In this report, we will explore the difference between those who self-identify as effective altruists versus those who say they broadly subscribe to effective altruism but do not self-identify. As there is variation in levels of involvement in the effective altruism movement, we were interested in assessing people who are outside the scope of the typical analysis. Past reports in the EA Survey Series have exclusively reported only on respondents who are aware of effective altruism, subscribe to effective altruism, and describe themselves as effective altruists.

We’re excited to continue what should be a lot of analysis and thoughtful conversation over the results from the 2018 EA Survey. This post outlines methodology and subsequent posts will outline different facets of the results that we analyzed and found noteworthy for the community.

The EA survey provides an annual snapshot of the EA community. Although it does not sample randomly from all effective altruists, it does provide an important glimpse at demographic attributes among those who have taken the survey. From these respondents, we observe that the majority of effective altruists look demographically much like those in past years. After cleaning the data and limiting the data set to those who declared that they self-identified as effective altruists, we sampled a total of 2,607 valid respondents for this report. In total, we surveyed 3,537 people. More people took the effective altruist survey than ever before, and this additional data enables us to look at the demographics of the effective altruism movement in more depth. In this report, we also aim to explore the characteristics and tendencies of EAs, including diets, political beliefs, careers, and relationships.