Is it obligatory to donate effectively? Judgments about the wrongness of donating ineffectively
Lucius Caviola, Stefan Schubert
Abstract
Most donations end up with relatively ineffective charities. In this paper, we present five preliminary studies on the hypothesis that people don’t find it obligatory to donate effectively. We find that people typically do not find it obligatory to donate to highly effective charities. We explore the conditions under which people do consider it obligatory to help effectively. For example, we find that people consider effectiveness more important when they are the only person who can help, or when the ineffective option is Pareto dominated by a more effective option. We also find that judgments of how obligatory it is to donate effectively are correlated with judgments of how obligatory it is to donate in the first place.