“Framing EA: ‘Doing Good Better’ Did Worse” by Rethink Priorities, David_Moss

Summary

• As part of our ongoing work to study how to best frame EA, we experimentally tested different phrases and sentences that CEA were considering using on effectivealtruism.org.

Doing Good Better taglines

• We observed a consistent pattern where taglines that included the phrase ‘do[ing] good better’ received less support from respondents and inspired less interest in learning about EA.
• We replicated these results in a second experiment, where we confirmed that taglines referring to “do[ing] good better” performed less well than those referring to “do[ing] the most good”.

Nouns and sentences

• Nouns: The effect of using different nouns to refer to EA was small, but referring to EA as a ‘philosophy’ or ‘movement’ inspired the most curiosity compared to options including ‘project’ and ‘research field’.
• Sentences: “Find the most effective ways to do good with your time, money, and career” and “Effective altruism asks the question of how we [...]

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Outline:

(00:12) Summary

(01:23) Method

(02:18) Taglines (Study 1)

(03:40) Doing Good Better replication (Study 2)

(05:23) Sentences (Study 1)

(06:45) Nouns (Study 1)

(07:41) Effectiveness focus

(07:55) Conclusion

(08:56) Acknowledgments

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First published:
October 27th, 2025

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Y6zMpdwkkAQ8rF56w/framing-ea-doing-good-better-did-worse

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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