HCL+PrioR mtg. Erez Yoeli. Thursday 4/30 12:30pm-2:00pm ET
Antonio Alonso Arechar
Best regards,
Antonio
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When do more lives matter more? Consequentialist intuitions across contexts, individuals, and cultures in a global moral game
MyGoodness is a ‘serious’ game in which participants make a series of forced choices between two charitable donations. The game uses a conjoint design that varies features of each charity, including the number of people helped, recipients’ gender, age, location, relationship to the donor (stranger, relative, self), aid domain (e.g., water, nutrition, assault), charity identity, and whether information must be actively uncovered. The game was played by over 250,000 individuals in more than 200 countries, yielding nearly 3 million donation decisions.
Using these data, we construct a novel measure of consequentialism—how much weight individuals place on the number of lives saved—and show how it varies across decisions, individuals, and cultures. At the decision level, we find that consequentialism is ‘comparative’. In direct comparisons, participants are sensitive to the number of lives saved, even as they express a willingness to trade off lives saved to help recipients with particular attributes, such as location, gender, or age. However: participants are no more consequentialist for recipients with these attributes; consequentism falls when lives saved are varied across decisions instead of within decisions; and participants are almost completely insensitive to the financial cost of saving lives. At the individual level, we test whether more consequentialist participants also selectively avoid information about outcomes. At the cultural level, we document systematic variation in consequentialism and relate it to national indicators of charitability, collectivism, tightness, and WEIRDness.
We interpret these findings in light of existing research on moral judgment and effective giving, offering new insights into when—and for whom—more lives matter more.