Altruism in governance: Insight from randomized training
Sultan Mehmood (New Economic School), Shaheen Naseer (Lahore School of Economics) and Daniel L. Chen (Toulouse School of Economics)
GPI Working Paper No. 7 - 2022, published in the Toulouse School of Economics Working Paper series and in the Journal of Development Economics
Randomizing different schools of thought in training altruism finds that training junior deputy ministers in the utility of empathy renders at least a 0.4 standard deviation increase in altruism. Treated ministers increased their perspective-taking: blood donations doubled, but only when blood banks requested their exact blood type. Perspective-taking in strategic dilemmas improved. Field measures such as orphanage visits and volunteering in impoverished schools also increased, as did their test scores in teamwork assessments in policy scenarios. Overall, our results underscore that the utility of empathy can be a parsimonious foundation for the formation of prosociality, even impacting the behavior of adults in the field.
Other working papers
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…
Doomsday rings twice – Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
This paper considers the argument according to which, because we should regard it as a priori very unlikely that we are among the most important people who will ever exist, we should increase our confidence that the human species will not persist beyond the current historical era, which seems to represent…
Economic growth under transformative AI – Philip Trammell (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University) and Anton Korinek (University of Virginia)
Industrialized countries have long seen relatively stable growth in output per capita and a stable labor share. AI may be transformative, in the sense that it may break one or both of these stylized facts. This review outlines the ways this may happen by placing several strands of the literature on AI and growth within a common framework. We first evaluate models in which AI increases output production, for example via increases in capital’s substitutability for labor…