I'm pleased to announce the first annual survey of effective altruists. This is a short survey of around 40 questions (generally multiple choice), which several collaborators and I have put a great deal of work into and would be very grateful if you took. I'll offer $250 of my own money to one participant.

Take the survey at http://survey.effectivealtruismhub.com/

The survey should yield some interesting results such as EAs' political and religious views, what actions they take, and the causes they favour and donate to. It will also enable useful applications which will be launched immediately afterwards, such as a map of EAs with contact details and a cause-neutral register of planned donations or pledges which can be verified each year. I'll also provide an open platform for followup surveys and other actions people can take. If you'd like to suggest questions, email me or comment.

Anonymised results will be shared publicly and not belong to any individual or organisation. The most robust privacy practices will be followed, with clear opt-ins and opt-outs.

I'd like to thank Jacy Anthis, Ben Landau-Taylor, David Moss and Peter Hurford for their help.

Other surveys' results, and predictions for this one

Other surveys have had intriguing results. For example, Joey Savoie and Xio Kikauka's interviewed 42 often highly active EAs over Skype, and found that they generally had left-leaning parents, donated on average 10%, and were altruistic before becoming EAs. The time they spent on EA activities was correlated with the percentage they donated (0.4), the time their parents spend volunteering (0.3), and the percentage of their friends who were EAs (0.3).

80,000 Hours also released a questionnaire and, while this was mainly focused on their impact, it yielded a list of which careers people plan to pursue: 16% for academia,  9% for both finance and software engineering, and 8% for both medicine and non-profits.  

I'd be curious to hear people's predictions as to what the results of this survey will be. You might enjoy reading or sharing them here. For my part, I'd imagine we have few conservatives or even libertarians, are over 70% male, and have directed most of our donations to poverty charities.

Summary: This article is intended for those who are "earning to give" (i.e. maximize income so that it can be donated to charity). It is basically an annotated bibliography of a few recent meta-analyses of predictors of income.

Key Results

• The degree to which management “sponsors” your career development is an important predictor of your salary, as is how skilled you are politically.

• Despite the stereotype of a silver-tongued salesman preying on people’s biases, rational appeals are generally the best tactic.

• After rationality, the best tactics are types of ingratiation, including flattery and acting modest.

Ng et al. performed a metastudy of over 200 individual studies of objective and subjective career success. Here are the variables they found best correlated with salary:

(all significant at p = .05)

(For reference, the “Big 5” personality traits all have a correlation under 0.12.)

Before we go on, a few caveats: while these correlations are significant and important, none are overwhelming (the authors cite Cohen as saying the range 0.24-0.36 is “medium” and correlations over 0.37 are “large”). Also, in addition to the usual correlation/causation concerns, there is lots of cross-correlation: e.g. older people might have greater political knowledge but less education, thereby confusing things. For a discussion of moderating variables, see the paper itself.

Career Sponsorship

There are two broad models of career advancement: contest-mobility and sponsorship-mobility. They are best illustrated with an example.

Suppose Peter and Penelope are both equally talented entry-level employees. Under the contest-mobility model, they would both be equally likely to get a raise or promotion, because they are equally skilled.

Sponsorship-mobility theorists argue that even if Peter and Penelope are equally talented, it’s likely that one of them will catch the eye of senior management. Perhaps it’s due to one of them having an early success by chance, making a joke in a meeting, or simply just having a more memorable name, like Penelope. This person will be singled out for additional training and job opportunities. Because of this, they’ll have greater success in the company, which will lead to more opportunities etc. As a result, their initial small discrepancy in attention gets multiplied into a large differential.

The authors of the metastudy found that self-reported sponsorship levels (i.e. how much you feel the management of your company “sponsors” you) have a significant, although moderate, relationship to salary. Therefore, the level at which you currently feel sponsored in your job should be a factor when you consider alternate opportunities.

The Dilbert Effect

The strongest predictor of salary (tied with education level) is what the authors politely term “Political Knowledge & Skills” - less politely, how good you are at manipulating others.

Several popular books (such as Cialdini’s Influence) on the subject of influencing others exist, and the study of these “influence tactics” in business stretches back 30 years to Kipnis, Schmidt and Wilkinson. Recently, Higgins et al. reviewed 23 individual studies of these tactics and how they relate to career success. Their results:

(Only ingratiation and rationality are significant.)

This site has a lot of information on how to make rational appeals, so I will focus on the less-talked-about ingratiation techniques.

How to be Ingratiating

Gordon analyzed 69 studies of ingratiation and found the following. (Unlike the previous two sections, success here is measured in lab tests as well as in career advancement. However, similar but less comprehensive results have been found in terms of career success):

Self-presentation is split further:

 

Moderators

One important moderator is the direction of the appeal. If you are talking to your boss, your tactics should be different than if you’re talking to a subordinate. Other-enhancement (flattery) is always the best tactic no matter who you’re talking to, but when talking to superiors it’s by far the best. When talking to those at similar levels to you, opinion conformity comes close to flattery, and the other techniques aren't far behind.

Unsurprisingly, when the target realizes you’re being ingratiating, the tactic is less effective. (Although effectiveness doesn’t go to zero - even when people realize you’re flattering them just to suck up, they generally still appreciate it.) Also, women are better at being ingratiating than men, and men are more influenced by these ingratiating tactics than women. The most important caveat is that lab studies find much larger effect sizes than in the field, to the extent that the average field effect for the ingratiating tactics is negative. This is probably due to the fact that lab experiments can be better controlled.

Conclusion

It’s unlikely that a silver-tongued receptionist will out-earn an introverted engineer. But simple techniques like flattery and attempting to get "sponsored" can appreciably improve returns, to the extent that political skills are one of the strongest predictors of salaries.

 

I would like to thank Brian Tomasik and Gina Stuessy for reading early drafts of this article.

References

Cohen, Jacob. Statistical power analysis for the behavioral sciences. Psychology Press, 1988.

 

Gordon, Randall A. "Impact of ingratiation on judgments and evaluations: A meta-analytic investigation." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 71.1 (1996): 54.

 

Higgins, Chad A., Timothy A. Judge, and Gerald R. Ferris. "Influence tactics and work outcomes: a meta‐analysis." Journal of Organizational Behavior 24.1 (2003): 89-106.

 

Judge, Timothy A., and Robert D. Bretz Jr. "Political influence behavior and career success." Journal of Management 20.1 (1994): 43-65.

 

Kipnis, David, Stuart M. Schmidt, and Ian Wilkinson. "Intraorganizational influence tactics: Explorations in getting one's way." Journal of Applied psychology 65.4 (1980): 440.

Ng, Thomas WH, et al. "Predictors of objective and subjective career success: A meta‐analysis." Personnel psychology 58.2 (2005): 367-408.