LessWrong Survey Results: Do Ethical Theories Affect Behavior?

Umm... what's the surprising thing about the results being as predicted? That they fit the prediction so well?

It was apparently later than I thought. Heh. Fixed.

Downvoted for snarking without following it up with an explanation.

Could you help me understand what a p-value is? I've heard multiple, different interpretations. I don't think the "probability due to chance" is that widely off the mark, though?

I have taken enough mathematical statistics to know what a p-value is, but I still don't know what it means.

How is it misinterpreted in this case?

It isn't, but maybe people who actually understand them don't use them as often.

Yup.

I hope Yudkowsky was a little more careful with the wording. Consequentialists (who are also sadistic) would choose specks and consequentialists (who are also paperclipers) wouldn't care either way unless one option wasted resources that could be used for paperclip manufacture.

Yudkowsky is well aware of that. I'd assume he thinks it true of human values, or at least rational human values, or ...I'll just update the essay to clarify that a bit.

I realize that I didn't do a very thorough job of looking at total charitable giving, so I did some more analyses.

Summary: People tend to give more if they are older, richer, or more religious. Consequentialists tend to be younger, but after controlling for age they do tend to give more than non-consequentialists (p=.02). Consequentialists also tend to be less religious, and if you control statistically for that as well then the relationship between consequentialism and giving is even stronger (p=.006).

log(charity+1) seems like the best variable to look at for total charitable giving - it has roughly a normal distribution plus a big point mass off in the left tail at zero giving (which stays at zero after adding 1 & taking the log), n=952. There is a weak & nonsignificant trend for consequentialists to have higher log(charity+1), p=.30. Average log(charity+1) is 3.21 vs. 3.01 for the 2 groups, which means that the geometric means are e^3.21 = $25 vs. e^3.01 = $20, a 1.2x ratio.

There are other variables which have stronger, clearer relationships with total charitable giving: income, age, and religion. People with more money give more, older people give more, and more religious people give more. All three variables have independent effects - in a multiple linear regression, age, income, and religiosity are all significant predictors of charitable giving.

(Details on those effects: for income, I used log(income+1000). About a third of the data points are lost with analyses that include income because a lot of people left it blank, and that's a non-random subset as they have lower giving than those who reported their income. The religion effect shows up on p(God) and p(Religion), and on the religious views question treated as categories, and on the religious views question treated as a quantitative scale from 1 (atheist & not spiritual) to 6 (committed theist). I combined the 3 quantitative questions into a single religiosity scale by standardizing each & averaging them.)

What does this tell us about the relationship between consequentialism and giving? Well, consequentialism is negative correlated with religiosity (consequentialists are less religious) and age (consequentialists are younger), which could hide a positive effect of consequentialism on giving. (It is uncorrelated with income).

And in fact, in a multiple regression using all four variables as predictors (age, income, religiosity, and consequentialism), all four are statistically significant predictors of charitable giving. The effect of consequentialism is significant at p=.006, and the effect size suggests that consequentialists give 1.9x as much as nonconsequentialists (of the same age, income, and religiosity); $42 vs. $22 geometric means (these are higher than the means before, since it excludes the people who left income blank, who tended to give less). So consequentialism does predict higher giving, controlling for age, income, and religiosity.

It's not clear if we should be controlling for religiosity in this way, though - if someone buys into the idea package which includes atheism & consequentialism then maybe they shouldn't get credit for being more generous than those who accept atheism but not consequentialism (especially when other idea packages, like theistic ones, are associated with higher generosity). But controlling only for age & income still leaves the effect of consequentialism statistically significant, p=.02, with consequentialists giving 1.7x as much as non-consequentialists of the same age & income ($40 vs. $23).

There is also some concern with controlling for income, especially because of the missing data (from a non-random third of the sample). There are also possible issues with endogeneity (e.g., people who choose a high income job so they can give more money to charity), although that suggests that controlling for income could lead to understating the effect of consequentialism rather than to overstating it. But it turns out to not be worth worrying about; running an analysis which controls only for age, consequentialism is still a significant predictor of giving, p=.02, 1.6x the giving ($27 vs. $17).

And there aren't similar concerns about statistically controlling for age, since age is an exogenous variable - the causal arrows can only go in one direction there. Another way to account for age is to just exclude everyone under the age of 25 (since many people in that age range aren't financially independent, so their giving rates aren't that informative). Of those aged 25+, consequentialists give more than non-consequentialists, p = .04, 1.7x the giving ($56 vs. $32), n = 526.

Logging the total charity donations:

R> lw2012 <- read.csv("2012.csv")
R> consequentialism <- lw2012[as.integer(lw2012$MoralViews) == 2,]
R> consequentialism <- log1p(as.integer(as.character(consequentialism$Charity)))
R> consequentialism <- consequentialism[!is.na(consequentialism) & consequentialism != 0]
R> others <- lw2012[as.integer(lw2012$MoralViews) != 2,]
R> others <- log1p(as.integer(as.character(others$Charity)))
R> others <- others[!is.na(others) & others != 0]
R> t.test(consequentialism, others)
    Welch Two Sample t-test

data:  consequentialism and others
t = 1.687, df = 411.6, p-value = 0.09238
alternative hypothesis: true difference in means is not equal to 0
95 percent confidence interval:
 -0.04613  0.60421
sample estimates:
mean of x mean of y
    5.241     4.962

Interestingly for the memeplex theory (which seems very plausible), Consequentialists are also more likely to indicate understanding of the Newcombs Problem (by choosing one box or two box over not sure or no answer) [chi2 = 16.1393, p = 0.001] but not more likely to actually one box over two box (chi2 = 4.1755, p = 0.243).

Peter, why are you surprised that consequentialists are more likely to choose torture over dust specks than others? That seems to me like the expected observation.

It was apparently later than I thought and I eyeballed the relationship backwards. Heh. Fixed.

Any statistical relationship between self-reported religious beliefs and self-reported charitable giving?

Yes, sort of, and in the direction you expect.

I split religion up into theist (Lukewarm theist, committed theist, pantheist/deist/etc., N = 130) and nontheist (agnostic, atheist but spiritual, atheist and not spiritual, N = 745) and did a t-test:

Theists: $597.71 Atheists: $419.34 p-value: 0.109

Then, by percentage of income:

Theists: 2.52% Atheists: 1.62% p-value: 0.203

Just at the level of philosophical gossip, it seems to be somewhat commonly believed among philosophers I've known that consequentialists and virtue theorists are generally OK, but you can't trust deontologists. I'd be very curious to see some results that are better than vague impressions from gossip.

Results that show whether or not you can safely trust deontologists? What would you have in mind for testing that?

But I have to suspect that the very small number of deontologists in your survey is a serious problem (not your fault, of course). [...] That raises the worry that if your sample is atypical in one respect it may be atypical in other respects.

There's no denying that it's an atypical sample. Indeed, any sample of people with ethical theories would have to be... the typical person doesn't even know what "consequentialism" means, let alone if they are one. Really, what we're looking for is a good sample of philosophically informed people, and LessWrong isn't such a bad place for that.

Ideally, we would want to sample philosophers at large, which (as lukeprog points out) Schwitzgebel does to the tune of similar findings (no statistically significant difference on whether ethicists vs. non-ethicists pay registration fees, academic society membership, voting, staying in touch with one’s mother, vegetarianism, organ and blood donation, responsiveness to student emails, charitable giving, and honesty in responding to survey questionnaires, and courteousness at talks).

Good point. I provide the current statistics as is, and if anyone wants to apply corrections for false positives, go ahead.

The survey question itself did not specify.

Me too. However, I worry that the personality measures are not all that reliable, for reasons that the main survey article mentioned.