It Only Takes One: The Psychology of Unilateral Decisions
Joshua Lewis (New York University), Carter Allen (UC Berkeley), Christoph Winter (ITAM, Harvard University and Institute for Law & AI) and Lucius Caviola (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
GPI Working Paper No. 14-2024
Sometimes, one decision can guarantee that a risky event will happen. For instance, it only took one team of researchers to synthesize and publish the horsepox genome, thus imposing its publication even though other researchers might have refrained for biosecurity reasons. We examine cases where everybody who can impose a given event has the same goal but different information about whether the event furthers that goal. Across 8 experiments (including scenario studies with elected policymakers, doctors, artificial-intelligence researchers, and lawyers and judges and economic games with laypeople, N = 1,518, and 3 supplemental studies, N = 847) people behave suboptimally, balancing two factors. First, people often impose events with expected utility only slightly better than the alternative based on the information available to them, even when others might know more. This approach is insufficiently cautious, leading people to impose too frequently, a situation termed the unilateralist’s curse. Second, counteracting the first factor, people avoid sole responsibility for unexpectedly bad outcomes, sometimes declining to impose seemingly desirable events. The former heuristic typically dominates and people unilaterally impose too often, succumbing to the unilateralist’s curse. But when only few people can impose, who know the stakes are high, responsibility aversion reduces over-imposing.
Other working papers
Three mistakes in the moral mathematics of existential risk – David Thorstad (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
Longtermists have recently argued that it is overwhelmingly important to do what we can to mitigate existential risks to humanity. I consider three mistakes that are often made in calculating the value of existential risk mitigation: focusing on cumulative risk rather than period risk; ignoring background risk; and neglecting population dynamics. I show how correcting these mistakes pushes the value of existential risk mitigation substantially below leading estimates, potentially low enough to…
Longtermist political philosophy: An agenda for future research – Jacob Barrett (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford) and Andreas T. Schmidt (University of Groningen)
We set out longtermist political philosophy as a research field. First, we argue that the standard case for longtermism is more robust when applied to institutions than to individual action. This motivates “institutional longtermism”: when building or shaping institutions, positively affecting the value of the long-term future is a key moral priority. Second, we briefly distinguish approaches to pursuing longtermist institutional reform along two dimensions: such approaches may be more targeted or more broad, and more urgent or more patient.
Against Anti-Fanaticism – Christian Tarsney (Population Wellbeing Initiative, University of Texas at Austin)
Should you be willing to forego any sure good for a tiny probability of a vastly greater good? Fanatics say you should, anti-fanatics say you should not. Anti-fanaticism has great intuitive appeal. But, I argue, these intuitions are untenable, because satisfying them in their full generality is incompatible with three very plausible principles: acyclicity, a minimal dominance principle, and the principle that any outcome can be made better or worse. This argument against anti-fanaticism can be…