“Framing EA: ‘Doing Good Better’ Did Worse” by Rethink Priorities, David_Moss

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As part of our ongoing work to study how to best frame EA, we experimentally tested different phrases and sentences that CEA were considering using on effectivealtruism.org.

Doing Good Better taglines

We observed a consistent pattern where taglines that included the phrase ‘do[ing] good better’ received less support from respondents and inspired less interest in learning about EA.
We replicated these results in a second experiment, where we confirmed that taglines referring to “do[ing] good better” performed less well than those referring to “do[ing] the most good”.

Nouns and sentences

Nouns: The effect of using different nouns to refer to EA was small, but referring to EA as a ‘philosophy’ or ‘movement’ inspired the most curiosity compared to options including ‘project’ and ‘research field’.
Sentences: “Find the most effective ways to do good with your time, money, and career” and “Effective altruism asks the question of how we [...]

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Outline:

(00:12) Summary

(01:23) Method

(02:18) Taglines (Study 1)

(03:40) Doing Good Better replication (Study 2)

(05:23) Sentences (Study 1)

(06:45) Nouns (Study 1)

(07:41) Effectiveness focus

(07:55) Conclusion

(08:56) Acknowledgments

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First published:
October 27th, 2025

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Y6zMpdwkkAQ8rF56w/framing-ea-doing-good-better-did-worse

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

Graph showing ratings of different Effective Altruism (EA) learning-focused sentences.

Graph showing effectiveness ratings of different EA-related taglines, with confidence intervals.

Chart showing ratings of different taglines about helping others and doing good.

Line graph comparing support ratings between

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