the higher, if they're both on the lower, pick the lower. If it's really really close, go with your gut.
Tbh, the definitions seem wonky to me, and I ended up not completing the survey due to a combination of that and the fact that there was a lot of ambiguity about which people I know do/don't fit into some of the listed categories.
Defining altruism as the desire to help others seems fine, but then the specific levels of altruism are defined in terms of having *actually done* things that help others, not in terms of *desire* to do so (and those could be very different). Some of the specific examples measure things other than altruism (e.g. becoming a missionary could measure altruism, or it could measure belonging to a religion where becoming a missionary is the default expectation) and some of them seem inconsistent with the level of altruism that they're supposed to represent (e.g. "working more than forty hours a week at a stressful and demanding job that they believe helps others" seems not *that* extreme to me, and I would pretty confidently predict that the number of people who have done it is quite a bit higher than the number of people who have given up their car for environmental reasons, even though the latter is presented as an example of a lower tier of altruism than the former).
More broadly, defining degrees of altruism in terms of specific examples of altruism seems unnecessarily confusing. If you've defined altruism decently well (which you have), then you can just define the levels of altruism with percentiles (e.g. extremely altruistic = 95th-100th, very altruistic = 75th-95th, altruistic = 50th-75th, non-altruistic = 0th-50th) and specify what population those percentiles are relative to (e.g. everyone in the world, everyone in your country, or whatever).
1. What should people do if they do not currently have a given category in their life, but had it in the past, for example a boss, co-workers, or a romantic partner? Should they leave the category blank, or complete it based on the last available instance, even if that was many years ago? If using a past instance, should it be the most recent one, the longest-lasting one, or something else?
2. I think some of the definitions are off, even if I understand the intended gradation. In particular, placing foster parents in the same category as people who donate more than 10% of their income or donate a kidney seems like a category error. While foster parents are often altruistically motivated, they are also frequently driven by practical, logistical, and financial considerations. Grouping foster parents with kidney donors feels misplaced.
3. I am unsure about the religious categories. It seems to me that many religious actions may not be driven primarily by altruism, but by obedience to religious commandments or a desire to serve God. For example, praying for people may be motivated more by religious duty than by helping others directly. However, I do not understand religiosity from the inside, so I may be mistaken.
Well, that was absurd. Several categories had zero people in them, most of the other categories I have absolutely no information on, and the definitions were weird. Whereas 11% is "EXTREMELY ALTRUISTIC", if someone donates 10% to "charity" and does nothing else altruistic, they don't seem to qualify for either VERY ALTRUISTIC or ALTRUISTIC. (In my case, my parents and much of my extended family are Mormon, so they are probably in this mystery zone, with the "charity" being the Church.)
Can we discuss the definitions here?
I was rather surprised by the definition of "extremely altruistic" as including anyone demonstrating the following: "becoming a foster parent, becoming a missionary, founding a charity".
The charity one is a bit of a cheap shot by me, because lots of things get charitable status when they don't deserve them, but that's an issue with the system. But can't the other two be done out of normal self-interest? Like: I want to foster kids because I can't have kids and I wish I could? Or: I want to be a missionary so I'll get into the good afterlife instead of the bad one?
imo this skews way too highly towards differentiating 99th percentile altruistic people from 90th percentile altruistic people. I ended up saying "not altruistic" for almost every category, and I barely qualify as altruistic, despite having donated stem cells, 10% of my income every year, etc
Huh interesting. I feel like I know a lot of people that
- Try to avoid using problematic language
- Recycle
- Donate a little bit, volunteer, and/or go to an occasional protest etc.
So I answered altruistic for a lot of categories.
Me too, I answered "altruistic" for the vast majority of the people on the periphery that I have met. Though maybe that reflects on my circles growing up, which heavily skewed towards not-highly-effective non-profit/volunteer groups.
If I donated some money once, does that count as donating "less than 1% of my income"?
Oh also you mentioned volenteering and I wanted to ask - is this study solely about human-focused altruism, or should animal-based volenteering count?
I'm not Ozy, but I have to imagine animal-based volunteering absolutely counts
You need a not applicable box for only children re siblings
You can skip those lines.
(and various other groups that may be the empty set)