Will the project "Extending cause prioritization research to the behavioral sciences" receive any funding from the Clearer Thinking Regranting program run by ClearerThinking.org?

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Below, you can find some selected quotes from the public copy of the application. The text beneath each heading was written by the applicant. Alternatively, you can click here to see the entire public portion of their application.

Why the applicant thinks we should fund this project

Most approaches to reducing existential risks or improving the future require positively influencing certain crucial decisions, attitudes, or behaviors at some point. Our knowledge of which strategies are most effective at promoting such improvements and how they work is dangerously unreliable and incomplete. Unless we identify and close these gaps in our knowledge, many efforts to improve the future might be doomed. On the bright side, a recent analysis found that some past efforts to improve global health and development interventions through behavioral science R&D projects have been very cost-effective (Kremer, Gallant, Rostapshova, & Thomas, 2021). Therefore, investing in (the right) behavioral science research is likely key to closing those dangerous gaps.  

Despite their potential importance, applied behavioral science research on improving the decisions, attitudes, beliefs, ways of thinking, values, and behaviors that are crucial from the perspective of Effective Altruism are neglected by academic funding agencies. Moreover, EA organizations rarely fund any behavioral science projects at all. One major reason is that behavioral scientists and grantmakers lack the tools to forecast the social impact of potential behavioral science projects and compare it against relevant benchmarks (e.g., cash transfers). This leaves us extremely uncertain about which of the millions of potential projects behavioral scientists could undertake would be highly impactful. This uncertainty makes it very difficult for grantmakers to identify or instigate behavioral science projects that are more cost-effective at improving the future than applying the tools and knowledge we already have in more established areas like global health. The lack of proper incentives, support, and clarity on what is essential leaves behavioral scientists stumbling in the dark. Consequently, behavioral science is missing out on the best opportunities to improve the future.

To overcome these problems, our project will shed light on which behavioral science research topics are most important and how cost-effective it is to fund research on those topics. To achieve this, we will develop a cost-effectiveness analysis method that can be applied to potential topics of behavioral science research. The method developed in this project will enable funders, such as the Future Fund and Open Philanthropy, academic and governmental funding agencies, prioritization researchers, and behavioral scientists, to derive quantitative estimates of how much alternative research projects might improve the future. We will apply our method to produce a list of high-impact behavioral science research topics with estimates of their expected cost-effectiveness in improving the future. We will primarily evaluate use-inspired basic behavioral science research and the development, evaluation, and improvement of behavioral science interventions. In the following, we will refer to this spectrum of activities as potentially useful behavioral science research.

Given our preliminary results, it seems likely that we will discover overlooked ways to improve the future that could be more than 100 or even more than 1000 times as cost-effective as unconditional cash transfers. Under reasonable assumptions about how the value of research varies across different topics, estimating the value of research on 20 topics will increase the total amount of good that can be done in a cause area by 15%-42% if the error variance of our estimates is between 50% and 200% of the average benefit of research (see Table 1).

Here's the mechanism by which the applicant expects their project will achieve positive outcomes.

1. The application of our method might lead to the discovery that behavioral science research on certain neglected questions is much more cost-effective at improving the future than the best existing interventions.

2. The discovery of these crucial open questions and low-hanging fruit might convince grant makers inside and outside the EA community to fund research on the most impactful questions we identified.

3. Our list of high-impact research topics and the availability of funding for such research would motivate and enable more behavioral scientists to conduct more impactful research. This research will generate insights and interventions that enable us to positively influence decisions crucial for humanity's long-term survival and the well-being of future generations of humans and animals.

4. The availability of our method could bring the criteria that (academic) funding agencies use to decide which scientific research projects to fund into closer alignment with the principles of effective altruism.

5. Over time, these developments could shift the values and priorities of academia towards the principles of effective altruism.

How much funding are they requesting?

$499,177

What would they do with the amount just specified?

The requested amount will allow us to develop, assess, refine, and apply a method for estimating the impact of behavioral science research on different topics. It would allow us to generate estimates of the expected cost-effectiveness of research on about 30 promising behavioral science topics and compare them to the effectiveness of existing interventions in global health and development. 

We plan to invest the funds to advance the proposed project roughly as outlined in this budget spreadsheet. The largest proportion of the funds will be used to hire a quantitative researcher (possibly Dr. Matthias Stelter) who will work on developing, assessing, and applying the cost-effectiveness analysis method full-time for two years. The second-largest portion of the funds will pay for four research assistants, who will help the team build and test numerous quantitative models. The third-largest portion of the budget will pay for a behavior scientist (possibly Dr. Izzy Gainsburg) who will support the modeling efforts with subject-matter expertise and coordinate the contributions of the consultants and research assistants (project management). The fourth-largest share of the funds will be spent on consultancies from behavioral science experts. Each consultant will be paid to share their knowledge of a research topic in their area of expertise with the team that is analyzing the cost-effectiveness of such research. We will also use some of the funds to pay external experts to critique our models, find flaws in our methodology, and provide impartial advice and feedback.

Here you can review the entire public portion of the application (which contains a lot more information about the applicant and their project):

https://docs.google.com/document/d/19sj8ke5XZesniup12S4NuRXe_LSA9bO3wZbxQtYnG24/edit#

Sep 20, 3:44pm:

Close date updated to 2022-10-01 2:59 am