Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Dr. Joshua Greene on Why Effective Altruism Is a Powerful Giving Multiplier EP 221

Episode Date: November 29, 2022

In honor of Giving Tuesday 2022, today I talk to Joshua Greene, a Professor of Psychology and a member of the Center for Brain Science faculty at Harvard University, about the power of effective altruism and the concept of the giving multiplier, which is the idea that the more people donate to highly effective charities, the more good that can be done. To learn more and make a donation through Giving Multiplier, visit https://givingmultiplier.org/passionstruck. What We Discuss with Dr. Joshua Greene About Effective Altruism and the Giving Multiplier In this eye-opening talk, Dr. Greene discusses the importance of effective giving through the psychology of effective altruism. He offers potent examples of how altruism has changed the world for the better and why we should all be more altruistic. This important talk will change how you think about giving back and the power of altruism in the world. Giving Multiplier was created by Dr Lucius Caviola and Prof Joshua Greene. Their research examines the factors influencing charitable giving, intending to help people make wiser charitable giving decisions.  Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://passionstruck.com/dr-joshua-greene-power-of-effective-altruism/  Brought to you by BiOptimizers and American Giant. --► For information about advertisers and promo codes, go to: https://passionstruck.com/deals/  --► Prefer to watch this interview: https://youtu.be/p-mu3GuODEs  Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter or Instagram handle so we can thank you personally! --► Subscribe to Our YouTube Channel Here: https://www.youtube.com/c/JohnRMiles Want to find your purpose in life? I provide my six simple steps to achieving it - passionstruck.com/5-simple-steps-to-find-your-passion-in-life/ Did you hear my interview with Robin Sharma, one of the top personal mastery and leadership coaches in the world and a multiple-time number-one New York Times best-selling author? Catch up with episode 209: Robin Sharma on Why Changing the World Starts by Changing Ourselves ===== FOLLOW ON THE SOCIALS ===== * Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/passion_struck_podcast * Gear: https://www.zazzle.com/store/passion_sruck_podcast Learn more about John: https://johnrmiles.com/   

Coming up next on the Passion Struck Podcast, we are naturally inclined to pay attention to and focus on the things that are closest to us geographically and culturally and socially. And so there's kind of this mismatch between where our feelings naturally go and where we really have the most opportunity to do good. Welcome to Passion Struck. Hi, I'm your host, John Armiles. And on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips tips and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on

Fridays. We have long-form interviews the rest of the week with guest-ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become PassionStruck. Hello everyone and welcome back to episode 221 of passion struck. Recently ranked is one of the top 40 most inspirational podcasts of 2022. And thank you to each and every one of you who comes back weekly to listen and learn, and to live better, be better, and impact the world. And if you're new to this show,

thank you so much for being here, or you would just like to introduce it, who are a friend or family member, we now have episode starter packs, which are questions of your favorite episodes that we organize and convenient topic to give any new listener a great way to get acquainted to everything we do here on the show. Either go to Spotify or passionstruck.com slash starter packs to get started. And if you love today's episode, we would so appreciate it if you gave us a five-star rating. Those ratings and reviews go such a long way in helping us expand our reach

and improve the overall rating for the show. In today's episode, I will be speaking with Harvard professor, Dr. Joshua Green, who is an expert on moral judgment and decision-making. The goal of today's episode is to explore how people see charitable donations, should these views be challenged, and would the effectiveness of charities raise greater funds for the charity sector in the future.

We will explore the psychology of effective altruism, and how most people give as a matter of personal preference, which favors decisions based on personal appeal rather than effectiveness. We will then explore the importance of effectiveness and why effective charities, ones that save the most lives and improve lives the most, are 100 times more effective than typical charities. Furthermore, we'll explore why ordinary people have the power to save and transform people's lives through effective given and how we are beginning to understand the factors that encourage and discourage such choices. This episode is being released on Giving Tuesday, a day that focuses on giving back following Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Joshua D. Green is a professor of psychology and a member of the Center for Brain Science Valpility at Harvard University. Dr. Green is the author of Moral Tribes, Emotion, Reason, and the gap between us and them. His honors include the Stanton Prize from the Society for Philosophy and Psychology and Harvard's Rosalyn Aparism Award for Teaching. He has been voted as favorite teacher by several of Harvard College's graduating classes. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your

journey, creating an intentional life. Now, let that journey begin. I am absolutely ecstatic to welcome Dr. Joshua Green to the PassionStruck podcast. Welcome, Josh. Oh, thanks so much for having me here. I'm excited to talk to you today. Well, I'm excited too because you're one of the most renowned experts on the psychology and neuroscience of moral judgment. And I wanted to start out today by asking you, how did those studies lead you to explore the psychology of effective altruism or effective giving?

Well, so I came to psychology and neuroscience as a philosopher and my degrees, both my undergrad degree and my PhD are both in philosophy and I was interested in understanding what's really right and wrong and why and I from the start was partial to a school of thought known as consequentialism or Utilitarianism. I really don't like the name Utilitarianism And it has a lot to do with psychology, which is why I'll explain but that's a more common name but the idea is what's ultimately right and wrong is That which produces the most overall happiness the most best quality of well-being and reduces suffering the most It's about the quality of people's experience and the more good experience, the better, the less suffering the better. And that's an idea that

always made sense to me. But there are certain kind of objections to that idea, having to do with things well, is it okay if you kill one person to say five people and sometimes it seems like it is and sometimes it seems like it isn't. And I spent a lot of time examining these kinds of moral dilemmas, sometimes known as trolley problems. And that was a lot of my early work. And that was interesting from a philosophical point of view to try to understand the psychology behind these tough cases. And it was also interesting, I think,

philosophically, to try to get underneath our intuitions. More recently, I wanted to get a little bit more practical and a little bit more applied and try to take some of the things that we've learned not just to study, into a lot of people, and understand how we can do that better. And what are the challenges and obstacles to getting ourselves to behavior and ways to make decisions that are not only good for ourselves, but as good as possible for the world. And so that led me to, among other things, this research on charitable giving. to among other things this research on charitable giving. Yeah, and I, another question on those lines. Why is whether or not it's good to give more effectively or to give it all a moral question?

Well, so humans are not naturally impartial, right? And humans, what we care about, is very much bound up with our experience. So you can think of sort of ordinary human social life as living within a set of concentric circles, right? There's you and then there's the people you're closest to, your family and your closest friends, and then there's the people in various sets of overlapping communities that can be the people where you live or people who share your religion or other interests, the people in your nation, right? And then there can be the whole world full of humans

or even other species, right? You might care about the well-being of animals and these days people are speculating about the well-being of artificial beings if artificial intelligence keeps advancing at its current pace, right? And this idea of these expanding circles or concentric circles goes back to one of my sort of leading lights, the philosopher Peter Singer who argued that over time, and then we started living in larger groups and interacting with larger groups, but always with the possibility of fighting

with the people outside the group. And we're getting closer and closer to this ideal of having full moral regard for everybody. And we're getting closer and closer to this ideal of having full moral regard for everybody. And we're getting closer and closer to this ideal of having full moral regard for everybody. And we're getting closer and closer to this ideal of having full moral regard for everybody. Right. And so that's where I see this research and that's what giving multipliers about now why is this a challenge. when it comes to our altruism, to our charity, to support causes that are personally meaningful to us

and therefore emotionally sailing. And this is certainly true for me. Wife and I, when we do our charitable giving at the end of the year, we want to support our local schools and we want to support the Boston Food Bank, which helps people in the Boston area near where we live, right? But then there are also these enormous opportunities to do good. But if you're a relatively

affluent person living in a country like the United States, the greatest opportunities to help people are typically outside of the United States, just because the money goes so much farther there. To give an example that comes from the philosopher and researcher Toby Ord, to pay for training and keeping a guide dog to help a blind person in the United States can cost something like $50,000 or more, whereas a surgery that can prevent someone from becoming blind due to a disease called tracoma, that can cost less than $100, right?

If you direct donations towards tracoma, that can cost less than $100, right? If you direct donations towards tricoma surgery, as opposed to guide dogs in the United States, you can do something like 100, maybe even a thousand times as much good in terms of the number of people that you're helping to the same extent. Now, this is not to say that we shouldn't care about blind people in the United States. I absolutely think that we should, but I think it's at least worth glacing some value on the causes that have these incredibly high impacts. And so what I've been thinking about is this tension between the personally meaningful cause, the emotionally salient cause, and the one that really has enormous impact, and that's

what we've been working on. And I guess we'll get to it soon. That's what our Giving Multiplier project is about. Okay, you gave a great lead in there for the rest of the discussion today, and I'm gonna start tackling this in different pieces. The first is I'm gonna go back to Peter Singer, and then one of the papers that you wrote, Peter Singer poses the question,

is it morally acceptable to allow a child to drown if the person going in to save them does not want to ruin their clothes. And Singer argues that to be the wrong conclusion. But then he went on to argue that affluent people have a comparable moral obligation to save the lives of distant children. And while some found that argument convincing,

why did many more find it unsettling? And how does that relate to effective given? Yeah, so I think in my experience, and I've talked about this with hundreds, maybe thousands of students and other people, almost everybody gets the initial argument. So just to rehearse this in a little bit more detail, right? You're walking along and you're walking by upon

and there's a child who's drowning there and you could save the child, but you'd have to wait in with the nice clothes that you happen to be wearing and depending on how fancy a dresser you are, that could be a couple of hundred dollars or a lot more, right, some amount of money that you could afford to give up, but that's not a huge amount for you. You could save that child lot more, right? Some amount of money that you could afford to give up, but that's not a huge amount for you.

You could save that child's life, right? And almost everybody agrees that you should wait in and save the child, even at that financial cost to yourself, right? And then the question is, all right. So first, is that comparable to a child who is drowning in poverty, so to speak, on the other side of the world. A child who needs food or needs badly needs medicine that can protect them from intestinal worms, for example, or other things that might be even more life-threatening malaria, right? And you might say, well, in the case of the drowning child, you're the one who can save that person, whereas with these children who are on the other side of the world, lots of people could, right? And then singer cleverly says, well, what if there are a bunch of other people standing around the pond?

And for some reason, they're not doing anything. Now is it okay for you to let the child drown? And almost everybody says, no, the fact that other people could help, but are not, doesn't mean that it's okay for you to not help, right? And you go through all of the kind of quick arguments that come to your mind about why these two things are different and singer does a pretty good job I think of batting all those down. And then where I think a lot of people are left is,

okay, but where does this lead, right? That is there are, you know, for practical purposes, there are infinitely many. There are more children or people in great need all around the world than you personally are ever going to be able to help or to save. So then the question is, well where do you stop? Are you allowed to take a nice vacation

instead of the cheapest possible vacation that you can take? Are you allowed to wear the clothes that you like instead of the simplest clothes that will keep you warm, right? And there's no very clean, easy answer to that question. And I think that that makes a lot of people feel uncomfortable, right? And if you ask Peter Singer himself about this, he's not a fanatic, you know, what he'll say is just do your best. Think of it as like a personal best kind of thing, right? Where one way to think about it is with how you manage your exercise or you manage your diet, right? You can imagine the physiologically

optimal diet, right? Or the physiologically optimal exercise regime. But if you try to do that and it's way too much for you, right, then you're not going to stick to it and you're going to say the hell with it and you're going to be worse than if you tried to do something more moderate, right? So I think his approach to mine as well is try to do a little bit more good for the people who are in the greatest need in the world and the most helpable. And once that becomes comfortable or normal, then you could see if you can crank it up a bit. But to go back to your question of why is this controversial, we have these competing motivations to use our resources

for ourselves and for the people we care most about. And then when it comes to altruism and charity, we're more drawn to things that are closer to us. And so there's a tension there, but I think it is worthwhile for all of us to consider just how much good we can do and to not feel too bad about it if we don't do the absolute most that we in principle could do because we're human and we're not born to be perfectly altruistic and perfectly impartial in our altruism.

Okay, well that leads to the question, why is charitable giving less effective than it could be? is charitable, giving less effective than it could be. Yeah, well, I think the world is big and the world is complicated, right? And it just happens that some ways of solving problems are just much more effective than others. And there are some places where the problems are just much more amenable to low-cost solutions, right? For example, to give another example, Helen Keller International provides vitamin A supplements that can do an enormous amount of good and even save somebody's life. And at extremely low cost, right, for pennies or dollars per person. And there's just not anything like that in a country like

the United States where you get so much value for a dollar of spending. So it's just what's out there in the world and what are the solutions that are available? That's in the objective side of what's out there in the world. And then on the subjective side, we go back to what I said before where we are naturally inclined to pay attention to and focus on the things that are closest to us geographically and culturally and socially. And so there's this mismatch between where our feelings naturally go and where we really have the most opportunity to do good. Okay, well, I now wanted to just take you through a couple questions on the psychology of all this. And the first would be what are the motivations and cognitive processes that support ultrowism? So this is a good question and this is something that we don't fully understand, but we have a pretty good framework, I would say. And I think that this question can be addressed at multiple levels, right? So at one level is the kind of ultimate explanation from a biological or

evolutionary or cultural perspective, what motivates us to care about other people, right? And then there's the proximate story, that is what's going on in our heads. On the more distal side, the ultimate explanation side, the general story is that the most basic form of altruism is within kin, with people with whom we share our genes. And that is a biologically, I don't know if I say encoded, but shaped tendency because when you help someone who shares your genes, you can think of that essentially as your genes helping copies of themselves and other people. And that's familiar and maybe not so interesting. One level out is called reciprocal altruism. That is you do good things for other people. Other people do good things for you in return. And this is what enables us to survive. When my hunting is successful, I share with you. And on days when I've got no food, you share with me. And we're enables us to survive. When my hunting is successful, I share with you.

And on days when I've got no food, you share with me. And we're both able to survive. Next level out is sharing and cooperating within a community where it's not so much about, you know, I scratch your back, you scratch mine. But I'm a generally good back scratcher to this group. And people in this group will generally scratch my back. And that's called indirect reciprocity. But that can still all be in the context

of personal relationship. And then finally, and this is really unique among humans, is we can have a kind of symbolic relationship or kinship with people who we don't even know. And this is one of the innovations of the great world religions, right? So if you are a Catholic, you can go anywhere in the world and it's the same mass, right? There's a language and there's a culture that you understand and you have a kind of natural feeling of communion and coherence

with people who might not even speak your language, right? So there are all these structures that basically enable us to survive and be cooperative. On a psychological level, these things are primarily driven by feelings. And it's really basic feelings, action, and reward, or punishment. When you do good things for other people, they do good things back for you, you get a positive feeling and your brain says, okay, great, do more of that. And we build up these kinds of habits. Anyone who's ever raised a toddler, in some ways you're dealing with a psychopath. Fortunately, it's a psychopath who's cute and not nearly as powerful,

but imagine if a toddler was eight feet tall and had access to guns, right? It would be a very scary situation. So what's happening when people get socialized is you create an environment in which the person learns to see positive pro-social behaviors as rewarding and anti-social behaviors. Don't hit your sister as punishing,

not necessarily very harsh punishment, but enough to adjust the behavior. But then we also have this capacity for reasoning, right? That we have feelings that say, do more of that, that's good, don't do that, that's bad. But we also can engage in cost-benefit reasoning, not just for ourselves, but for the world. And sometimes that can lead us to behavior that does more good,

especially if we're encountering a new kind of situation. And for all of us, I think the opportunities that we face in terms of charitable giving are fundamentally new. They're not new in the sense that you personally haven't heard of them before, but our biology and our culture is not designed for a world in which you can save the life of the stranger on the other side of the world

by making a sacrifice that you won't even notice or think about a week later. And that's where our reasoning capabilities really shine is helping us to adapt to new situations that we haven't either as individuals or as cultures or as a species had a kind of strong feedback loop. And they also are good for things where the goal is not just survival and self-interest, but actually doing something good for the world. Your values are not just how do I do what's best for me and my family,

but how can I be someone who contributes to the world more generally? Our feelings may not be optimized for that, and that's where I think more reasoning itself is very helpful, especially thinking about consequences. Yeah, I didn't realize the impact that social connections had on giving

until I became the fundraising chair for something down here called the warehouse arts district which in St. Pete it was designed to create a district that as the city was exploding you could keep the rent stand to a point that artists could still thrive. But what I found was fun reason is extremely difficult. And as I started to look at some of the affluent families in the area, it's interesting because a lot of them have one or two zones of focus that they like to do. So it could be around children's programs, it could be around cancer research or something else. And you had to find specific groups that were tied to wanting to support the arts.

And it begs the question, how does our personal connection draw us more to some charities than others? Yeah, well, so I mean, most people have experienced something like this. If you've ever had a loved one who died of a disease, let's say a cancer or a certain kind of cancer, you know, you may have felt, oh, I would love to contribute to research or care for people who suffered through what this person I love suffered through and maybe prevent someone from having this disease. That is the kind of thing, right? Or if you personally benefited,

you benefited from something. Let's say there was a time in your life where you were homeless, right? And someone helped you get out of that situation. It is extremely natural to want to, if you're back on your feet and have resources to contribute to that. So, whether it's based on sympathy or empathy with people who've suffered in certain ways or your own experience, or you may just be passionate about certain issues or things, you just love animals and you wanna help them thrive

and save animals who are suffering. So, I think it's things like that. Often people's direct or indirect personal experience and just aspects of their personality that we don't fully understand about why people are drawn to certain things in certain causes Yeah, and one final question on this whole psychology aspect and that is I Know throughout my lifetime People always bring up the high overhead costs that some charities have and one that just comes to mind to me is goodwill

But there are many others where people tell you don't give your money to them, give it to someone else because seven percent of it goes to administration. But your research found that this overhead myth can be dispeled. Why is that? Yeah, well, the overhead myth can be dispeled because overhead isn't really what matters if you think about it, right? The way I often ask people to think about this in terms of if you were running a business, right? A lot of the most successful businesses devote a lot of resources to research and development, to figuring out what are the problems that we can solve and how can we best solve them.

And they don't pay their people the absolute minimum or higher the people who are willing to work for the absolute minimum businesses that want to have a good sustainable workforce over time want to hire people who are exceptionally talented and exceptionally motivated and not always worried about whether they're going to pay the rent or be able to pay for the things that they want to pay for like sending their kids to college and things like that. And businesses invest, right? And if you want to know how effective is this business, you don't ask first, are you spending a lot on your overhead, on your infrastructure, on your personnel?

Instead you say, are you turning a profit? Do you have a good plan? And if you're making a good profit and you have a plan that makes sense and that's a sustainable one that can grow, but it involves a lot of overhead, then you say, hey okay great, that's a good way to do it, right? And it's exactly the same thing in the domain of charitable giving. I think that what's going on with overhead is people, emotionally, I want to support the animals in the animal shelter

and not the cost of the shelter, right? I don't want to be paying rent to a landlord. I want stuff going to cute puppies, right? If you're actually running that business or that organization, you know that overhead really is enormously important. And the organizations are in a better position to know how much overhead they need. But this idea has actually been quite damaging to charitable organizations because they've

felt in the past that they had to fight to keep their overhead down so people would be willing to give, even if it was detrimental to the causes that they were supporting. But fortunately now, people are getting over this idea and instead focusing on charity of effectiveness. That is for every, you know, thousand dollars that you put in, what is the expected outcome based on the track record? And that's the thing that really matters. Yeah, well, that's where I want to go for the rest of the interview. I did want to mention that as I was prepping for this,

I happened to watch a TED Talk that was given by Dan Palata, who's a well-known speaker and author in the charitable giving space. But I was drawn to it because the TED Talk was titled, the way we think about charitable giving is dead wrong. But he basically cites the same thing that you said that he feels they should be treated more like a poor profit organization in order to generate as much profit as I could because the better run the charity is, the more it will be able

to put money towards the causes that's supporting. Yeah, no, I think that makes sense. Assuming what you mean by profit is where profit in this case is the benefit that the charity produces for the world, right? Yeah, yes, yes, exactly. So you brought up these highly effective charities. What are some of the common characteristics of those that are highly effective

versus those who are not? So a framework for thinking about this is important, neglected, and tractable. So important basically means big, right? That is, is this a big problem that we're trying to solve? There are thousands of people, many of them children every year who die from malaria, for example, right? And malaria is a preventable disease. That's on a huge scale, right? And

that's much more effective to do something that can help thousands of people, as opposed to a cause for a single person, even though single individuals tend to be much more motivating, right? It's always much more affected to tell the story of a single person. And it's good that we have those interpersonal feelings, but bigger problems are bigger problems, right? So that's one. Then there's this issue of neglecting, right? So if everybody is already putting a lot of money into something, and this happens a lot when there's a kind of emergency, right? So there is a tsunami that does terrible damage and there's a rescue effort, and money may come pouring in from all over the world. And that's great,

and that region needs it, but it can be far more than people can put to good use, and there can be can be far more than people can put to good use. And there can be chronic problems that are ongoing, where you actually do still more good per dollar, solving this problem that's always there, then you do by addressing this emergency. This sort of overflow of funds during an emergency is like one end of the spectrum when it comes to what's neglected or not.

But then there are other things that are always there, and that they're neglected because, especially because the problems are in places that are not where the charitable funds are originated. That's probably the single biggest reason. And then tractable, right? So there are some problems that we really don't know how to solve, right? But there are others where we have pretty good solutions, right? So to come back to the example of preventing malaria, long lasting insecticidal malaria nets have been shown through controlled experiments to do extremely well. And this

has been rigorously tested where the nets are distributed in this set of villages that were randomly selected, and then you have a randomly selected control where they're not. And you can see over time how many cases of malaria are there, how many deaths are there. And for the amount of money that a person in the United States with some disposable income can afford to give, you can save somebody's life. It probably costs about $5,000 of distributing malaria nets to save someone's life. Now people often think I should say that it's much cheaper to save somebody's life. You may be seen people on TV say, oh, for $100 or $10, you can save somebody's life. But that's not exactly accurate.

It's true that a treatment that's very inexpensive could just happen to be in the right place at the right time to save somebody's life. But in practice, you have to give out a lot of malaria nets in order to produce the effect where someone's life ends up being saved. But that's for real. That's real hard scientific evidence behind that, and you can do that either yourself or teaming up with a relatively small number of people.

And this is the against malaria foundation is one of the charities that we support. So you want big problems that have big effects on lots of people. You want problems that are not everybody's rushing to help on that with their funds, and then ones where you have good, well validated methods for addressing the problem. I wanted you to go into how you came up with the GivingMultiplier.org site, because it's really a testing lab for you, for some of these ideas, but I thought for the audience, this would be a good overview, and then I'll ask you some specific questions about it.

Yeah, great. For many years, I've thought as someone who's interested in these philosophical questions, but also people's psychology and decision making, how can I encourage people to give and give more effectively with their resources? And I tried it first using in experiments, presenting messages to people and seeing what they do, trying to convince people the way I was convinced. So I was convinced by that Peter Singer drowning child argument, right? That yes, of course, if I have an obligation to save the child who's drowning right in front of me, why don't I have something like the same obligation to save a child who's drowning on the other side of the world? And we did experiments like this, including a project in which Peter Singer was one of the team members. And what we found is that this works either not at all or a little bit.

Some people respond to this kind of message, I'm one of them, but not everybody does. And so then I started thinking, okay, well, is there a completely different approach here? And at the time, I just brought on a new postdoctoral researcher, a brilliant guy named Lucius Caviola, and we were talking about this, and we hit on this other idea. Instead of saying to people, this is what you should do,

instead of what you're currently doing, which is implicit in that, you say, what if we just ask people to do both? Say, okay, you already give to charity. Great. Give to the local animal shelter or whatever it is that you love, but why not also give some of what you're planning to give to a super effective charity to give another example of deworming treatments. This is medicine that kills parasitic worms in people's digestive tracks and these parasitic worms have devastating effect in Africa and Asia, often on children. For less than a dollar,

you can give somebody one of these do-worming treatments, right? You can have over a thousand children aided by this by giving something like a thousand dollars, right? And we've been more than that, right? Sure, give to the local animal shelter, but also how about paying for 500 do-worming treatments, right? Which is just huge benefit to people. And we did some experiments and we thought, okay, people

actually are quite happy to do this split. So we did one one experiment where the control condition is you pick your favorite charity. And then you have to choose between giving to that or giving to deworm the world. And then in the experimental condition, we gave people three choices. We said, you can give everything to your personal favor, charity, everything to deworm the world,

or you can do a 50-50 split. And we found that over half the people were willing to do the 50-50 split and that more money overall went to the super effective charity that can help hundreds of children with a relatively modest donation, more went there when people were given that split option. And then we did some further research

to try to understand the psychology behind this and the short and long of it is related to what I said before is that you have your heart and your head, right? Your heart is saying, yeah, about the animals of the shelter down my street. But what's interesting there is the amount that you give is not so important to you there emotionally, right? You want to give something. And so if you scratch that itch with something, but leave some money for the super effective stuff, then you get this

other kind of satisfaction of doing something really smart and effective. It's backed up by the best research and has the biggest impact. So people like having that heart head kind of compliment. And then we thought, okay, well, you know, we could publish a research paper saying, hey, people should do this, but not everybody reads psychology journals. How can we get this to go bigger? And we thought, well, we can advertise it and try to incentivize it. So we did some further experiments where we asked people, we said, hey, and if we'll add money on top to both of your donations, the one you picked and the one we recommended, if you do this, and we found people really like, that's not so surprising.

But then the question was, okay, but where's that money going to come from? And we did another set of experiments where we asked people, okay, you just agreed to make this split donation and you just got some money on top. And would you be willing to take some of the funds that you gave to this highly effective charity that until 10 minutes ago you'd never heard of and put that in the matching fund so that other people can do what you just did. And we found that not everybody but a fair number of people were happy to put money into the matching fund in this kind of pay it forward way. And it turned out that people were putting enough into this matching fund to pay for the

matching funds that would go to other people. So we thought, well, maybe this would work in the real world. Lucius and his web designer friend Fabio Koon and some other people put together this website called Giving Multiplier. We're able to do this in partnership with a wonderful organization called Every.org, which allows people to have an account and use it to donate to any charity that's registered in the United States. So they provide the kind of back end platform and then giving multiplier directs people's donations through that. So giving multiplier essentially does what we were doing in these experiments.

So if you go to the website, you pick your own personal favorite charity or you can pick different ones on different rounds if you want to use it multiple times, right? And then you'll see a list of super effective charities that work in different cause areas. So some of them I've already mentioned, the Against Malaria Foundation, Dewirming, Helen Keller International with provides vitamin supplements and things

that can prevent people from going blind. And then there are highly effective charities that promote animal welfare. And then there are highly effective charities that promote animal welfare. And then there is a charity, for example, that is devoted to doing research to prevent the next pandemic or a climate charity that is devoted to, among other things, research on energy producing technologies that are low carbon that are really

going to solve the sustainable energy problem. So we've got those set of charities. You pick one of those, then you decide how much you want to give total, and then you use our little slider to decide how you want to allocate it, and the more you give to the highly effective stuff, the more money will add on top. And right now for a 50 50 split, this can change. We're adding 50% on top if you have a access code, and we have created an access code for passion struck. So you can either enter passion struck all one word where there's an option to. So then you've got your matching code, you get your matching funds. If you decide to give it all to the highly effective charity, we'll match your donation dollar for dollar.

And then you can put that through. And then before you finalize your donation, you have an option to support the matching fund or you can support the matching fund directly. And so the nice thing about this again is you get the best of both worlds. You can support any charity that's registered in the US that you're passionate about, but you also get a taste of doing something that is the most highly effective things that you can do

with your charitable donations. And then we add money on top to both of those things. So that's when we're all around. And then as long as people keep supporting the matching fund, we can do it. And so far, this whole thing has been self-sustaining, and we are close to raising $2 million since we launched in 2020. Yeah, it's awesome. And what really intrigued me about everything that you're doing is so much of the prior research that's been done on giving has been focused on the quantity of giving. I think your whole premise here on the effectiveness of the results of it is really a dramatic switch.

And thank you for that code. I'll make sure I put it in the show notes and everywhere else that we get people, especially since it's Giving Tuesday, to check out this platform. And I like that you can allocate part of it to something that you might have an emotional appeal for. And then, as you said, the other side

to these highly effective charities. Yeah, yeah. So we're excited for Giving Tuesday and we hope this will put us over the $2 million mark. So I want to ask as a follow on to that, how do you systematically measure the cost effectiveness of altruistic endeavors with the goal ultimately of how do you do

as much good as possible? For a lot of the charities that we're supporting, we are relying on organization called GiveWell. It's a really interesting group and they've been enormously effective and influential. So it was started by two hedge fund guys who spent all of their time researching investments and figuring out where are the good investments? Where should we park our money? And then when it came time to give some of the money that they had amassed away,

they were struck by how there was no one doing the kind of research for that that they were doing in order to figure out how to invest their money. And so on the side, they started researching charities to try to figure out where do you get the most bang for your buck in terms of charities. And they started telling their friends about it and the people with that. And now there people really were interested in this. And they wanted to give as effectively as possible as well. Eventually, this became so involved. And so many people were interested. They started this organization called Give Well

about 10 years ago that is devoted to figuring out, to doing the research, to figure out which charities save the most lives or improve human lives the most per dollar. And this has been going for about 10 years. They have moved hundreds of millions of dollars to highly effective charities. And we are relying on their research.

They have a great research team of at least the dozen people, maybe more at this point, just doing this work full time. There are other causes where it's about long-term things in the future, right? So if you're trying to prevent a nuclear disaster, although we don't have nuclear on our site at the moment, trying to prevent the next pandemic, obviously you can't do controlled experiments where you have an pandemic happen when we do this. How

many pandemics happen when we did that, right? So what they're what you're doing is you're looking towards a really big, terrible event and saying, is it reasonable to think that there is a small, but significant chance that these efforts could prevent or mitigate the negative effects of something like that? So when you're dealing with things like sustainable energy, you're dealing with things like pandemics. It's more of a rigorous quantitative scientific analysis, but it's not based on a controlled experiment because it's not the kind of thing you can experiment with. And then when it comes to animal charities, we're relying on research from animal charity evaluators, who are focused, again, on most bang for the buck.

And there I think the big shift is most people who support charities that help animals. It's mostly geared towards companion animals, right? The kinds of animals that we love personally. But most of the animal suffering in the world takes place through human food production. And you don't have to be a vegan or a vegetarian to think that there should be that the conditions in facilities that produce the food that we should be humane, right? And or at least as more humane than they currently we are. And so animal charity evaluators are focused on charities that are either making conditions better for farm animals, agricultural animals, and there's a lot of room for improvement there, or looking for ways for people to happily eat less meat.

Right. So the good food institute, for example, is devoted to creating meat alternatives that people really so that they don't feel like they are Sacrificing anything right and again this has this kind of heart head duality to it right is that if you can find a way to offer People something that they want that they like that's in the service of this good thing that can be so much more productive Inscalable than trying to sort of fight against people's natural instincts when it comes to their food consumption We don't do the research ourselves. We're very small and we're relying on what we see as the best organizations for assessing the effectiveness of charitable causes. Okay, and so I just so I understand this, so you all look at give-well and you look at who they're recommending as the most highly effective ones and that's who you're putting into your ecosystem. Yeah, that's right.

For the global health and poverty charities, that's correct. And we're somewhat selective. We choose a balance of things that we think will appeal to people with different interests and that are more likely to appeal to a wider group of people than maybe some other organizations would. But yes, but they're all considered to be highly effective

by those organizations. Okay, another topic I wanted to ask you about is, in one of your papers, you bring up favorite effective bundling versus micro-matchin. What is the difference between the two and what have you found is more effective? Well, what we've really found is that they're super effective in combination.

Those are technical terms. I can see you did your homework and read our paper, but those are actually technical terms for the fundamental elements in the Giving Multiplier website. So bundling is asking people to split, is saying instead of just picking one charity split between one that you really like and one that the research has is super duper effective.

So we call those favorite effective bundles, right? So that's the first part. But then giving multiplier works because we can advertise it and say, and if you do that, we'll add money on top of your donation. And that's matching. Now normally matching, you've probably seen different charities have matching campaigns.

If you give now, we will add, we'll double your donation or whatever it is. That the conventional kind of matching works where you have a donor who in advance has said I will put up this money and then other and that's a range in advance with the charity and then other people can respond to that matching offer. We are doing we call this micro matching because anyone who donates through giving multiplier has the opportunity to become a micro matcher that is to contribute to the matching fund. And we's a really beautiful pay it forward virtuous circle here where use the site and they get money added on top of to the charity that they chose and one that they chose from our list. And then they say, okay, great, I'm going to take some of that money

and I'm going to put it into the fund so that somebody else can do the same thing. And to our amazement, this whole thing has been self-sustaining. We were prepared when we launched this to shore it up with some outside money. And we may have to do that at some point. But so far, we've been just amazed at how much our regular users have been excited to support the matching fund. But I also don't want to discourage people from using the site who don't want to add to the matching fund. You shouldn't feel like you have to giving multiplier requires both types to work. Right. We need some people who really like the idea of

supporting this whole system and we need some people who are drawn in by the opportunity to get that support for the charities they're coming in with and for the ones that they learn about. So we love having both types of users, the people who support the fund and the people who are just getting their first taste of effective giving and we say great and we're happy to add on top for that purpose. Yeah, well, one of the people I'm going to have to introduce to this is a gentleman I had on the podcast a while back named Jeff Walker. You may have run into him because it was an adjunct professor at Harvard, but what people have known him for is he was the vice chairman of JP Morgan Chase for many years ran their private equity division, but was ahead of their charitable organization. And now he's part of the giving pledge, but he has devoted his life since retirement to focusing on systems change through charitable giving.

And so I've never seen someone who's on more boards than he is, but he's been pursuing everything from being on the U.N.'s envoy to Africa and figuring out how do you solve for some of the biggest problems happening in Africa, et cetera. But he talks very much in terms of what we really need is systems change if you want to bring about some of the biggest things to happen to these underprivileged populations globally. So I think this would be right up his alley. And the other one I'm going

to introduce it to is Jean Allweng, who is also on this show. If you're not familiar with her, she runs Virgin Unite, which is the film, The Roppa Call Arm, Richard Branson. But she's also looking at this whole power of partnering and how through partnerships, it has this overwhelming effect on increasing the efficacy that giving can do because of the partnerships that are formed and how people align. efficacy that giving can do because of the partnerships that are formed and how people align. And I use those two as a lead-in because when we think of giving, we often think of the very affluent and Richard Branson, obviously as one. I had Bernie Marcus on the show who was the founder of Home Depot recently.

He's given back a couple of billion. We think of the Gates's Jeff Bezos, et cetera. But a lot of your research shows that ordinary people can do tremendous good. So all this is leading up to how can ordinary people do enormous good? Yeah, no, that's right. And I think it's hard to get your head around.

When you think of, for example, the do-worming treatments that cost less than a dollar each, right? If you imagine, if you went into a classroom of children who were suffering because of parasitic worms, and there were 30 kids in that class, and you spent less than $30, right? Treating their infections, you would feel so good about that. And that's $30. And you're not going to be able to walk into the classroom and see that from afar, but for $30, not a huge donation, you can have that kind of impact. It is really astounding how much good an ordinary person can do if you choose the right charities. As you said before, amounts versus effectiveness, you would have to work pretty

hard to say, okay, I'm going to double my giving this year. If you pick the same charities you've been giving to, but you're going to give twice as much. But by choosing charities that are more effective, even for part of your donation, you can multiply your effectiveness by an order of 10 or an order of 100 times. And that to me, it's so strange and mind blowing, but it's so satisfying once you get into it and see what you can do. Yeah, I found those studies that you did that show that there was a diminishing return for increasing allocations to your favorite charities. Pretty interesting. Yeah, that was part of the, yeah, that's in the research there and I didn't get into all the details there, but that's the right exactly is that you can scratch that itch, but then do even more good by using some of your resources to do high impact giving.

Okay, so I just want to touch on this again. So if the audience goes to giving multiplier dot org and that's giv, I ng multiplier dot org and then they put in the code hash instruct that unlocks for them, the opportunity to have a multiplier put on the donation that they make on the site. Yep, that's right. And so the giving, the matching amount goes up a bit. And so you get even get even more bang for your buck. And again, that is, yeah, he said, giving multiplier dot org passions truck on all one word. Okay, and do you have to do that as a slash or as it just a code that you put on when you go to the site. You can do it both ways. You can do it giving multiplier dot org just and then slash just write passion struck all one word or when you get to our little slider where you allocate your funds, you can just put passion struck all one word in the little box for the code there and you'll get your matching increase. Well, Josh, thank you for coming on today.

I think this was perfect episode for Giving Tuesday and some glad we could throw this one together so quickly. Great. Yeah, I'm excited about it and I'll report back and see how the passion struck audience did. We've had some incredibly successful promotions with great podcasts. And I'm excited to see what this group ends up doing. Yeah, I am as well. Well, thank you so much for being on the show and can't wait in the future to interview you again, downstream once you write your next novel.

Well, thanks very much. Okay, well, thanks for having me on. It's been a great pleasure and happy holidays to you and yours. Thank you, you as well. I thoroughly enjoyed that interview with Dr Joshua Green. And I wanted to thank Joshua for giving us the honor of interviewing him. Links to all things Joshua will be in the show notes at passionstruck.com. Videos are on YouTube at John Armiles, where we have well over 400 of them.

For you to look at some with exclusive content that you only find there. Everties or deals and discount codes are in one community place at passionstruck.com slash deals. I'm at John Armiles on both Instagram and Twitter and you can also find me on LinkedIn. You're about to hear a preview of the Passionstruck Podcast interview that I did with Wendy Smith and Marianne Lewis, where we discuss both and thinking,

embracing creative tensions to solve your toughest problems. Run for more than 20 years of pioneering research. They provide tools and lessons for transforming these tensions into opportunities for innovation and personal growth. We found four categories of paradox that we see again and again and they're certainly intro-woven and connected, but I would call them out as we call them paradoxes of performing, learning, belonging, and organizing. We do see these all over the place. One of the reasons why we unpack these different types is not because somebody has to say, oh, I'm experiencing this tension. What type of paradox is it? One of the reasons we unpacked is to say actually guys these paradoxes show up everywhere in so many parts of our lives. And let's just remind ourselves how pervasive this is.

Remember that we rise by lifting others. So share this show with those you love. And if you found this episode useful and share it all given, please share it with somebody else who can use the advice that we gave here today. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you're on the show so that you can live what you listen. And until next time, live life Ashenscroft. you