What about getting other people on board with being good? One obvious way to try to motivate people to help with some of the big problems the world is facing is to convince them of how bad these problems are. Unfortunately, this can backfire. It is much more effective to offer them solutions to the problems: what they can do to help.1
Although there are vast differences between the effectiveness of different charities, only six percent of individual donors do any comparison at all. Thirty-three percent do some research, more often for humanitarian and environmental causes, and rarely for arts and religion causes.2 Congratulations, you’re one of the better third because you’re reading this book!
An experiment wanted to test what kinds of pitches people would respond to when asked to donate money to a charitable cause. One group was told a single child needed a drug that cost $300,000 to make. This group saw a picture of a child and was told her name and age. Another group was told that $300,000 was needed to help eight children, and they got names, ages, and pictures, too. Who gave more? The people who thought they were only helping one child.
Here we have an example where $37,500 to save someone was less attractive than spending $300,000.3 Why do people think this way?
The accepted answer is that stories of single individual people trigger our empathy more than groups of people. In fact, the more people a charity reports it will help, the less money people will give. The sad truth is that sometimes doing the most good is at odds with what will warm our hearts the most.
It gets more interesting: another study sent out scientific information about the effectiveness of the charity to some of its regular donors, and a description of an individual who was helped to the others. It turns out that for people who regularly gave more than $100, the scientific information increased the size of donations, but for small-amount donors, it decreased it. This suggests that the big donors care about effectiveness and evidence, and people who give to get a warm glow in their hearts tend to give little and care about effectiveness less.4
If evidence, magnitudes, numbers, and statistics don’t generate empathy, and the things that generate empathy result in decreased donations, then we have reason to doubt the idea that significant, effective change in the world will be driven by empathy. If the world will be saved, it will be saved by people capable of abstract, scientific reasoning. If you’ve made it this far in the book, you are probably one of those people.
Many people think that when you’re doing good in this world, it doesn’t count if you take credit for it, that giving anonymously is the only legitimate means of being good. If you take credit for it, show it off, or if, God forbid, it also causes some good to come to you, in terms of reputation or even something financial, then it negates the good that you’ve done, or maybe the goodness of the person.
This is a viewpoint I have a lot of trouble relating to. Suppose Chris saves three people’s lives through charity. The most extreme version of this view would say that if Chris takes credit for it, then the goodness of what he did was nullified, making the situation morally equivalent to her having done nothing. But objectively speaking, the giving version of Chris saves three lives that the non-giving version did not. Is taking credit so bad that it’s worth three people dying over?
This might have to do with the doctrine of double-effect. Sometimes, when billionaires do charitable giving, they are criticized because what they really wanted was some benefit to themselves and their companies. People are wont to think of rich people as being selfish, so if they can see some self-serving motive for the charity, it plays on people’s cynicism, and they assume that the self-serving motivation was the primary one.
But there’s a good argument for why people should take credit for their charity: social proof. When people perceive that some behavior is something a lot of other people are doing, it becomes more socially acceptable for them to do it. If the people donating to charity are being quiet about it, it makes it seem less normal.
Suppose someone makes $150,000 per year, and gives away $100,000 of it to charity. This strikes some people are alarming, and possibly freakish. But if you already know about say, ten or twenty people in your social circle behaving similarly, it would not seem so weird.
When trying to make people act well, by far the strongest intervention is by changing people’s ideas of what is socially acceptable. This social proof also can make people act badly. People tend to act in a way that feels normal, whether that behavior is objectively good or bad.
This was demonstrated in a brilliant experiment run in the real world. There was this park in Arizona with a petrified forest, and one of the problems that the park was facing was that people were walking out with petrified pieces of wood. Over time there was less and less petrified wood there. Robert Cialdini placed signs on different trails in the park, encouraging people to leave the wood there, but worded in different ways. Some signs read, “Many past visitors have removed the petrified wood from the park, changing the state of the Petrified Forest.” Other signs read, “The vast majority of past visitors have left the petrified wood in the park, preserving the natural state of the Petrified Forest.” Later, he placed pieces of petrified wood on the trail and measured how many of them got stolen. People stole far less wood when they were told that most people were being good, and more wood when they were told that lots of people were breaking the rules.5
This is profound, because we often will try to get people to act better by emphasizing how often people act badly. For example, we might try to discourage teen pregnancy or suicide by giving alarming statistics on how prevalent these problems are. This approach backfires. That study found that telling park-goers that lots of other people stole wood actually increased theft!
This same kind of intervention was replicated with not having your towels washed every day in hotel rooms, promoting recycling, and other domains.6 It’s particularly effective because telling people what to do or not do can feel heavy-handed. People know they are being manipulated. But merely describing how others act goes under the radar, so to speak, and people don’t put up the same resistance and skepticism because they don’t know they are being manipulated.7 I use a lot of manipulation in this book, but I figure the reader is reading the book in the first place because they want to be manipulated to be more productive, happy, and good. But when you’re approaching people out of the blue, or sticking a flyer in their mailbox, your audience is certainly not asking to be told what to do!
Bringing it back to charity, if you are generous, and don’t tell anybody about it, you’re being humble, but also making charity look less normal, and thus contributing to others’ reluctance to give. Similarly, we should all be celebrating people who are generous, rather than seeing their announcement of giving as a reason for questioning their motives and being scornful of them.
Furthermore, studies show that allowing people to make their generosity public makes them more generous, even though the reason might be to increase prestige or to prevent damage to their reputation. People are more likely to vote when they are given the opportunity to wear a sticker that says, I VOTED, or even to put a virtual sticker on their social media account. When companies violate environmental regulations and laws, publicly putting them on a list of offenders causes more change than fines and penalties.8 People care about their reputations, and this can be used for good, by rewarding helpers and shaming hurters.
By emphasizing that others are giving, it makes the practice seem more acceptable, even expected. People tend to underestimate how giving the people around them really are, and this reduces the amount of giving they want to do.9
Fighting Feelings of Futility
One thing that holds a lot of people back is a feeling of futility. It might seem that whatever you do is useless because there is so much suffering. You can try to reduce your carbon footprint, or donate what you can, but in the grand scheme of things, sometimes it can feel like it doesn’t matter, because the problems you’re fighting are so overwhelming.
Let’s take climate change as an example. People sometimes think of climate change as something that will or won’t happen. Looking at it like this can engender a feeling of hopelessness, because what you can personally do will probably not affect whether it will happen or not. Since it appears to be happening, and gigantic organizations and millions of individual people are making choices that make climate change worse, it overwhelms what you can do.
But a better way of thinking about climate change isn’t that it will or won’t happen—it is happening, and the outcomes can be better or worse, and the longer we can delay the bad outcomes, the better. This means that every choice you make regarding your carbon footprint matters, even if it only matters a little bit. Every time you choose not to take a transcontinental flight, for example, it slows global warming by some small amount, and makes the world a bit better.
For animal welfare, the situation is even clearer. When you find yourself thinking that factory farms are going to continue hurting animals, and that people will continue to support them, your individual choice not to eat chicken isn’t going to solve the problem. But it will contribute to fewer chickens being raised in terrible conditions, and that is a win for that chicken who might have been.
When it comes to helping human beings survive disease, you’re actually saving lives. Your donations are unlikely to change the global poverty or disease statistics in any measurable way, but you are actually saving human lives, and each one you do is very meaningful.
Let’s make an analogy with murder. If someone murders, they are not really affecting the worldwide murder rate in any appreciable way. That is, even if someone kills five people, the numbers for world homicide rates will not budge. But is this mean those murders didn’t matter? That they were just fine, because the global murder rate stayed the same? Of course not. Each murder leaves misery in its wake. Loved ones suffer, and the murdered person feels the pain of death, and, more importantly, loses years of future life.
The situation is the same with saving people from disease. Each person you save from disease is similar to the misery avoided by preventing a murder. There’s a real person out there whose family will not suffer so much and who will get to live years of life more because of what you did. And that’s valuable, even if it doesn’t appreciably change the rate of malaria death in the world.
Not every situation is like this. Let’s suppose someone is dying from a bacterial infection, and you do something to kill some bacteria. There is some amount of bacteria that would need to be killed to save the person, and if that threshold is not met, the person will die anyway. So if you remove just a little bacteria, it doesn’t matter. But fighting climate change is not like this. Saving human lives is not like this. Unlike the infection example, every little bit actually does matter.
Encouraging Other People to Reduce Animal Suffering
When people eat unethical meat, it contributes to animal suffering. One way to get people to reduce their harm to animals is to encourage them to change their diets. But the evangelical vegan is an oft-mocked stereotype.
It’s probably better to get people to reduce the amount of animal products they consume, rather than trying to convince them to be completely vegan. Convincing two people to cut their meat consumption in half does the same amount of good as convincing someone to be vegan, and it’s probably a hell of a lot easier. Not eating any meat at all is hard. It’s so hard that even most self-identified American vegetarians regularly eat meat.12 That is, most people you know who you classify as vegetarians probably eat meat sometimes.
Getting back to the lessons of social proof, this is because veganism is viewed as a radical, extreme position, and it’s tough to convince someone to live by something they view as radical and extreme. Being completely vegan has social costs that being a reducetarian does not. Nobody mocks people who try to eat less meat.
It’s the same with any restrictive diet. I have a friend who is a devout Jew. He told me that he would be completely kosher, except that it would interfere too much with his social life. He wouldn’t be able to eat at restaurants, and would only be able to attend dinner parties of people who kept a kosher kitchen. So he compromised and keeps kosher at home, and is more lax outside the house (he still avoids pork). Similarly, unless you live in India, maintaining a vegan diet isn’t easy. There are many restaurants you either can’t go to or just need to order french fries wherever you go. People report that family concerns are a serious barrier to becoming vegetarian.13 Telling your mother you can’t eat her roasted chicken anymore has a high social cost.
Many people are resistant to reducing their meat consumption because they perceive vegetarian dishes as less appetizing. One study showed omnivores images of vegan dishes, and asked them which ones looked the most appetizing. They found that familiar vegetarian foods, such as roasted potatoes or pasta with tomato sauce, looked much tastier than vegan replacement foods, such as veggie burgers or a tofu scramble.14 So we shouldn’t try to convince people that tofu is going to be just as delicious as turkey on Christmas night.
What we don’t want is to try to convince someone to be vegan, and then later they reject it (perhaps after trying it for a while), and then abandon the whole project of trying to eat better, and just eat whatever they want. Instead, by encouraging people to reduce the amount of animal product they consume has the potential to influence someone a little, and as they habituate to their new diet, their commitment to reducing can grow over time. A gradual change reduces the chances of burnout.
This is what is happening to me. My happiness and energy are better when I have meat in my diet. I tried to be vegetarian and failed at it. But the reasons I wanted to avoid eating meat are still there, and I slowly have worked those ideas into my diet. I try to eat lentils or mussels for lunch, and steel-cut oatmeal for breakfast, instead of my usual bacon and eggs.
Even when people do manage to resolve to be vegetarian, it often doesn’t last the rest of their lives. The average vegetarian stays that way for about five years.15 There are five times as many former vegetarians as current vegetarians.16 This suggests that even convincing someone to be vegetarian once cannot be expected to last. You have to look at it in terms of years of vegetarianism you get per dollar invested. This makes sense also because, even if someone does stay vegetarian for their whole lives, the number of years of vegetarianism gained depends on how old they were when they decided.
We can use scientific methods to come up with estimates of the effectiveness of trying to get people to reduce meat consumption. I want to emphasize that these studies are estimates. Measuring these things is very difficult, and the people who conduct them stress that they are ballpark estimates, and that the exact numbers reported might change given better data and methods. Nonetheless, I’ll give you a sample of the cost-effectiveness of these kinds of interventions.
One study looked at $1,500 worth of investment to try to get people to have meatless Mondays. According to this study, it for every dollar spent, 0.082 animals were spared (the range is 0.065 to 0.099). This means that one dollar saves 1 percent of an animal, or, it costs about $100 to spare a single animal. In this sense, “sparing” an animal means it was a land animal (probably a chicken) never raised, or a fish never caught.17
Other studies are less encouraging. One way animal advocacy groups try to get people to consume less meat is by passing out leaflets. A big study of the short-term effect of doing this found that it resulted in more animals consumed. The people doing this study emphasize that their results are only estimates, but why might this be happening?
We’re not sure, but one reason might be that leaflets tend to focus on cows and pigs. This might have made people opt for eating chicken instead. But because each chicken produces so much less meat, even if people reduced their meat consumption (by the pound) they still might have ended up with more animal death by eating more chicken.18 Here’s an example of how an attempt to help ends up antimattering. Getting people to eat less pork and beef makes them turn to another animal, chicken, that’s worse for animal welfare.
Protests are another form of activism, but are difficult to study. Many studies of protests are poorly done, or have a lack of sufficient data to conclude on the effects of protest for animal welfare.19
Estimates have been made for the effectiveness of online advertisements, too. One estimate suggests that you can convince someone to be a vegetarian for one year for $100 donated to an effective charity, using online ads. Let’s talk about this number.20
Although being a vegetarian is generally good for the environment, some people find it very difficult to do. For these people, forcing themselves to be vegetarian would take enormous mental resources and willpower, and that comes at a cost. There’s only so much you can do in your life, and you should spend your willpower wisely on the most effective things. Now, if it costs only $100 to convince someone else to be vegetarian for one year, you can look at your finances and make a decision: would you rather put in the effort to be vegetarian or spend $100 a year? Because the effect on animal welfare and the environment is about the same.
Maybe you have $200 you could spend a year on effective animal welfare charities, like the Humane League. This means that a meat-eater who gives $200 per year to the Humane League is doing twice as much good for animal welfare as a vegetarian who doesn’t donate anything.
I’m one of those people who couldn’t muster the will be to vegetarian. But I donate about $600 per year to the Humane League, which means I’m doing six times as much for animal welfare as a vegetarian!24
Some caveats are in order: this $100 is a very rough estimate, but is probably within an order of magnitude of the true cost. Also, you should be spending your “meat offsets” from your discretionary spending, not your charitable spending. For example, I donate a portion of my income every year to charity. Of the $600 I give to the Humane League, $500 comes from the charity budget, and $100 of it comes from my discretionary spending money. Otherwise you’re not really offsetting anything, you’re just taking money away from your other charitable spending.
Some of the things in this book look like they suggest that humanity’s very existence is bad for the world. If insects feel pain and suffering, it just might be true, in the short term.
But there are reasons to suspect that even if it is true, we should soldier on.
First, if humans were to vanish somehow, the ecosystem would rapidly replace us with other living things. To the extent that the existence of humans is bad because of the suffering of wild animals needed to support our species, removing us, while leaving the rest of the world intact, likely won’t make a dent in wild animal suffering.
But even if we are causing more harm than the animals that would replace us, it could be that were passing through a stage, and when we come out of it, everything will be much better. But only some form of intelligent life will be able to get through this stage. So even if humans are doing things that right now, on net, make the world worse, we might reach a utopian stage for all beings at some point in the future. If humans were to go extinct then the wild animal suffering, for example, would continue for a very long time, and might only change if some other animal evolved to become intelligent, like raccoons or something, and they might go through the same phases that we are going through right now. So at least we have a head start.
Are humans the right ones to do this? Well, there’s a window of time for life on Earth. We’re about three-quarters of the way through it, and eventually the Sun is going to fry the Earth and it will be no more life here. There very well might not be enough time in that window for another intelligent species to arise and develop the capacity to substantially reduce suffering. Given that humans have enjoyed some amount of moral progress over time, we have a head start on morality over any potential new species and might be the best bet for goodness in the future.