Is it obligatory to donate effectively? Judgments about the wrongness of donating ineffectively the wrongness of donating ineffectively

Abstract

Most donations fail to end up with the most effective charities. Five preliminary studies were conducted to investigate the hypothesis that people don’t find it morally obligatory to donate effectively. In all scenarios, participants did not think it was wrong to donate ineffectively except when there was no one else who could provide help or when the ineffective option was Pareto dominated by a more effective option. Judgments of the obligation to donate effectively were correlated with judgments of the obligation to donate in the first place. –AI-generated abstract.