Joshua Greene

You can give it all to your personal favorite.

You can give it all to the deworming charity that the expert recommend or do a 50-50 split.

And what we found was that over half the people did the 50-50 split.

So more money ended up going to the highly effective charity when you gave people the option to split than when you forced them to choose.

And we did a bunch of experiments to try to understand the psychology of it.

And the gist of it is that when you give from the heart, it's not about how much you give.

The difference between giving $50 to the local animal shelter or $100, it feels more or less the same.

So if you give $50 instead of 100, then you've got another 50 bucks.

And what you can do with that 50 bucks is scratch a different itch, which is the itch to give smart and impactfully rather than, you know, only doing the thing you have the personal connection with.

So that's sort of like the hard head psychology there.

And then we said, okay, well, what if we offer people an incentive and, you know, we'll add money on top.

And unsurprisingly, people did this even more.

It was like another 75 or 55% boost when we added money on top.

And then there's the question of, okay, where's that money going to come from?

So then we said, well, what if after people have made their choices, we say, hey, would you take the money that you were going to give to that super effective charity that you had just learned about and instead put it into a matching fund for other people?

We found that a lot of people would do that.

So we're like, huh, the math seems to add up.

Let's give this a try.

So Lucius and his developer friend, Fabio Kuhn, created this website called Giving Multiplier.

And if you're home, you can Google Giving Multiplier.