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
Estimating long-term treatment effects without long-term outcome data – David Rhys Bernard (Paris School of Economics)
Estimating long-term impacts of actions is important in many areas but the key difficulty is that long-term outcomes are only observed with a long delay. One alternative approach is to measure the effect on an intermediate outcome or a statistical surrogate and then use this to estimate the long-term effect. …
In search of a biological crux for AI consciousness – Bradford Saad (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
Whether AI systems could be conscious is often thought to turn on whether consciousness is closely linked to biology. The rough thought is that if consciousness is closely linked to biology, then AI consciousness is impossible, and if consciousness is not closely linked to biology, then AI consciousness is possible—or, at any rate, it’s more likely to be possible. A clearer specification of the kind of link between consciousness and biology that is crucial for the possibility of AI consciousness would help organize inquiry into…
The Conservation Multiplier – Bård Harstad (University of Oslo)
Every government that controls an exhaustible resource must decide whether to exploit it or to conserve and thereby let the subsequent government decide whether to exploit or conserve. This paper develops a positive theory of this situation and shows when a small change in parameter values has a multiplier effect on exploitation. The multiplier strengthens the influence of a lobby paying for exploitation, and of a donor compensating for conservation. …