This is certainly really important for 80k—it’s on our list of strategic considerations to investigate.
We haven’t looked into it in depth already, beyond knowledge of some relevant psychology literature (e.g. being primed by images of money has been found to make people more selfish in a couple of (probably dodgy) studies).
We’ve put a couple of measures in place which seem like they might help to mitigate the types of drift that don’t involve updating on new information. First, making a public commitment to make the world a better place in an effective way encourages people not to drift towards being non-altruistic (while is also sufficiently broad not to commit people to moral beliefs they might well want to change e.g. that animal suffering doesn’t matter), because people want to be consistent. Second, participating in the 80k community could help to counteract destructive social pressure from workplace communities. It remains to see how well these measures work—we’ll be keeping a close eye.
Hi Luke,
This is certainly really important for 80k—it’s on our list of strategic considerations to investigate.
We haven’t looked into it in depth already, beyond knowledge of some relevant psychology literature (e.g. being primed by images of money has been found to make people more selfish in a couple of (probably dodgy) studies).
We’ve put a couple of measures in place which seem like they might help to mitigate the types of drift that don’t involve updating on new information. First, making a public commitment to make the world a better place in an effective way encourages people not to drift towards being non-altruistic (while is also sufficiently broad not to commit people to moral beliefs they might well want to change e.g. that animal suffering doesn’t matter), because people want to be consistent. Second, participating in the 80k community could help to counteract destructive social pressure from workplace communities. It remains to see how well these measures work—we’ll be keeping a close eye.
Ben