The ultimate goal of our research agenda is to help do the most good possible, in line with the principles of effective altruism. In brief, effective altruism advocates for using reason and evidence to take actions that improve the world as much as possible, impartially accounting for the welfare of all its inhabitants, present and future. There are many approaches to this project. For example, one common approach is to find the most cost-effective way of improving health outcomes of the global poor based on randomized control trials. Another is to improve farmed animal welfare by lobbying corporations whose procurement decisions influence millions of animals. These approaches have had enormous success and are good bets for maximally effective interventions based on their short-term, direct impact. However, it is hard to measure their indirect or long-term effects. Their total impact is thus subject to a high degree of uncertainty.

One approach to address this drawback is designing interventions that are robustly positive in the very long term. This alternative approach is based on the idea of longtermism. Longtermism rests on three central premises. First, future people matter. Second, the future could contain a vast number of people. Third, our actions may predictably influence how well this long-term future goes. For example, some actions have the potential to affect the chances of human extinction, with existential implications for all potential humans who could otherwise have lived over millions of years. Importantly, while we cannot evaluate these actions based on randomized controlled trials or a track record of improving welfare, we still can and should choose them based on evidence (e.g., about detecting and preventing dangerous pathogens, trends in technology, the destructive potential of nuclear weapons, etc.) and reason (careful argumentation as to what strategies maximize expected future welfare based on this evidence).

Overall, longtermism seems plausible, has fairly radically revisionary implications if correct, and is currently underexplored in academic research. It also presents challenges: positively influencing the long-term future is hard and involves dealing with enormous uncertainties. For all these reasons, we think that there is tremendous scope for longtermism-relevant research. If you find the idea of longtermism and its implications interesting, and you would be interested in conducting psychological and behavioral science research that informs it, then this research agenda is for you.

How can psychological and behavioral science inform longtermism and improve the long-term future?

Psychological research can inform longtermist thinking in multiple ways. For example, some decisions could have profound implications for the long-term future, such as whether to detonate a nuclear weapon, create a potentially dangerous new technology, and invest in pandemic preparedness. Understanding the psychology of these decisions is one step to ensuring they are made more wisely. Moreover, the optimal policy from a longtermist perspective might often depend on human psychology. What incentives are sufficient to persuade pathogen researchers to take sufficient precautions against laboratory leaks? What makes voters elect potentially dangerous leaders? What long-term trajectories will facilitate human psychological wellbeing? Psychological research to answer these kinds of questions has various concrete paths to impact. The three main paths to impact are by providing key decision-makers with action-guiding information, raising public awareness of the pros and cons of longtermism-aligned action, and by providing science-based tools to influence decision-making to achieve better long-term outcomes.

Action-guiding information

Some psychological insights are directly action-guiding for decision-makers looking to effectively improve the future. While it is important to publish the basis for these insights in high-quality, peer-reviewed journals to ensure their rigor and credibility, it is also important to communicate these insights directly to policymakers, philanthropists, and other key decision-makers. For example:

We could identify the key decisions that humans are likely to make suboptimally for future welfare (e.g., risking a catastrophe to win a technological arms race) and intervene specifically on those key decisions.
We could examine people’s attitudes toward future people to assess the political tractability of longtermist policy.
To assess the value of reducing existential risk, we may need to understand and evaluate the potential levels of future humans’ psychological wellbeing.
To decide who should make decisions affecting the future, we may need to understand what psychological traits predict sound judgments.

Education and awareness raising

Given the profound revisionist implications of longtermism, it is important to educate people about it and raise awareness of the pros and cons of acting in line with its principles. Academic research is often the first step to raising broader awareness of important scientific insights. Insights that are rigorously researched and published in academic journals may, with an increased likelihood, be featured in university education, textbooks, journalistic outlets, or popular science books. As an example, consider the widespread awareness of cognitive biases owing to Kahneman and Tversky’s research, and its undermining of the case for laissez-faire policy based on rational actors. Analogously, if longtermism-relevant psychological insights become integrated into public consciousness, it might lead to a more nuanced and appropriate weighting of longtermist considerations by individual decision-makers, philanthropists, and the policy community. For example:

Public support for longtermist interventions could increase with knowledge of common decision-making errors that lead to catastrophic risks.
Public support for longtermist policy could decline with knowledge of any decision-making errors that humans frequently commit when attempting to improve the longterm future.

Practical interventions and tools

A more direct approach is to develop and test practical strategies that could empower people to do more good or prevent them from causing longterm harm. For example:

We could develop training programs to alert scientists to any catastrophic risks that could result from their research or persuade policymakers to put greater priority on reducing existential risk.
We could provide decision-making tools that help people appropriately weigh low probability risks.
We could develop rationality classes to improve the sophistication of public opinion and lower risk of electing dangerous leaders.
We could develop and test psychometric assessment tools that could help to identify people who have the potential to do a large amount of good or avoid putting people in positions of power who could do a large amount of harm.

Note that as a heuristic, interventions that could plausibly improve the future in 100 years or later are likely more promising from a longtermism perspective than interventions with a short-term impact but an unclear long-term impact. For example, some behavior change interventions will likely be replaced by better interventions further in the future and, while their impact is valuable, it is not likely to persist for very long. In contrast, an intervention that has some chance of preventing an existential catastrophe could benefit humans for thousands of years or more.

Who is this research agenda for?

This research agenda is intended for researchers in psychological and behavioral science who are interested in global priorities research and effective altruism related research. Researchers interested in pursuing such research, connecting with other like-minded researchers, or providing feedback could visit our website at http://eapsychology.org or contact us at ea.psych.lab@gmail.com (or contact the authors of this agenda directly).

Resources on effective altruism, longtermism, and global priorities research

Readers who want to learn more about effective altruism, longtermism, and global priorities research are encouraged to consult the following websites or books:

80,000 Hours

Longtermism

Doing Good Better — William MacAskill
The Most Good You Can Do — Peter Singer
The Precipice — Toby Ord
What We Owe the Future — William MacAskill
Scout Mindset — Julia Galef

Other lists of effective altruism-inspired psychological research questions

List of most important psychology topics to study (Greenberg, 2022)
How effective altruism can help psychologists maximize their impact (Gainsburg et al., 2021)
Effective Thesis
An interdisciplinary synthesis of research on understanding and promoting well-doing (Lieder, Prentice, & Corwin-Renner, 2022)
Life Improvement Science (Lieder & Prentice, 2022)

Potential Research Priorities according to a team of more than 40 leading behavioral scientists and Effective Altruists (Lieder, 2021)

Cultivating Changemakers: A review of Meta Changemaking (Reynante et al., 2022)

Research areas

These research areas and questions are a first draft attempt at outlining the kind of psychological and behavioral science research that can inform longtermism. There are many other topics that would be important to study, even more so than some of the topics here. In fact, tractable research questions will probably test more specific and original hypotheses than we’ve been able to list. We hope that readers will use our high-level questions as inspiration to generate new questions to explore further.

In terms of organization, many of the research areas listed below overlap. This is an intentional and pragmatic decision. Some categories focus on an object-level topic (e.g. morality) and others focus on a particular approach (e.g. developmental psychology). We find it useful to consider research areas from these different angles, even though it means some questions will fall under multiple areas (e.g., by studying the developmental emergence of morality). For each sub-category, we first list an overarching general research question in bold, followed by a few concrete sub-questions. The sub-questions are intended to exemplify the broad questions that follow from the overarching general question. We list some relevant existing literature after the questions for each research area. This list is not meant to be exhaustive, instead, they just include a few key examples. We appreciate that existing research has made substantial progress on many of the research questions we pose. Our research agenda is intended to inspire readers to build on this past research.

Morality

Understanding people’s values, whether they can be influenced, and if so, how, is important to inform longtermism. People’s moral values influence the extent to which they will support efforts to effectively improve the future and how they will conceive of that project. Morality research could take several forms. Some forms would focus on understanding people’s values. For example, we could research how compatible the implications of longtermism are with people’s moral psychology. This knowledge would help determine what form a politically tractable version of longtermism would take. Or, to identify what approaches to improving the future are likely to be neglected by typical altruists, and therefore have low-hanging fruit unpicked, we could research which approaches are perceived least favorably on moral grounds. Other forms of this research would focus on fostering desirable values. For example, to examine how to persuade people of the importance of improving the long-term future, we could research how to make the project as morally appealing as possible and how to influence moral preferences to be more aligned with it.

Understanding people’s values

In which ways and to what extent do human moral values and intuitions deviate from values conducive to effectively improving the future?

How wide is the range of entities that people deem worthy of moral concern and treatment? What predicts individual differences in this moral expansiveness? To what extent does moral expansiveness predict how much people morally value future generations, artificial intelligence that could achieve sentience or intelligent life forms that might follow humans? To what extent do people morally value non-sentient entities, e.g., non-sentient artificial intelligence?
How effectiveness-focused are people in the moral domain? How reluctant are people to prioritize the more effective option over a less effective option when this requires trading off lives against other values? How scope insensitive are people in helping contexts involving a large number of lives? How do these factors affect people’s willingness to allocate resources to improving the future rather than having a smaller expected impact on individuals living today?

Which emotions motivate people to effectively improve the future?

Are prosocial emotions such as empathy, sympathy or gratitude, motivators or obstacles to effectively improving the future? How can we harness prosocial emotions to help people do the most good? How important are social factors, such as social norms, in motivating people to improve the future?

How do people value the future of humanity and assess existential risk?

What are the psychological obstacles to caring about the long-term future of humanity (i.e., the next thousands, millions, or even billions of years), e.g. in terms of motivations (e.g., value-action gap), moral beliefs, empirical beliefs, etc?
How do people trade off bad outcomes, such as suffering, vs good outcomes, such as happiness? Under which framings do people’s intuitions change? Does people’s trade-ratio between suffering and happiness depend on whether they focus on mere outcomes or on actions required to bring about these outcomes?
What are people’s temporal discount rates for future people? What are the causes of people’s discount rates for future people — empirical uncertainty or normative considerations? How do time preferences in the moral domain relate to time preferences in the non-moral domain?
What are people’s views of a future utopia? Do they want humanity to spread in space or stay earthbound? To what extent are people’s views of an ideal future driven by non-utilitarian values?

What are people’s population-ethical intuitions?

Do people have clear and robust population-ethical views (i.e., about outcomes that differ in the composition or size of the respective populations)? Are some of their reactions to population-ethical dilemmas more robust and less framing-dependent than others? Are people’s population-ethical views closer to totalism or averagism? Do they have person-affecting views?

What objections do people have about an approach to ethics based on impartial welfare maximization and improving the future?

Do people believe it is too demanding or impractical?
Do people fundamentally disagree with the notion of impartial welfare maximization? How do people interpret the notion of impartial welfare maximization? To what extent do people endorse or deviate from consequentialism? To what extent do people endorse welfarist axiological values or the view that the overall value in the world is given by the sum total of wellbeing in it? Do people endorse prioritarian or egalitarian values? Do they endorse intrinsic non-welfarist values, such as seeing value aesthetics, purity, or wisdom? How well-formed are people's views on these abstract philosophical questions? How well do they predict willingness to engage in the project of effectively improving the future?
Are people more motivated by object-level causes than by impartial welfare maximization in the abstract? Are they partial to helping specific groups such as people with a particular misfortune? Do they see the project of impartial welfare maximization as a threat to causes that they value intrinsically?
Are some objections based on misunderstandings or genuine disagreements with the principles or concrete implications? Can we correct potential misunderstandings?

How confident or uncertain are people in their moral values?

Can people be made more or less uncertain about their moral values? How do people deal with moral uncertainty, and how does that relate to how they deal with other kinds of uncertainty?
How persuadable are people of new moral values? How often do people's moral philosophies meaningfully change?

(See also individual differences, developmental, cross-cultural sections below)

Fostering values conducive to effectively improving the future

How can we foster values conducive to effectively improving the future?

How can we spread values conducive to effectively improving the future in specific groups, such as amongst students, educators or policy makers?
How can we achieve fundamental norm change in society? How can we expand people’s moral circle (e.g., reduce presentism) and increase effectiveness-focus in society at large? How can we increase longtermist thinking in a way that aligns with people’s current norms?
What’s the role of moral argument and moral reasoning in shaping moral values? What messages and framings work best to change attitudes and behavior?
How does a new issue go from being amoral to becoming morally relevant or from being considered a moral matter to becoming treated as morally neutral? Is this consistent across different issues? How does it vary at an individual level?

What are the best ways to reduce the value-action gap for those interested in effectively improving the future?

How important is social proof? How effective are nudges?
How important is the role of identity or group belonging in motivating people to want to do the most good?

What are feasible strategies to overcome moral disagreement?

How feasible is moral trade as an approach to overcome moral disagreement, i.e, the process where agents with different moral views agree to take actions or exchange resources in order to bring about outcomes which are better from the perspective of everyone involved? What norms would people tend to apply to these trades, e.g. a fair split of resources or a more outcome-focused approach?

Relevant work:

Berman, J. Z., Barasch, A., Levine, E. E., & Small, D. A. (2018). Impediments to effective altruism: The role of subjective preferences in charitable giving. Psychological science, 29(5), 834-844.

Bloom, P. (2017). Against empathy: The case for rational compassion. Random House.

Caviola, L., Althaus, D., Mogensen, A., & Goodwin, G. (2021). Population ethical intuitions. Cognition.

Crimston, C. R., Hornsey, M. J., Bain, P. G., & Bastian, B. (2018). Toward a psychology of moral expansiveness. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 27(1), 14-19.

Feinberg, M., Kovacheff, C., Teper, R., & Inbar, Y. (2019). Understanding the process of moralization: How eating meat becomes a moral issue. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 117(1), 50–72.

Gainsburg, I., Pauer, S., Nawal, A., Aloyo, E. T., Mourrat, J. C., & Cristia, A. (2021). How effective altruism can help psychologists maximize their impact.

Greene, J. D. (2013). Moral tribes: Emotion, reason, and the gap between us and them. Penguin.

Greenberg, S., (2001). Which intrinsic values set different demographic groups apart?

Kahane, G., Everett, J. A., Earp, B. D., Caviola, L., Faber, N. S., Crockett, M. J., & Savulescu, J. (2018). Beyond sacrificial harm: A two-dimensional model of utilitarian psychology. Psychological Review, 125(2), 131.

Lieder, F., Prentice, M., & Corwin-Renner, E. R. (accepted subject to minor revisions). An interdisciplinary synthesis of research on understanding and promoting well-doing. Social and Personality Psychology Compass.

Ord, T. (2015). Moral trade. Ethics, 126(1), 118-138.

Tetlock, P. E. (2003). Thinking the unthinkable: Sacred values and taboo cognitions. Trends in cognitive sciences, 7(7), 320-324.

Reynante, B. M., Wilcox, J. E., Stephenson, O. L.,Lieder, F., Thielmann, I., & Lacopo, C. (submitted). Cultivating Changemakers: A review of Metachangemaking.

Rhee, J. J., Schein, C., & Bastian, B. (2019). The what, how, and why of moralization: A review of current definitions, methods, and evidence in moralization research. Social and Personality Psychology Compass. https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12511.

Rozen, P. (1999) The Process of Moralization. Psychological Science, 10(3): 218-221.

Singer, P. (2011). The expanding circle: Ethics, evolution, and moral progress. Princeton University Press.

Skitka, L. J., Hanson, B. E., Morgan, G. S., & Wisneski, D. C. (2021). The psychology of moral conviction. Annual Review of Psychology, 72, 347-366.

Rationality, judgment, and cognitive biases

If an impartial actor wants to use reason and evidence to effectively improve the future, they will be more effective to the extent that they avoid cognitive biases and make rational decisions. Psychological longtermist research thus includes understanding people’s judgments and decisions, how rational they are, and how to make them more so. Some of the worst outcomes for the longterm future, e.g., nuclear war or misaligned AI, are likely driven by misjudgments and suboptimal decision making. Psychological research could therefore study the cognitive biases that lead people to make such dangerous high-stakes decisions. Relatedly, psychological research could identify biases that lead people to underestimate particularly effective approaches to proactively improving the future. Further, to help impartial altruists effectively improve the future, research could develop methods to boost rational decision-making and forecasting accuracy.

Identifying decision tendencies and biases relevant for longtermism

Note. There are potentially hundreds of tendencies that are relevant. Here, we just list a few understudied ones as examples.

What cognitive biases affect how people decide between different options for effectively improving the future?

Are people overconfident in their judgments of which choice would most effectively improve the future? How do people value new information and the ability to keep their options open? How do people weigh the scale of a problem relative to its tractability and neglectedness? Do such biases cause people to overestimate or underestimate the value of action directed at improving the future vs. solving problems in the present?

How do people deal with the perceived risk of decisions to improve the long-term future?

How risk and ambiguity averse are people in altruistic decision-making?
How do people reason about very small probabilities and extreme tail events? Under what circumstances do people effectively "round down to zero" and ignore low-probability outcomes entirely? How do people weigh low-probability, extreme events? And to what extent are people fanatically focusing on one very small probability but high magnitude event? How do people reason about observer selection effects when estimating risks?
When making altruistic decisions, do people tend to think more about the overall value of the outcome/world, or about how much good they themselves do (the difference they make)? Do people dislike being a largely anonymous part of a much greater altruistic effort? In particular, if people are risk-averse (or ambiguity averse), which of these quantities are they risk-averse with respect to?

How do people deal with radical uncertainty about the long-term effects of their actions (i.e., cluelessness)?

How do people make decisions under cluelessness? Do they have a tendency to focus on certain positive short-term impacts even if the sign of the total long-term impacts is unclear and even if there are other options that have more robustly positive long-term consequences?
What if they have no precise probabilities? What if they know that they are not aware of all relevant possibilities (conscious unawareness), and so must deal with 'unknown unknowns'? Does it make them more cautious? Less so? When? Why?

Improving rational thinking

How can we increase rationality and wisdom in society as a whole in a way conducive to improving the future?
Does improving rationality increase the effectiveness of people who aim to improve the future, or lead people to prioritize the future more?
How can we foster better epistemic attitudes?

Are there interventions that could lead to the adoption of a Scout Mindset? How can motivated reasoning be overcome? How long-lasting are these effects?
Do these interventions also make people prioritize improving the future?

How can we teach relevant mindware?

What are the effects of Bayesian expected value training on different populations (e.g., college undergraduates)?
Does this training make people prioritize improving the future?

How can we improve reasoning amongst different populations?

Can we improve rationality in policymakers, judges, young people, or even the general population?
Does such training make people prioritize improving the future?

Forecasting

How good are people at forecasting on (very) long time-scales?

What things influence this? Which people are better and why?

How can we improve forecasting, to make better real-world predictions about the future?

Can we evaluate predictions using techniques such as the willingness to place bets on opinions and publicly commit to positions?
How well do schemes like the Bayesian truth serum work for incentivizing truthful forecasting in contexts where the forecast is never resolved?
Can we improve predictions over long time horizons by creating a chain of forecasting tournaments such that each year forecasters predict the outcome of next year’s tournament?
What scoring rules are most effective for eliciting accurate forecasts?

What inclines people to trust the forecasts of experts?

What are obstacles that prevent people from taking expert forecasts seriously?

Relevant work:

Caviola, L., Schubert, S., & Greene, J. D. (2021). The Psychology of (In) Effective Altruism. Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

Baron, J. (2000). Thinking and deciding. Cambridge University Press.

Bazerman, M. H. (2020). Better, Not Perfect: A Realist's Guide to Maximum Sustainable Goodness. HarperCollins.

Daniel, K. (2017). Thinking, fast and slow.

Galef, J. (2021). The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't. Penguin.

Greenberg, S. (2022). Clearer Thinking Program Categorization.

Grossmann, I. (2017). Wisdom in Context. Perspectives on Psychological Science,12(2) 233–257.

Morewedge, C. K., Yoon, H., Scopelliti, I., Symborski, C. W., Korris, J. H., & Kassam, K. S. (2015). Debiasing decisions: Improved decision making with a single training intervention. Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2(1), 129-140.

Sellier, A. L., Scopelliti, I., & Morewedge, C. K. (2019). Debiasing training improves decision making in the field. Psychological science, 30(9), 1371-1379.

Tetlock, P. E., & Gardner, D. (2016). Superforecasting: The art and science of prediction. Random House.

Yudkowsky, E. (2008). Cognitive biases potentially affecting judgment of global risks. Global catastrophic risks, 1(86), 13.

Individual differences

Not everyone is equally motivated and effective at improving the future. Research could investigate these individual differences. For example, research could study the psychological factors — values, personalities, cognitive traits — predicting whether someone is more likely to endorse the project of effectively improving the future and take action accordingly. This may also entail the development of rigorous psychometric measurement tools that helps to reliably assess these factors. Conversely, psychological research could also study the psychological factors that predict reckless decision-making in high stakes situations that could greatly harm the future.

Identifying people who tend to either improve or harm the future

How do we identify people, e.g., policymakers, who will safeguard the future wisely? And how do we identify people whose decision-making tendencies pose a threat to the far future, e.g., by taking unnecessary risks with technology or pathogens?

Can we develop assessment tools (e.g. standardized measures) to identify such people, e.g., by measuring the psychologically predictive factors?
How can such tests be developed and deployed in a scalable way such that they prevent cheating?
Could indicators of past rational or moral behavior be used as predictors of future rational or moral behavior?
Could nominators who report on other people’s moral character, attitudes and tendencies help to identify people interested in effectively improving the future?

How could rationality skills and thinking attitudes be measured?

Can we develop better measures than the existing ones (e.g. CRT or Stanovich’s CART)? Can we develop rationality measures that are sufficiently sensitive to be able to differentiate between highly rational individuals?
How can we measure the extent to which people understand and can apply rational mindware (thinking tools) such as probabilistic reasoning, economic thinking (e.g. expected value reasoning, understanding opportunity costs), scientific thinking, etc?
How can we measure rational thinking attitudes (or epistemic virtues), such as truth-seeking, intellectual honesty, intellectual modesty, nuanced reasoning, actively open-minded thinking, ‘Scout mindset’ (Galef, 2021)? How can such measures be improved to be more accurate and precise? For example, can behavioral measures be developed? Can measures be developed that are accurate even in competitive contexts (e.g., when respondents are incentivized to perform well)?
Can we measure the effects of higher rationality in real-world contexts? Does greater rationality translate into improved judgments and decisions, or even into more successful outcomes in the personal, business and altruistic domain?

Psychological predictors of effectively improving the future

Which psychological factors predict whether a person will attempt to effectively improve the future (e.g., maximizing altruistic impact, impartially considered)?

What non-cognitive predictors are there, such as values (expansive altruism, effectiveness-focus), interests, and motivations (determination to do what’s moral)?
Why are some people more likely to take action (e.g. on the ideas of effective altruism) than others, even if they agree equally strongly with the moral principles (i.e. attitude-behavior gap or willpower)?
What personality traits (e.g., optimizer mindset) predict interest in effectively improving the future?
What cognitive predictors are there, such as rational thinking skills (e.g. analytical reasoning) and attitudes?
What determines these predictive traits? Are they innate or acquired and how malleable are they?

Which people are less likely to find the project of effectively improving the future appealing and why?

Do they have certain specific values that are at odds with the project of effectively improving the future, and if so, which and why? Or do they lack certain values which seem conducive to effectively improving the future (e.g. expansive altruism and effectiveness-focus), and if so, why?

Relevant work:

Adler, M. G., & Fagley, N. S. (2005). Appreciation: Individual differences in finding value and meaning as a unique predictor of subjective well-being. Journal of personality, 73(1), 79-114.

Caviola, L. Althaus, D., Schubert, S., & Lewis, J. (2022). What psychological traits predict interest in effective altruism?

Caviola, L., Morrissey, E., & Lewis, J. (2022). Most students who would agree with EA ideas haven't heard of EA yet. Effective Altruism Forum.

Lovett, B.J., Jordan, A.H., & Wiltermuth, S.S. (2012). Individual Differences in the Moralization of Everyday Life. Ethics and Behavior, 22(4), 248-257.

Meindl, P., Jayawickreme, E., Furr, R. M., & Fleeson, W. (2015). A foundation beam for studying morality from a personological point of view: Are individual differences in moral behaviors and thoughts consistent?. Journal of Research in Personality, 59, 81-92.

Moss. D. (2021). Effective Altruism Survey. Effective Altruism Forum.

Reynolds, S. J. (2006). Moral awareness and ethical predispositions: Investigating the role of individual differences in the recognition of moral issues. Journal of Applied Psychology, 91(1), 233.

Stanovich, K. E., & West, R. F. (2000). Individual differences in reasoning: Implications for the rationality debate?. Behavioral and brain sciences, 23(5), 645-665.

Stanovich, K. E., & West, R. F. (1998). Individual differences in rational thought. Journal of experimental psychology: general, 127(2), 161.

Stanovich, K. E., West, R. F., & Toplak, M. E. (2016). The rationality quotient: Toward a test of rational thinking. MIT press.

Sun, J., & Goodwin, G. P. (2020). Do people want to be more moral?. Psychological Science, 31(3), 243-257.

Developmental

One approach to improve the future is to educate and empower the young generation with helpful tools and ideas. Psychological research could contribute to this project by empirically investigating how the psychological factors conducive to effectively improving the future emerge developmentally. It could also explore strategies that could help to foster critical thinking skills and pro-social values across different age groups.

Psychological factors related to improving the future across age

How do psychological tendencies related to improving the future and valuing future people emerge developmentally?

What’s the developmental trajectory of such psychological inclinations (e.g. moral expansiveness) and obstacles from childhood to adulthood?
How do children differ from adults in their inclinations towards improving the future?

At what age are people the most responsive to new (moral) ideas, such as the idea of valuing future people?

Fostering critical thinking and pro-social values across age

Can rational reasoning skills and good epistemic virtues be taught and cultivated successfully in young people?

Are there ways to foster a critical and open mindset in children in a long-lasting way? Who are children most likely to learn this from (e.g., peers, family, social media)?
To what extent can such approaches also be used with adults?
Does teaching children rationality skills make them more receptive to acting to improve the future than adults?

To what extent can young people’s curiosity about valuing future generations be increased?

Relevant work:

Bergman, R. (2002). Why be moral? A conceptual model from developmental psychology. Human development, 45(2), 104-124.

Klaczynski, P. A., Byrnes, J. P., & Jacobs, J. E. (2001). Introduction to the special issue: The development of decision making. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 22(3), 225-236.

Kirby, J., Crimston, C. R., & Hoang, A. (2022). Compassionate Mind Training Can Increase Moral Expansiveness: A Randomised Controlled Trial.

Kohlberg, L., & Gilligan, C. (2014). Moral development. Psychology: Revisiting the Classic Studies, 164.

Marshall, J., Gollwitzer, A., Mermin-Bunnell, K., Shinomiya, M., Retelsdorf, J. & Bloom, P. (2022). How development and culture shape intuitions about prosocial obligations. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. DOI: 10.1037/xge0001136.

Neldner, K., Crimston, C., Wilks, M., Redshaw, J., & Nielsen, M. (2018). The developmental origins of moral concern: An examination of moral boundary decision making throughout childhood. PloS one, 13(5), e0197819.

Sommer, K., Nielsen, M., Draheim, M., Redshaw, J., Vanman, E. J., & Wilks, M. (2019). Children’s perceptions of the moral worth of live agents, robots, and inanimate objects. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 187, 104656.

Toplak, M. E., West, R. F., & Stanovich, K. E. (2014). Rational thinking and cognitive sophistication: development, cognitive abilities, and thinking dispositions. Developmental psychology, 50(4), 1037.

Wilks, M., Caviola, L., Kahane, G., & Bloom, P. (2021). Children prioritize humans over animals less than adults do. Psychological Science, 32(1), 27-38.

Cross-cultural

Effectively improving the future is a global endeavor that requires an understanding of human psychology across many different cultures. Psychological research could contribute to that project by empirically investigating cross-cultural differences in psychological tendencies that are conducive to or hinder improving the future.

Cross-cultural differences in attitudes about and decision-making related to effectively improving the future

How do cultures differ in their values and thinking tendencies related to effectively improving the future?

Do people from Western (WEIRD) cultures differ from people of other cultures (such as China, India, or Russia) in their extent of valuing future generations and using effective means to improve the future? What can such differences tell us about how to best cultivate values conducive to the project of effectively improving the future in different cultures? Are there potentially promising neglected countries for spreading the ideas of effectively improving the future?
Do people across cultures differ in how they think about the future of humanity, utopia, dystopia, or human extinction?
Do people across cultures have different views on policy issues related to nuclear proliferation, AI safety, or biosecurity?
How do different cultural values impact perceptions of what it means to effectively improve the future (e.g., do those from collectivist cultures think of focusing on distant others as more or less moral than those from individualistic cultures)?
What is the role of religion in predicting interest in the project of effectively improving the future?

Relevant work:

Henrich, J. (2020). The WEIRDest people in the world: How the West became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous. Penguin UK.

MacAskill, W. (2022). What We Owe the Future. Hachette UK.

Olivola, C. Y., Kim, Y., Merzel, A., Kareev, Y., Avrahami, J., & Ritov, I. (2019). Cooperation and coordination across cultures and contexts: Individual, sociocultural, and contextual factors jointly influence decision making in the volunteer's dilemma game. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 33, 93-118.

Rhoads, S., Gunter, D., Ryan, R. M., & Marsh, A. A. (2020). Global variation in subjective well-being predicts seven forms of altruism. Psychological science. 32(8), 1247-1261.

Romano, R., Sutter, M., Liu, J. H., Yamagishi, T., & Balliet, D. (2021) National parochialism is ubiquitous across 42 nations around the world. Nature Communications. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-24787-1.

Van Doesum, N. J., et al. (2021) Social mindfulness and prosociality vary across the globe. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(35).

Historical psychology, evolutionary psychology, and anthropology

To improve the future it can be helpful to look into the past. Social sciences with a historical or evolutionary focus could contribute to that project. For example, such research could investigate how moral values relevant to improving the future have changed in the past, and based on this, estimate how they could plausibly change in the future.

How have moral values changed across history?

How has the moral circle changed across history? What are examples of times when it may have contracted rather than expanded? Is the moral circle expansion we see at the societal level driven by cohort effects? To what extent have people included future generations in their moral circle?

How convergent are psychological traits over time?

Is there convergence over time, e.g. for some moral values? And what does this imply about the future? What do moral values converge to?
How persistent are psychological traits, such as certain moral attitudes or cognitive traits, over historical time?

What can evolutionary psychology tell us about moral values (and indeed more broadly)?

Does it say anything about which moral norms are feasible to cultivate in society on a long-term basis? Can it inform which relevant behaviors are strongly influenced by genetics, and therefore, what strategy is best for improving them? Can it improve our hypothesizing about relevant cognitive biases? For example, might people underestimate rates of technological change based on the slow rates in the environment of evolutionary adaptation?

How have people’s evaluation of suffering and happiness changed historically?

Did humans in the past or humans in other cultures (or philosophical traditions) value pain and pleasure, suffering and happiness differently than current WEIRD people do? For example, did/do some people find suffering good or neutral, and why? And would valuing suffering make people more or less inclined to value future people, or to have an expanded moral circle, and why?

What are people’s attitudes towards their ancestors?

How do people tend to think about distant ancestors? How much does this vary across cultures?
Could this provide a potential data point relevant to how our descendants will think about us and consequently how much we should expect them to continue projects we begin or spend resources from our investments in ways we’d approve of?

Relevant work:

Branwen, G. (2019). The narrowing circle. https://www.gwern.net/The-Narrowing-Circle.

Calman, K. C. (2004). Evolutionary ethics: can values change. Journal of Medical Ethics, 30(4), 366-370.

Haslam, H., McGrath, M.J., & Wheeler, M.A. (2019). Changing morals: we're more compassionate than 100 years ago, but more judgmental too. The University of Melbourne.

Pinker, S. (2012). The better angels of our nature: Why violence has declined. Penguin Books.

Roser, M. (2022). The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better. Our World in Data.

Schulz, J. F., Bahrami-Rad, D., Beauchamp, J. P., & Henrich, J. (2019). The Church, intensive kinship, and global psychological variation. Science, 366(6466), eaau5141.

Tomasik, B. (2013). Differential intellectual progress as a positive-sum project. Center on Long-Term Risk.

Wright, R. (2010). The moral animal: Why we are, the way we are: The new science of evolutionary psychology. Vintage.

Policy and institutional

A key route to improving the future is through policy and institutional changes. Psychological research could contribute to this project by investigating the obstacles that prevent such helpful policy changes. Ultimately, it could also help to develop and test practical strategies that could be implemented to improve institutional decision making.

Psychological obstacles to effectively improving the future in policy contexts

From the perspective of effectively improving the future, what are the most dangerous psychological tendencies in a policy context?

Are there ways to identify people with dark triad personality traits in policy contexts?
How does the basic underlying psychology of policymakers and other powerful people differ from the general public? To what extent do policy makers, focused on issues such as nuclear proliferation, international cooperation, etc., show tendencies of short-term thinking, zero sum thinking, or thinking in terms of competition instead of cooperation?
How can we facilitate honest, productive, open-minded conversation and debate across groups and ideologies to promote effective and timely policy change?

How can we encourage institutional decision makers to take the long-term future into account?

How effective are different messages, framings, or nudges?

What are the values, beliefs, and thinking tendencies of researchers doing potentially dangerous work?

How do AI researchers think about risks from advanced AI?
How do synthetic biologists and biological researchers think about biological risks, such as accidental release of dangerous viruses?

Improving thinking and decision-making in institutional settings

How can psychological and behavioral research help to improve institutional decision making?

Can we empirically test the feasibility of policies and real-world interventions to improve institutional decision-making, such as new institutional designs (e.g. representation of future generations), behavioral techniques such as incentives and nudges, and information campaigns?
What can we learn from previous public policy campaigns (e.g. anti-smoking, pro-exercise, etc.) to inform new ones about the project of effectively improving the future?

Can better values and mindsets be cultivated amongst specific groups with influence?

Can we cultivate a security mindset amongst AI safety researchers and synthetic biologists?
How could we screen high-security lab workers for traits that could increase the probability of dangerous risks (e.g. lab leaks)?
Can we teach policymakers crucial rational reasoning skills, such as economic, scientific thinking tools, probabilistic reasoning, and expected value reasoning? (see Rationality section)
Can we cultivate a security mindset and an emphasis on avoiding worst-case outcomes amongst policymakers?

Relevant work:

Caviola, L. & Greene, J.D., Boosting the impact of human altruism. Manuscript in preparation.

Hauser, O. P., Rand, D. G., Peysakhovich, A., & Nowak, M. A. (2014). Cooperating with the future. Nature, 511(7508), 220-223.

John, T., & MacAskill, W. (2021). Longtermist institutional reform. The Long View (forthcoming), Legal Priorities Project Working Paper Series, (4).

Schoenmakers, K., Greene, D., Stutterheim, S. E., Lin, H., & Palmer, M. (2022). The Security Mindset: Characteristics, Development, and Consequences.

Whittlestone, J. (2017). Improving institutional decision making. 80,000 Hours report.

Winter, C., Schuett, J., Martínez, E., Van Arsdale, S., Araújo, R., Hollman, N., ... & Rotola, G. (2021). Legal Priorities Research: A Research Agenda.

Future wellbeing

An impartial altruist attempting to effectively improve the future is in significant part ultimately interested in increasing the future’s aggregate wellbeing level. Research that helps to estimate the wellbeing levels of future individuals could therefore be action-guiding. In particular, a crucial question for such altruists is whether the future in expectation will contain much more happiness or much more suffering. This may determine whether an altruist is more likely to prioritize improving the quality of the future (i.e. reducing suffering and improving happiness) or reducing the chances of human extinction.

Estimating wellbeing in the future

How happy are people today and what can this tell us about people’s wellbeing levels in the future?

What proportion of people finds their lives valuable and worth living, i.e., better than neutral? Are there cross-cultural differences?
What predicts happiness? Are there demographic or cross-cultural differences?
What’s the relative intensity and evaluation of negative versus positive experiences?
Is the baseline affect weakly positive? Is it also true of non-humans?
How could ongoing trends in technology affect human happiness in the distant future, and therefore, the value of reducing human extinction risk?

What biases do people have about predicting and evaluating wellbeing?

Do people assess the value of others’ lives differently from their own?
To what extent do positive illusions about the self contribute to people's feelings of well-being? Do depressed individuals make more realistic inferences, i.e., “depressive realism”? How should skepticism about the reliability of introspection inform our interpretation of self-reported subjective well-being? How widespread and serious is 'affective ignorance'?
Do these judgments affect people’s evaluation of the importance of protecting the future?

Wellbeing in non-human beings

How happy are non-human beings?

Do farmed animals and wild animals live net positive or negative lives respectively? What are the differences across species?
To what extent can we reliably attribute affectively valenced experience to entities of different kinds? What is the physiological basis of conscious experience and of affectively valenced experience?
To what extent do people base judgments of the value of the future on judgments of the welfare of future non-human beings?

Relevant work:

Diener, E., & Diener, C. (1996). Most people are happy. Psychological science, 7(3), 181-185.

Killingsworth, M.A., Stewart, L., & Greene, J.D. (2021). Is life “worth living”? A measure of absolute happiness. Manuscript in preparation.

Taylor, S. E., & Brown, J. D. (1988). Illusion and well-being: a social psychological perspective on mental health. Psychological bulletin, 103(2), 193.

Haybron, D. M. (2007). Do we know how happy we are? On some limits of affective introspection and recall. Nous, 41(3), 394-428.

Waterman, A. S. (2007). On the importance of distinguishing hedonia and eudaimonia when contemplating the hedonic treadmill. American Psychologist, 62(6), 612–613.

Schwitzgebel, E. (2011). Perplexities of consciousness. MIT press.

Norris, C. J., Gollan, J., Berntson, G. G., & Cacioppo, J. T. (2010). The current status of research on the structure of evaluative space. Biological psychology, 84(3), 422-436.

Martínez, E., & Winter, C. (2021). Protecting Sentient Artificial Intelligence: A Survey of Lay Intuitions on Standing, Personhood, and General Legal Protection. Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 8.

Shulman, C. (2012). Are pain and pleasure equally energy efficient? Reflective Disequilibrium.

O’Brien & Kassirer (2018). People are slow to adapt to the warm glow of giving. Psychological science, 30(2), 193–204.

Happier Lives Institute. Research Agenda. https://www.happierlivesinstitute.org/research/research-agenda/

DeYoung, C. G., & Tiberius, V. (2021). Value fulfillment from a cybernetic perspective: A new psychological theory of well-being. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 10888683221083777.

Williams, L. A. (2021). From human wellbeing to animal welfare. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 131, 941-952.

Cause-specific issues

Here we focus on global problems that seem particularly pressing from the point of view of effectively improving the future. In general, it’s useful to study the views and psychological tendencies people show that relate to these specific issues. This includes, for example, the study of psychological obstacles preventing people from taking these issues seriously. Note that the cause areas listed below are chosen because they seem particularly neglected from the perspective of effectively improving the future. There are many other important cause areas (e.g. prejudice, climate change) that aren’t listed because they seem relatively less neglected in academic psychology.

Global catastrophic risk (in general)

How do people think about risks that could permanently curtail the future of humanity?

Do people underestimate or overestimate such risks? Do they underappreciate the importance of mitigating such risks?

What do people think about emerging technologies that have the potential to cause global catastrophic risks?

Are they too optimistic or pessimistic relative to the views of experts? What drives these attitudes?

What do people think about human extinction and the future of humanity?

Do people find human extinction good or bad, and why? Do people find it morally important to safeguard the future of humanity?
What are people’s empirical beliefs about the likelihood, causes, and mitigation of human extinction?

Which people don’t find it bad if humanity went extinct and why?

Is this attitude in part driven by non-utilitarian values?
(see Morality section)

Relevant work:

Bostrom, N. (2013). Existential risk prevention as global priority. Global Policy, 4(1), 15-31.

Bostrom, N., & Cirkovic, M. M. (Eds.). (2011). Global catastrophic risks. Oxford University Press.

MacAskill, W. (2022). What We Owe the Future. Hachette UK.

Schubert, S., Caviola, L., & Faber, N. S. (2019). The psychology of existential risk: Moral judgments about human extinction. Scientific reports, 9(1), 1-8.

Yudkowsky, E. (2008). Cognitive biases potentially affecting judgment of global risks. Global catastrophic risks, 1(86), 13.

Risks from artificial intelligence (AI)

What are people’s views on the argument that advanced AI, such as artificial general intelligence (AGI), poses an existential threat to humanity?
How do AI researchers think about risks from advanced AGI?

How concerned are AI researchers about risks from uncontrolled AGI, and why?
How do AI researchers’ views differ from those of other populations? Are they more or less concerned?

What are experts’ opinions on AGI timelines and take-off scenarios?

What are people’s views on when, how, and how fast transformative AI will be developed and deployed?

How can we raise awareness of AGI risk among AI researchers?

How do we create group dynamics and systems that ensure safe development of AGI?
(See Policy section above)

Can we transfer insights from human psychology to the cognition and behavior of AI?

Can our understanding of human cognition help to interpret AI systems and ensure that they are safe?

How could the empirical study of human moral values be useful for the alignment of AGI?
What cognitive biases could undermine efforts to align AGI?

Do people underappreciate how training an AGI on one task makes it competent to do another task?
Do people succumb to the curse of knowledge when trying to predict AI’s ability to infer how humans want it to behave?

What do people think about digital sentience?

Do they believe that digital beings can be sentient? If not, why?
Do people morally value or discount (different types of) potential digital beings?

How could advanced AGI affect human wellbeing, given different plausible future AGI scenarios?

How would human well-being be affected in a world in which all human labor is fully automated? How would human wellbeing be affected in a world with total surveillance, e.g., in an authoritarian system?

Relevant work:

Bensinger, R. (2021). "Existential risk from AI" survey results, AI Alignment Forum. Link.

Bostrom, N., & Shulman, C. Propositions Concerning Digital Minds and Society.

Clarke, S., Carlier, A., & Schuett, J. (2021). Survey on AI existential risk scenarios, EA Forum. Link.

Grace, K., Salvatier, J., Dafoe, A., Zhang, B., & Evans, O. (2018). When will AI exceed human performance? Evidence from AI experts. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 62, 729-754.

Irving, G., & Askell, A. (2019). AI safety needs social scientists. Distill, 4(2), e14.

O'Shaughnessy, M., Schiff, D., Varshney, L. R., Rozell, C., & Davenport, M. (2021). What governs attitudes toward artificial intelligence adoption and governance?. Preprint.

Pauketat, J. V., & Anthis, J. R. (2022). Predicting the moral consideration of artificial intelligences. Computers in Human Behavior, 136, 107372.

Pauketat, J. V., Ladak, A., & Anthis, J. R. (2022). Artificial Intelligence, Morality, and Sentience (AIMS) Survey: 2021.

Zach Stein-Perlman, Benjamin Weinstein-Raun, Katja Grace, “2022 Expert Survey on Progress in AI.” AI Impacts, 3 Aug. 2022. https://aiimpacts.org/2022-expert-survey-on-progress-in-ai/.

Zhang, B., Anderljung, M., Kahn, L., Dreksler, N., Horowitz, M. C., & Dafoe, A. (2021). Ethics and governance of artificial intelligence: Evidence from a survey of machine learning researchers. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 71, 591-666.

Zhang, B., & Dafoe, A. (2020, February). US public opinion on the governance of artificial intelligence. In Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (pp. 187-193).

Zhang, B., & Dafoe, A. (2019). Artificial intelligence: American attitudes and trends. Available at SSRN 3312874.

Zhang, B., Dreksler, N., Anderljung, M., Kahn, L., Giattino, C., Dafoe, A., & Horowitz, M. C. (2022). Forecasting AI Progress: Evidence from a Survey of Machine Learning Researchers. arXiv preprint arXiv:2206.04132.

Pandemics and biosecurity

How do biological scientists (e.g. working on synthetic biology) think about biological risks, such as accidental release of dangerous viruses?

Do they underestimate the risks of accidents? Do they underestimate the extent to which their research could directly or indirectly be used by malevolent actors?

How can we raise awareness of biological risks, such as accidental pandemics, amongst biological scientists?

To what extent can we draw useful insights from past pandemics such as the Spanish flu or Covid-19?

How can we improve institutional decision-making (e.g. amongst policy makers) with regard to pandemic preparedness?
What are the attitudes of the general public towards pandemic preparedness?

Do they underestimate the risks? How can we tackle anti-vaccination attitudes?

Relevant work:

Carus, W. S. (2017). A century of biological-weapons programs (1915–2015): reviewing the evidence. The Nonproliferation Review, 24(1-2), 129-153.

Gronvall, G. K. (2016). Synthetic biology: Safety, security, and promise. Health Security Press.

Inglesby, T. V., & Relman, D. A. (2016). How likely is it that biological agents will be used deliberately to cause widespread harm? EMBO reports, 17(2), 127-130.

Kilbourne, E.D. (2011). Plagues and pandemics: past, present, and future. In N. Bostrom & M. M. Cirkovic, Global catastrophic risks. Oxford University Press.

Koblentz, G. (2003). Pathogens as weapons: the international security implications of biological warfare. International security, 84-122.

Koehler, A., & Hilton, B. (2020). Preventing catastrophic pandemics. 80,000 Hours.

Millett, P., & Snyder-Beattie, A. (2017). Human agency and global catastrophic Biorisks. Health security, 15(4), 335-336.

Monrad, J. T. (2020). Ethical considerations for epidemic vaccine trials. Journal of medical ethics, 46(7), 1-5.

Nouri, A. & C.F. Chyba. (2011). Biotechnology and biosecurity. In N. Bostrom & M. M. Cirkovic, Global catastrophic risks. Oxford University Press.

Racicot, M., Venne, D., Durivage, A., & Vaillancourt, J. P. (2012). Evaluation of the relationship between personality traits, experience, education and biosecurity compliance on poultry farms in Québec, Canada. Preventive Veterinary Medicine, 103(2-3), 201-207.

Salvatore, S. (2017). Psychological Evaluations for the US Army Biological Personnel Reliability Program. Journal of Biosecurity, Biosafety, and Biodefense Law, 8(1), 3-17.

Vanlandingham, D. L., & Higgs, S. (2021). Viruses and Their Potential for Bioterrorism.

Global war and nuclear threat

What do people think about nuclear proliferation?

Do people across different countries (e.g., USA, Russia, China, India) differ in their views on nuclear proliferation and disarmament?
How do cognitive biases (see Rationality section) impact thinking about the risk of nuclear threat and global war?

How can we raise awareness of nuclear threats?

How effective are different messages or framings?

What leads to the endorsement of extremist beliefs and behaviors (e.g., war and terrorism)?

How do contextual factors (e.g., poverty, inequality, religious or ideological education, educational attainment) influence the uptake of extremist beliefs and behaviors?
How do psychological factors (e.g., self-deception, cognitive dissonance, close-mindedness, dehumanization) influence the uptake of extremist beliefs and behaviors?
How do social factors (e.g., type of intergroup conflict, history of oppression, conflicting ideologies) influence the uptake of extremist beliefs and behaviors?

Relevant work:

Ellsberg, D. (2017). The doomsday machine: Confessions of a nuclear war planner. Bloomsbury Publishing USA.

Graham, A. (2017). Destined for War Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap? HarperCollins.

Hoffman, D. (2009). The dead hand: the untold story of the cold war arms race and its dangerous legacy. Anchor.

Hogg, M. A., & Blaylock, D. L. (Eds.). (2011). Extremism and the Psychology of Uncertainty (Vol. 3). John Wiley & Sons.

Loza, W. (2007). The psychology of extremism and terrorism: A Middle-Eastern perspective. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 12(2), 141-155.

Schlosser, E. (2013). Command and control: Nuclear weapons, the Damascus accident, and the illusion of safety. Penguin.

Suedfeld, P., & Tetlock, P. (1977). Integrative complexity of communications in international crises. Journal of conflict resolution, 21(1), 169-184.

Threats to liberal democracies and descent into long-term authoritarianism lock-in

How can we prevent or mitigate the harm caused by malevolent leaders?

How can we best identify malevolent people (e.g. psychopaths, narcissists, etc.)?
What leads individuals to support such malevolent leaders, and how can we prevent this?
How can we prevent malevolent leaders from manipulating minds (e.g., via misinformation, conspiracy beliefs, alarmist beliefs, promoting radical means-to-ends thinking)

How can values, such as reason, evidence, liberalism, tolerance, and democracy, be retained and strengthened in a cooperative way?

How can we help political groups to cooperate in an era of polarization?
What leads individuals to (correctly or incorrectly) believe their democracy and liberty are being threatened, and what impacts these individuals’ strategies to regain these values?
How do intellectual humility and open-minded (vs. close-minded) thinking influence our ability to cooperate with those we disagree with? How can we increase such humble and open-minded thinking?

What factors could increase the risk of a collapse of liberal democracies in Western countries and the establishment of authoritarian systems?

To what extent does political polarization increase that risk?
How do misinformation and conspiracy beliefs proliferate throughout a liberal democracy, and how does this threaten democratic systems? How can we prevent the spread of false information and beliefs?

Relevant work:

Caplan, B. (2011). The totalitarian threat. In N. Bostrom & M. M. Cirkovic, Global catastrophic risks. Oxford University Press.

Dikötter, F. (2022). How to Be a Dictator: The Cult of Personality in the Twentieth Century. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Johnson, S. A. (2019). Understanding the violent personality: Antisocial personality disorder, psychopathy, & sociopathy explored. Forensic Research & Criminology International Journal, 7(2), 76-88.

Lazer, D. M., Baum, M. A., Benkler, Y., Berinsky, A. J., Greenhill, K. M., Menczer, F., ... & Zittrain, J. L. (2018). The science of fake news. Science, 359(6380), 1094-1096.

McCoy, J., & Press, B. (2022). What Happens When Democracies Become Perniciously Polarized? Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Smith, A., & de Mesquita, B. B. (2011). The dictator's handbook: Why bad behavior is almost always good politics. PublicAffairs.

Contributors

Main authors:

Lucius Caviola, Joshua Lewis, Matti Wilks, Abigail Novick Hoskin, Stefan Schubert

For helpful comments we thank Adam Bales, Adam Bear, Andreas Mogensen, David Althaus, David Thorstead, Erin Morrissey, Falk Lieder, Geoffrey Goodwin, Hayden Wilkinson, Inga Grossmann, Izzy Gainsburg, Jessie Sun, Matt Coleman, Maximilian Maier, Noemi Dreksler, Samantha Kassierer, Sven Herrmann, and Will Fleeson.