Most students who would agree with EA ideas haven't heard of EA yet (results of a large-scale survey)

Abstract

In a large-scale survey we found that only 7.4% of New York University students knew what effective altruism (EA) is. At the same time, 8.8% were extremely sympathetic to EA. These students agreed with basic EA ideas when presented with a short introduction, showed interest in learning more about it, and scored highly on our ‘effectiveness-focus’ and ‘expansive altruism’ measures. Interestingly, these EA-sympathetic students were largely ignorant about EA; only 14.5% knew about it before the survey. We estimate that, in total, 7.5% of NYU students do not know of EA but would be very sympathetic to the basic ideas. These findings could have important implications for the scaling of outreach but need to be interpreted carefully. Note: This post is long because of the Detailed results section. Most readers may just want to focus on the Key results and Conclusions sections.