NES Professor Sultan Mehmood presented his work “Training Effective Altruism” at one of the most prestigious conferences in economics: NBER Fall Meeting in Development Economics.
Sultan Mehmood along with his coauthors conducted a field experiment with deputy ministers in Pakistan to find that training policymakers in the benefits of empathy via lectures, books and education materials impacts their altruism as well as social policies. Treated ministers increased mentalizing of others: blood donations doubled, but only when blood banks requested their exact blood type. One year after training, amid official duties, ministers were twice as likely to choose social policies and recommend over 4-fold additional funding for them.
The research shows that training empathy in the school of thought associated with Peter Singer's Effective Altruism can increase prosocial behavior in lab and in the field. The authors conclude that the principles of effective altruism may be an organizing theory for effective cohesion policies amid fragility, corruption, conflict, and violence in many societies.
More about the research on VoxDev. Watch the video of the presentation: