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The Perceived Morality of Effective Altruism Across Social Distance

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The Perceived Morality of Effective Altruism Across Social Distance Running head: BIASED BENEVOLENCE Biased Benevolence: The Perceived Morality of Effective Altruism Across Social Distance Authors: Kyle Fiore Law, Dylan Campbell, Brendan Gaesser* Affiliations: Department of Psychology, University at Albany, State University of New York, Albany, NY *Correspondence to: Brendan Gaesser [email protected] 1400 Washington Ave., Albany, NY 12222 585-750-1614 Total word count: 11,573 2 BIASED BENEVOLENCE Abstract Is altruism always morally good, or is the morality of altruism fundamentally shaped by the social opportunity costs that often accompany helping decisions? Across four studies, we reveal that in cases of realistic tradeoffs in social distance for gains in welfare where helping socially distant others necessitates not helping socially closer others with the same resources, helping is deemed as less morally acceptable. Making helping decisions at a cost to socially closer others also negatively affects judgments of relationship quality (Study 2) and in turn, decreases cooperative behavior with the helper (Study 3). Ruling out an alternative explanation of physical distance accounting for the effects in Studies 1-3, social distance continued to impact moral acceptability when physical distance across social targets was matched (Study 4). These findings reveal that attempts to decrease biases in helping may have previously unconsidered consequences for moral judgments, relationships, and cooperation. Keywords: prosocial behavior, effective altruism, inequality, morality, social distance 3 BIASED BENEVOLENCE Biased Benevolence: The Perceived Morality of Effective Altruism Across Social Distance It makes no moral difference whether the person I can help is a neighbor’s child ten yards from me or a Bengali whose name I shall never know, ten thousand miles away. – Peter Singer, 2015 We couldn’t escape the brutal conclusion that - in our world today - some lives are seen as worth saving and others are not. We said to ourselves, ‘This can’t be true. But if it is true, it deserves to be the priority of our giving.’ – Bill Gates, 2005 The nature of altruistic behavior is changing. Humans have a deeper capacity to help others in need than ever before, not necessarily because of advancements in human morality and reasoning (Bloom, 2016; Lecky, 1869; Pinker, 2012; Singer, 1981), but rather because of changes in technology, medicine, and economics. In an increasingly connected, medically advanced, and wealth-imbalanced world, more can be done to improve the lives of others with fewer resources and less effort than ever before. We frequently help family, friends, and neighbors, but perhaps most remarkable is the fact that we are now able to just as readily help distant strangers suffering extraordinary hardship and even death. Indeed, for those in affluent societies, resources can do precisely the “most good” (i.e., produce the greatest welfare gains in life and livelihood) in the most cost-effective manner when donated to socially distant others living in extreme poverty (GiveWell, 2019), a logic central to the growing social and philosophical movement of effective altruism (Singer, 2015, 2016). Explicit in this rationale is that people should strive to minimize the extent to which they take personal relationships and social closeness into account when deciding where to donate resources because doing so would not be valuing human life equally, violating the moral principle of fairness and failing to 4 BIASED BENEVOLENCE maximize the impact of helping others (Bloom, 2016; Prinz, 2011; Singer, 2015). Yet in practice, people do take how close and connected they feel with others into account when deciding who and how much to help; charitable giving tends to increase as social distance decreases (Goeree et al., 2010; James & Zagefka, 2017; Strombach et al., 2014) and subjectively preferred, socially closer charities tend to be opted for over socially distant, welfare- maximizing ones (Berman et al., 2018). Effective altruism recognizes that these social preferences in helping close others exist and advocates that humanity should try to do more to distribute resources equitably. Despite the fact that choosing to donate to socially distant others may actually accomplish more in terms of gains in welfare, the fact that these decisions simultaneously involve not helping one’s family, friends, community members, or countrypeople by omission may lead to more negative moral evaluations of socially distant helpers versus socially close helpers and their actions. This raises the intriguing question of whether doing the “most good” is always perceived as morally better, or whether the moral evaluation of altruism fundamentally shifts according to the social opportunity costs that accompany decisions to help others in need. In general, helping behaviors tend to be evaluated as morally praiseworthy (Barasch et al., 2014; Bostyn & Roets, 2016; Carlson & Zaki, 2018; Pizarro et al., 2003) and helpful actions lead to positive perceptions of the helper’s moral character (Landy & Uhlmann, 2018; Piazza et al., 2014). Such evaluations influence social preferences, and from a young age, individuals like and prefer to interact with people who help as opposed to hinder others in need (Hamlin et al., 2007; Jordan et al., 2016; Judd et al., 2005; Olson & Spelke, 2008; Sommerville et al., 2013). When outcome metrics for various charitable options are made explicit and directly comparable to individuals (i.e., joint evaluations; Hsee, 1996), people are more likely to select the welfare- 5 BIASED BENEVOLENCE maximizing option (Caviola et al., 2014; Kogut & Ritov, 2005a, 2005b). Thus, when helping behaviors are assessed independently of who is receiving help (i.e., the social relationship between the donor and recipient of help), people judge helping as morally positive and appear to prefer options that maximize gains in welfare. But what about when maximizing welfare gains entails favoring socially distant over socially closer others, as in the types of donation decisions advocated by effective altruism? Research in social psychology and affective neuroscience has established that people tend to care for and empathize more easily with those who are socially closer and more similar to them (Cikara et al., 2011; Masten et al., 2010; Preston & de Waal, 2002) and that these preferences extend to a variety of helping behaviors observed in lab and real-world contexts (De Dreu et al., 2010; Hein et al., 2010; Levine et al., 2005; Preston & Ritter, 2013). For example, when choosing to share economic resources within their social networks, people tend to share fewer resources with more distant recipients (Fareri et al., 2012; Goeree et al., 2010; Hoffman et al., 1996), indicating that people value the gains of others less with increasing social distance (Jones & Rachlin, 2006; Strombach et al., 2014; Vekaria et al., 2017). Complementary ultimate and proximate theoretical perspectives can help make sense of such preferences. At the ultimate level, the fact that humans lived in relatively small, close-knit groups throughout much of their evolutionary history is thought to have created selective pressures favoring within-group cooperation and between-group hostility (Choi & Bowles, 2007; Greene, 2014). Additionally, evolutionary theory would predict a particularly strong sense of attachment and obligation towards kin (Hamilton, 1963; Preston & de Waal, 2002). This in turn could potentially account for a number of proximate explanations that have been offered for ingroup favoritism including the importance of one’s groups to their self-esteem and identity 6 BIASED BENEVOLENCE (Tajfel, 1974), the higher levels of empathy and obligation we feel towards socially close versus distant others (Cikara et al., 2014; Hughes, 2017; McManus et al., 2020) and the fact that loyalty to close others appears to be a central moral concern in cultures across the globe (Graham et al., 2013). To the extent that people’s moral judgments of others’ behavior align with these preferences, helping socially close others may be perceived as more morally acceptable than helping socially distant others despite the fact that this choice does not maximize welfare gains for those in need. Thus, maximizing one’s impact when donating may come with a personal social cost for donors. Related emerging research on moral judgments of impartial concern and altruism (i.e., impartial beneficence; Everett & Kahane, 2020; Kahane et al., 2018) offers conflicting results. On the one hand, several studies have shown that those who choose to help strangers and more socially distant others instead of close friends and family are perceived to be morally worse and less trustworthy than those who do the opposite, even when helping the socially distant other would produce more substantial welfare gains (e.g., building houses for Habitat for Humanity instead of spending time with one’s mother; Hughes, 2017; McManus et al., 2020). These effects appear to be driven by the perceived obligations of helpers towards close friends and family (Hughes, 2017; McManus et al., 2020), and reverse in direction when helpers were in roles where greater impartiality would be expected (e.g., in a professor-student relationship; McManus et al., 2020). In contrast, however, our own independent reanalysis of moral wrongness ratings from data sets posted by Everett et al. to the Open Science Framework (OSF, Everett et al., 2018) revealed that, whereas impartial actions were consistently seen as morally worse than partial
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