Joshua Greene on Effective Charities

Harvard psychology professor Joshua Greene studies the back-and-forth between emotion and reason in how human beings make moral decisions. In this Social Science Bites podcast, Greene – whose work transcends psychology to include philosophy and neuroscience – discusses how people address one particular moral question, what charities to contribute to. Should they give to charities that are objectively best at deploying their money toward a cause, or charities that address a particular endeavor closest to the contributor’s heart? Spoiler alert: Greene says they can do both.

Greene and collaborators such as Lucius Caviola studied the reactions of people to giving, learning that the connectedness that givers feel to a cause isn’t totally dependent on how much they give. As a result, he’s suggested (and done more than suggested, as we shall see) that individuals can give both to their sentimental favorites but also to hugely effective charities working directly on health or poverty-alleviation measures. This split offers a psychological balm on two fronts – their personal interest and their real desire to be impactful.

“So people want to give from the heart and support the charities that are personally meaningful to them, but when it comes to giving from the heart, what matters is that you give something, and not how much you give,” he explains to interviewer David Edmonds. “… And people also like being impactful. They like the idea of being smart and effective. So now you essentially get a two-fer that when we ask people, to what extent did you feel like you did something that was personally meaningful to what extent do you feel like what you did was impactful, when people do the split, when they do the bundle, they’re high on both dimensions, whereas they’re only high on one or the other when they do the all or nothing.”

Rather than end with that insight, however, Greene and company came up with a solution that allows givers to not only split their contributions but to multiply the amount through a tool called Giving Multiplier.

“If people want to try Giving Multiplier,” Greene concludes the podcast, “go to givingmultiplier.org and it’s very simple. You put in your own favorite charity, and then you pick one from our list, and then you decide how much you want much you want to donate total. And then you use our little slider to decide how you want to allocate, and you can see how much money you’ll get added on top, depending on how you do your allocation. And we give a higher matching rate, so you get more money added on top if you have a promotional code. And the promotional code for listeners to this wonderful podcast is bites. So you can either go there, and when you get to the little allocation slider, you can enter in bytes, or you can just go to givingmultiplier.org/BITES. I should also say, for listeners in the US, you’re all set. If you’re in the UK, these are US charities, so you won’t have it for tax purposes. If anyone out there is interested in helping us bring this to the wider world. In the UK, please let us know. But in any case, anyone can use it, and you can use the code bites.”

In addition to his work at Harvard and membership in the Center for Brain Science faculty there, he has written the book Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them. He has received various honors, such as the academically oriented Stanton Prize from the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, the teaching-oriented Roslyn Abramson Award from Harvard, and the market-oriented 2021, Best New Ideas in Money from MarketWatch and the Reimagine Charitable Giving Prize Winner from Open IDEO/Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the latter two both in 2021 and with Caviola. Greene is a fellow of the Society for Experimental Psychologists and of the Association for Psychological Science.

To download an MP3 of this podcast, right-click this link and save. The transcript of the conversation appears below.

David Edmonds: When you donate to a charity, how much do you know about its effectiveness? Would knowing which charities did the most good influence your giving? Wouldn’t it be better if more money went to the most effective charities? Joshua Greene is a psychologist and neuroscientist at Harvard. His research has led him and some colleagues to set up a website to increase donations to effective charities. So far, and I’m recording this in late 2024, so far, it’s raised $3.4 million and has funded, for example, 60,000 anti-malarial nets and Vitamin A supplements for tens of thousands of malnourished children.

Joshua Greene, welcome to Social Science. Bites.

Joshua Greene: Hi. Thanks for having me on.

Edmonds: We’re talking today about charities, and in particular what some people call effective charities. Perhaps you can begin by explaining what we mean by effective charities. In what ways are some charities more effective than others?

Greene: Well, there are many charities that are doing things where they’re attempting to save people’s lives, or they’re attempting to improve people’s quality of life, right? And this is typically charities in the health and poverty domain. So, an example of a highly effective charity, one may be familiar to many of your listeners, would be the Against Malaria Foundation, which distributes anti-malarial insecticidal nets. All-in cost of distributing a net is about $5 and you can, on average, expect to save somebody’s life for about $5,000, which is more expensive than most people think, but is actually incredibly cost-effective compared to the vast majority of other things that people might be inclined to support, like cancer research.

And then there are other things that, on an individual level, can have an enormous impact for much, much less. For example, there are medical treatments that rid people, usually children, of debilitating intestinal worms, and one of those treatments can typically cost less than $1. So an enormous amount of good that one can do for, you know, less than the price of a drink or three or four drinks in a place like the United States or the UK.

The surprising thing here is the factor that the most effective charities are 100 times more impactful than typical charities. So, the way I sometimes think of this is people think of charities as varying in their effectiveness, in the way that humans vary in height. So like, a really tall person like Shaquille O’Neal, might be 50 percent taller than someone who’s not so tall, like Simone Biles, right? And you might think a really effective charity would be 50 percent taller. But it’s not like heights among people, it’s like heights among plants. It’s like a California redwood versus a shrub, in terms of what the most effective charities can do. So this sets up an opportunity, but it’s also a kind of psychological challenge.

Edmonds: So if we want to divert more of people’s charitable giving to these effective charities, why can’t we just point out what you’ve just pointed out to me, that some charities are just a lot more effective, do a lot more good than others?

Greene: So there is a narrow segment of the population that hears that information, looks it up, gets the facts, takes it seriously and says, “Wow, that’s amazing. I’m going to make a significant change in what I do with my disposable income.” The vast majority of people hear that, and some people may doubt it or whatever, but of those who take the claim seriously, they just kind of say, “Well, I get that, but there are other things that I care about.” So someone might say, “OK, I understand that I could do a lot of good providing deworming treatments to children on another continent, but I also really care about the animals in the local shelter where I’ve gotten some of my pets, and I really care about my local schools, and I really care about cancer research, because my aunt died of breast cancer, right?” And so people say, “So I get it, but like for me, charity is about what matters to me personally, and where I feel a kind of emotional connection.”

And the typical response among enthusiasts about effective giving is to say, “Well, it’s not about you, it’s not about your feelings. You shouldn’t do that. You should just give to the more effective stuff!” And for a while, that was kind of my line, until I realized that my wife and I didn’t live by it ourselves. We gave most of our charitable giving to these expert-recommended, super effective causes, but we still give to the Boston Food Bank and our local public schools. And so at some point, my collaborator and I, this is Lucius Caviola, who’s at Oxford now near you, said, “Well, why don’t we just try asking people to do both?” Just say, “OK, good, you’re a human. I’m a human. We both are doing the same thing. Support the local animal shelter, but why don’t you take some of what you’re giving and give it to these highly effective charities? Also just do both.”

And so we started running experiments with this, and I can tell you about those results, but let me pause there.

Edmonds: Yes, I want to hear about those results. But just to be clear, is the reason that you and others give to that local charity or to the cancer charity that covers the cancer that your mother might have suffered from, for example, is that because it just feels more meaningful what’s going on there?

Greene: Well, I think it varies from person to person, but yeah, I think that that is part of I mean, one thing I think of it is what motivates people to give in the first place, right? Part of it is a desire to have a positive impact, but part of it is a desire to feel connected. One way to think about it is, how much better do you feel if you do something good versus if somebody else does something good? You’re glad to see someone else out there doing something good, but if you do it, it’s much more of a warm glow. So it is, to some extent, undeniably about us, right? And I don’t say that in a finger waggy way. I mean, it’s true of me as well.

So, what we’ve been thinking about is, how do we create a way of giving that allows people to give with their heart but also give with their head.

Edmonds: I first came across your work in moral philosophy, where you were talking about fast and slow thinking moral philosophy, or I think you put it like settings in the camera, automatic settings and manual settings. And I wonder if this is roughly in the same terrain, that there’s head and heart, as it were?

Greene: Yeah, you’re very perceptive here. So of course, you wrote your wonderful book on the trolley problem, and it was in that context that I really got my research going as a experimental psychologist and neuroscientist, as you know, but others might not. I’m also a philosopher of my training, originally, my PhD was in philosophy.

So, thinking about those trolley dilemmas, those are dilemmas where, by definition, there’s no third way, right? So you can push the man off of the foot bridge, and that person will die, but you can save five people, and people with normal, healthy neural neural circuitry have a strong negative response to the idea of of pushing that guy off the footbridge, even if they know that it will save more lives — and the dilemma forces that choice. This is a similar kind of thing, and I’m not claiming that it is exactly the same neural mechanisms. I think they overlap, but are not exactly the same. But on the one hand, you have the consequentialist utilitarian thought, OK, in the footbridge case, you can save more lives. Here you can save more lives with your charitable donation. That part overlaps.

And then I think it’s a different kind of emotional response or motivation that makes you say, “Yeah, but I also really care about breast cancer, or I really care about the local animal shelter.” But the beauty here is, with the footbridge dilemma, by definition, there’s no solution, whereas here, for once, I’m happy to say, yes, there’s a third way. You don’t have to just face that forced choice. And that is what has made this project so satisfying, is that we can go out in the world and say, “Here, dilemma solved.”

Edmonds: We’re going to get to that third way any minute now. But imagine that it was only binary, that you could give all your money to effective courses, or all your money to causes that felt meaningful, that you were personally linked to. When people are asked to do that, what do they do? And how do people judge their decisions?

Greene: Well, that’s the control condition in our first experiment. We said, here, pick any charity you like, and then here’s this super effective charity like the deworming charity that I described, and in our first experiment, 82 percent of people chose to give the money to the charity that they selected — their personal favorite — rather than the one that the experts recommended as highly impactful. So that’s the control condition, and I can tell you about the experimental condition when we’re ready.

Edmonds: I’m ready. So there is a third way. You found a third way?

Greene: Yeah, right. So in the other condition, participants have the option to give it all to their personal favorite, or all to the highly effective one recommended by experts, or to split it 50/50 and what we found there is that a narrow majority of participants chose the 50/50 split. And what that actually ended up meaning was that about 75 percent more of the money ended up going to the highly effective charity. So, you might think that it’s neutral. In one case, it’s all or nothing, and in the other case, it’s all or nothing, or a 50/50 split. But there’s no reason why I should bias things in a particular direction. But in fact, there was a huge increase in the amount of money going to the highly effective charity when you give people the option to split, and we spent subsequent experiments figuring out how to boost that and understanding the underlying psychology.

Edmonds: Let’s deal with the underlying psychology first. Why is it that people like this split? In fact, prefer this split to giving all of the money to effective charities, or all of the money to, as it were, meaningful charities? Why do they like splitting the money between these two types of gifts, these two types of causes?

Greene: It seems to be that people have two motivations, but that those motivations can be satisfied, or pretty well satisfied, by doing the split. So people want to give from the heart and support the charities that are personally meaningful to them, but when it comes to giving from the heart, what matters is that you give something, and not how much you give. The difference between giving $100 and $200 to the charity that you love, it’s not as if you feel twice as good or twice as satisfied. If you give 200 instead of 100 instead you feel maybe a little bit more satisfied, right? So if you take that $200 that you have allotted to charitable giving, and you give 100 of it to the charity that you love, then you get all, or almost all of the satisfaction of supporting that beloved charity, but then you have $100 left over to do something else.

And people also like being impactful. They like the idea of being smart and effective. So now you essentially get a two-fer that when we ask people, to what extent did you feel like you did something that was personally meaningful to what extent do you feel like what you did was impactful, when people do the split, when they do the bundle, they’re high on both dimensions, whereas they’re only high on one or the other when they do the all or nothing.

Edmonds: What about third-party viewers looking at these decisions taken by those who split their decisions compared to those who give it all to one cause or another. People looking from the outside, how do they judge those who split their decisions?

Greene: Yeah, so we had an experiment on this. We presented people with the vignette. People are presented with all three options, all to the personal favorite, all to the highly effective, or the split. And then we ask people to evaluate people who made different choices. And among other things, we ask them, how warm or kind do you think this person is? How competent do you think this person is? And what we find is that for the people who, knowing that they could do more good, but choose to give it all to the personal favorite, they say this person is very warm and kind, but maybe not super competent. And for the people who choose to give just to the highly effective charity, people say, well, this person clearly seems very competent, but maybe they’re not so warm and kind. But for the people who choose to do the split, they actually get full marks for both. There’s not even a compromise. They’re seen as fully warm and fully competent.

But I don’t think it’s really about in these choices, what will people think of me? Most people are not doing this publicly. In fact, with the donation platform that I’ll describe, we’ve encouraged people to share their donations, and some people do, but a lot don’t. I think it’s more about how people see themselves or feel about themselves, rather than reputation. But you were right to sort of point to that perception, or self-perception, is sort of a key part of this.

Edmonds: So this donation platform you mentioned, you’ve actually not only done these experiments, you’ve done something very unusual for an academic: you’ve acted upon them, and you’ve set up a mechanism by which people can donate. Can you talk me through that?

Greene: Yeah. So that’s right, let me say a little bit more about the research going into this. So, we discovered that people really like doing these charity splits. So, we thought, well, we need some way to get this idea out there. And we took the obvious economist approach and say, “Well, what if we offer people money?” If we say, “Hey, if you make a split donation, we’ll add money on top”? And unsurprisingly, people love that, and they do even more of it.

But then, of course, the question is, where does the money come from?

So, then we tried just asking people, after they’ve set up their donation, hey, you’re about to give some of your money to this highly effective charity, this deworming charity, let’s say that you’ve never heard of before. Would you instead put that money into a fund that will support matching donations for other people. in a kind of pay-it-forward sort of way. And what we found was that about 30 percent of people are willing to do that, but others weren’t. But the math worked out so that enough people were willing to do it to cover the cost of the people who were just going to take the matching funds.

And so we thought, wow, if the results of these experiments are right, this could work in the real world, and by a wide margin. So, Lucius set up this website with some of his technologically inclined friends called givingmultiplier.org and it essentially implements this splitting and matching system.

Edmonds: So, if I donate $200 and I spit it $100 each way, do the matching dollars only match those I’ve given to the affected charity, or do they double the total I’ve given overall?

Greene: So, they apply to both. And that’s part of the point of this, right? In a meaningful way, it really validates both sides, people’s hearts and their heads, right? That we’re not saying, “Well, if you make a split donation, we’ll support the part of your donation that we care about as the charity expert nerds,” right? We’re saying, “No, we’re willing to support both.”

How much money gets added on top depends on how you allocate. So if you have a promotion code, and we’ll talk about that at the end of the show, currently, the matching rates can vary, but currently, if you do a 50/50 split, then we add 50 percent on top right. So if you’re going to give $200 total, and you choose $100 for the local animal shelter and $100 for the Against Malaria Foundation, then what will happen is $150 will go to each of those charities, and that extra $100, split 50/50, comes from our matching fund.

Edmonds: It sounds like you take a normative position on this, in that you think it would be better if more money went to the effective charities than currently goes to effective charities. And that, in a way, that’s the right thing to do, and that people who are donating with their heart, donating to the animal shelter, the meaningful charities, obviously, they’re not doing anything wrong, but they could be doing something better, and that therefore, the best possible world would be one in which as much money as possible, went to the effective charities.

Greene: So I would put a little bit of an asterisk on that, and I would distinguish between the best thing to do and the best thing to be I would not want to live in a world. I don’t think it would be a good world. if people felt no strong emotional connections to their family, to their friends, to their communities, to the things that have become meaningful to them through the course of their lives. I don’t think there’s a version of human existence, maybe in some future species or cyborg or whatever, who knows, but humans as we are now, without any biological intervention, I think the best world that we can hope for is one in which people feel strong personal connections to things. I also think the best world that we could hope for is going to involve people being willing to step outside of their personal connections and do things that, by the evidence, by the math, promotes the greater good.

So, in a narrow and real sense, I think it would be better if people gave all of their money to the super-effective causes. I’m not saying that I disagree with that, but I also think that if we didn’t have these inclinations that push in the other direction, the world would be worse. So rather than fighting those inclinations, what I say is do both, and let’s reward each other for that.

Edmonds: But you’re a philosopher as well as a psychologist. In your own giving, you’ve already mentioned that you donate to the local charity. You don’t feel a kind of obligation to try and overcome those instincts and to spend all the money in the most effective way.

Greene: No, I mean, part of it is we give a lot more money to the highly effective stuff than we do to the personal connection stuff. And of all the things that I could change about myself, giving modest sums to charities that are personally meaningful to me and my wife is not high on the list.

Edmonds: Let me ask you about the fundamental premise of this. We’ve had on this show before, Angus Deaton, who’s a Nobel Prize winning economist, and Angus is a bit skeptical about some of these calculations made by organizations like GiveWell that come up with these figures that you mentioned earlier, about $5,000 being required to save a life. And what Angus says is that what happens is that these NGOs go into a country and they supply these bed nets, and on the face of it, it looks like they’re saving many lives, But actually what’s happening is, by this work being done by NGOs, they’re somehow breaking the contract between the citizen and the state, and they’re undermining that relationship, and in doing so, they’re feeding corruption.

And so it looks like it’s doing some good, but in fact, there are things that are much more difficult to measure, which suggest it’s not doing nearly as much good as we think. And there’s various bits of evidence that support this. One bit of evidence is that countries that have the least amount of aid per capita, like India and China, are often the countries that have the most dramatic growth. And I wondered whether this casts a shadow on this kind of project.

Greene: So there’s another kind of split that I’m doing, and that is between working on things like charitable giving and working on things like inter group conflict, I’m placing the giving multiplier bet and saying, “OK, there sure is a lot of good evidence that these things do a lot of good.” And it’s really hard for me to imagine looking a child in the eye and say, “I’m not going to vaccinate you. I’m not going to get the worms out of your stomach because really this is undermining your social contract.” I mean, maybe that’s right. And I’m not saying that you can’t make an empirical case in that direction, but that is a long, complicated, speculative, empirical argument.

So what I would say is the most reasonable thing to do is to do giving multiplier one level up when it comes to one’s research and aspirations that we should be trying to save people’s lives from debilitating, curable and treatable diseases, but we should also really be thinking about those social structures, right? And what I think Deaton is essentially saying is that places only get better when they have good institutions, institutions that make it worth trying, that make it worth the effort to build a life, build a business, whatever it is, and that’s what really propels people out of poverty.

But institutions are very hard to change. Well, what is the root threat to institutions? I think it is inter-group animosity, particularly in places where there’s ethnic conflict, which is the case in a lot of dictatorships, and increasingly dominating the political scene in democracies, and that is what I am working on in the other half of my research life. So, I’m not disagreeing — I’m placing both bets.

Edmonds: So you’re expanding your research interest. Let me suggest one area you could go: We’ve been talking today about how to persuade people who want to give a given amount of money to give it away in different ways. But are you also interested in how people can be persuaded to give away more money, not just to give it away in different proportions?

Greene: Well, I think that what we end up doing is getting people to give more than they otherwise would. So, we asked them questions. You know, what would they have done were it not for their encountering giving multiplier? But I guess my theory about what makes people do more of things is that they find it satisfying. To me, the best way to get people to be more generous is to get them to start being generous and get them to experience it as a positive thing. And people certainly have that experience when they are doing community service, when they get that warm glow of being engaged in something that has that kind of personal connection.

And what I would like to see is more people getting a warm glow from effective giving. So, there are other things that we’re doing to try to build more of that. So, we now have a feature with giving multiplier where people can do their own sort of personal fundraiser. So, let’s say you’re getting married or you’re graduating, you can set up a fundraiser, and you can do it in two different ways. You can pick from one of our highly effective charities and fix that in place and say, “OK, we’re getting married, and we really believe in helping children get vaccinated or whatever it is. So we’re going to have new incentives as our super effective charity. And then pick one that you like also,” right? Or you can do it the other way. You can say, “We really care about breast cancer research, but we also think it’s important to be impactful, and you pick from among this list,” right? And anyone now can set up their own fundraiser and use it for events. And we’ve had people do this for their weddings. We’ve had people do this for memorials. And so things grow, things spread.

Edmonds: I said it was final question. Let me ask you one more. Talk a bit about the interdisciplinary nature of your work, because you’re primarily a psychologist, but it seems to me you’re drawing on lots of other different disciplines, including economics and including philosophy, in fact.

Greene: Yeah, well, from my point of view, there are important questions and there are important problems, and disciplinary boundaries are for registrars, but not because they have any inherent meaning. And so if there’s a question I’m trying to answer, well, OK, I’m going to look to psychology and look to neuroscience and look to anthropology and try to understand that. And if there’s a problem to be solved, well, yeah, use all the tools that are available to you. So, from my point of view, it’s not like why be interdisciplinary, it’s why wouldn’t you be if you’re serious about answering the questions and solving the problems that are the target of your inquiry.

Edmonds: Joshua Greene, thank you very much. And perhaps you could give the listener the details of where they want to donate if they want to participate.

Greene: Yeah. So if people want to try Giving Multiplier, go to givingmultiplier.org and it’s very simple. You put in your own favorite charity, and then you pick one from our list, and then you decide how much you want much you want to donate total. And then you use our little slider to decide how you want to allocate, and you can see how much money you’ll get added on top, depending on how you do your allocation. And we give a higher matching rate, so you get more money added on top if you have a promotional code. And the promotional code for listeners to this wonderful podcast is bites. So you can either go there, and when you get to the little allocation slider, you can enter in bytes, or you can just go to givingmultiplier.org/BITES. I should also say, for listeners in the US, you’re all set. If you’re in the UK, these are US charities, so you won’t have it for tax purposes. If anyone out there is interested in helping us bring this to the wider world. In the UK, please let us know. But in any case, anyone can use it, and you can use the code bites.

Edmonds: Thanks very much, Josh.