The field of global priorities research is about rigorously investigating what the most important global problems are, how we should compare them to each other, and what kinds of interventions best address them. For example, how do we compare the value of more work on climate change vs global health vs preventing future pandemics?

We might distinguish between foundational global priorities research on the one hand, and applied global priorities research on the other.

We think both kinds of global priorities research can be very important, and this profile is about both.

Foundational global priorities research

Foundational global priorities research mainly lies at the intersection of economics and moral philosophy, though it may also involve tools from other disciplines. It looks at the highest-level issues concerning which global priorities most further the social good, especially from a long-term perspective. This means it would include topics like investigating the value of reducing existential risk vs other ways of doing good, how much to prioritise ‘broad’ interventions that positively affect many different issues at once vs more ‘targeted’ interventions that focus on a single issue, and what methodologies we should use to answer these questions.

There are also more exotic-sounding topics for foundational global priorities research that nonetheless seem like they might be very important to us — for example: What’s the chance that we are in some sense living in a simulation? Should we try to engage in ‘acausal trade‘?

All these questions are relevant to the issue of which problems we should prioritise working on right now if we want to do as much good as we can, though some are more relevant than others — and the tractability of these questions also varies. To get some sense of the range, see the research agenda produced by the Global Priorities Institute at Oxford, and a few examples of foundational global priorities research questions we’ve collected.

Applied global priorities research

Applied global priorities research also seeks to determine what we should prioritise, but is focused on taking the lessons of the more foundational research and applying them to the particular situations we happen to be in. It often also uses more empirical methods and focuses less on philosophy.

For example, if foundational global priorities research told us that reducing existential risk is a top priority, applied global priorities research might ask which specific risks are biggest and easiest to mitigate (e.g. climate change vs pandemic risk). Or let’s say we wanted to pursue broad interventions — which interventions really do affect a broad range of issues in a robustly positive way? How much do they cost? Another valuable kind of applied global priorities research is investigating an underexplored problem area to see how pressing it seems.

We think many of Open Philanthropy’s research reports represent especially high-quality examples of applied global priorities research.

You also can find lots of great contributions along similar lines on the effective altruism forum — e.g. posts on Growth and the case against randomista development and What is the likelihood that civilizational collapse would directly lead to human extinction (within decades)?. In general, because of its focus on doing as much good as possible with limited resources, applied global priorities research has been a strong focus of the effective altruism community over the past decade.

There isn’t a sharp line between foundational and applied global priorities research; rather it is a spectrum. But very roughly speaking, more foundational research is more likely to be done in an academic setting like the Global Priorities Institute, and more applied research is more likely to be done at a think tank, grantmaking institution, or effective altruist organisation.

Why work on global priorities research?

1. Some problems are far more pressing than others

Intuitively, you might think that if we rated the world’s problems on how pressing they are, and put them on a graph, we’d end up with something like this — some problems are more pressing than others, but most are quite pressing:

But when we used our framework to evaluate different problems we found that it looks more like this — some problems are far more pressing than others:

For example, in rich countries like the US or Switzerland, the marginal cost to save a life through spending on healthcare is over $1 million.¹ By contrast, the marginal cost to save a life in sub-Saharan Africa through distributing antimalarial bed nets is estimated to be less than $10,000.² This suggests that if a foundation is focused on health in developing countries rather than in rich countries, it could save about 100 times as many lives.

If such big differences in effectiveness exist, then it is crucial to identify the best areas to focus on. Finding a more effective area could mean we achieve 10 or 100 times as much. Choosing poorly could mean achieving only 1% as much. The aim of global priorities research is to enable decision-makers to avoid this mistake.

2. We may discover new, even more pressing global problems

The differences in effectiveness between working on different problems could be bigger if there are problems that humanity hasn’t even thought of yet. And it seems likely that we haven’t discovered all the serious global problems that exist.

When we look at the history of the human race, we see many examples of major moral problems that most people were completely oblivious to. These include slavery, the deplorable treatment of foreigners, the subjugation of women, the persecution of people who aren’t heterosexual, and the gross mistreatment of animals. It is unlikely that we’re the first generation to have discovered all the serious moral problems that exist, meaning there are probably major global problems we aren’t even aware of today.

Global priorities research could have a huge impact if it identified new pressing problems that we’re not aware of, and redirected money and talent towards working on them.

3. Billions of dollars could be redirected to more pressing problems

Organisations whose stated purpose is to pursue the common good spend tens of trillions of dollars each year (out of a global GDP of around $75 trillion), most of which is spent by governments domestically. Foreign aid spending is over $135 billion each year, and private philanthropy in the US totals $350 billion each year.

Probably only a small fraction of these tens of trillions of dollars is genuinely intended to improve the world as much as possible, rather than promote the interests of a specific group (e.g. a voting bloc within a specific country). And only a small fraction of that would be responsive to higher-quality research.

Nonetheless, if billions of dollars could be redirected to problems that are larger in scale, more neglected, or easier to solve, this could provide huge gains.

Moreover, many people also want to work on the world’s most pressing problems — that’s why our website exists! — meaning that total resources are even greater than solely monetary totals convey.

And since differences in effectiveness can be so large, even if research only influences a comparatively small amount of resources, it can be highly effective. As one example, the charity evaluator GiveWell produces research which, in 2015 alone, led individuals to give $15.5 million to the highly effective charity Against Malaria Foundation. These donations will likely save around 2,000 lives through the distribution of bed nets that protect people from malaria.³ Only around 4% of US charitable donations go to international causes. This makes it likely that the majority of the $15.5 million GiveWell redirected would have gone to charities working in the US, which, on average, do far less to improve lives than charities working internationally.

4. Global priorities research is a highly neglected field

Despite the importance of this research, it’s also highly neglected. As of 2018, organisations focused on directly comparing different global problems (e.g. farm animal welfare vs nuclear war vs improving scientific research) had a collective budget of less than $10 million per year:

However, interest in this area is growing, so the total is definitely higher today. We should also note that there is also research being done which indirectly helps with setting global priorities — for example, work done by some academic economists, and groups that run trials and compile data on specific policy areas.

5. The field has a track record of success in redirecting hundreds of millions of dollars

The field of global priorities research is young, but it has already succeeded in influencing how resources are spent. Here are a few examples:

• GiveWell — in 2015 redirected at least $39.7 million in donations from individual donors to their recommended charities.⁶
• Open Philanthropy — advised the foundation Good Ventures to make grants totaling $76.7 million in 2015.⁷
• Global Priorities Project — the UK Department for International Development reallocated £2.5 billion (US $3.6 billion) to fund research into treating and responding to the diseases that cause the most suffering. The Global Priorities Project was advocating for this change (though of course the policy process has many inputs, of which they were only a small part).⁸
• Copenhagen Consensus Center — its cost-benefit analysis helped convince the United States Bush administration to launch the $1.2 billion President’s Malaria Initiative, among many other successes.⁹

What are the major arguments against this problem being pressing?

The research may be too difficult

You might think that global priorities research will not be able to reach more accurate results than our current best knowledge, due to the large amounts of uncertainty, ambiguity and judgement calls involved. Perhaps the reason this research is neglected is that it’s simply too difficult.

We think this is a reasonable concern. However, the small amount of global priorities research done so far, has already led to significant progress, including:

• GiveWell identifying global health as a promising area to look for outstanding donation opportunities.
• Identifying the importance of taking into consideration the effects on future generations when comparing different global problems.
• The development of better methodologies for prioritisation, like how to assess the value of working on problems of unknown difficulty, for example research into cold fusion, or institutional reform through political lobbying.

Moreover, there are many ‘low-hanging fruit’ opportunities for global priorities research still available. For example, researchers could aggregate expert opinions on the severity of different global problems, and gather existing empirical data on the relative scale, neglectedness, and solvability of different global problems.

The research may be ignored

You might think that politicians and donors won’t be motivated to act on the results of global priorities research. Maybe they’ll care more about securing reelection or will instead respond to emotional appeals and gut judgements.

This is a reasonable concern, but we think that if good evidence is presented, at least some will act on the results, as demonstrated by the examples mentioned above.

What is most needed to solve this problem?

Most needed are researchers, and in particular:

• Researchers trained in economics, mathematics, or philosophy to develop the methodology for setting global priorities.
• Researchers trained in social and natural sciences with the ability to collect data and analyse specific global problems.

Additional researchers can not only enable more progress on these questions, but they also demonstrate that this area is of academic interest, which can bring in more researchers in the future.

Also needed are academic project managers and operations staff to help scale up existing institutes and found new ones.

Finally, it’s less of a bottleneck, but funding is also needed. Funding could be used to scale up and found new research centres. It would also be useful to fund scholarships for individuals, and it would be ideal for one or two funders to specialise in evaluating research proposals in this area.

What can you concretely do to help?

How to enter

If you want to work in this area as a researcher, you’ll need training in the relevant disciplines.

• If you are an undergraduate, you can major in or take classes in mathematics, economics, statistics, or analytic philosophy. If you are out of university, you can take online classes in these subjects, for example this introduction to microeconomics.
• In general, for foundational global priorities research the best graduate subject is an economics PhD. The next most useful subject is philosophy, followed by decision-making psychology, scientific subjects relevant to emerging technologies, and topics like public policy, political science, and international relations. People have also entered this field from maths, computer science, and physics. For applied global priorities research, radically different backgrounds could be useful, depending on the specific problems investigated.
• Note that obtaining advanced degrees and positions in many of these fields, such as academic philosophy, can be very demanding and competitive.
• You should read the existing work of organisations working on global priorities research to get up to speed, such as Open Philanthropy’s cause reports.

What are some top career options within this area?

Research paths

The only major academic centre currently focused on this research is the Global Priorities Institute at Oxford, so if you want to pursue this path as an academic that’s the ideal place to work. That said, we expect that other centres will be established over the coming years, and you could also pursue this research in other academic positions.

One downside of academia, however, is that you need to work on topics that are publishable, and these are often not those that are most relevant to real decisions. This means it’s also important to have researchers working elsewhere on more practical questions.

We think the leading centre of this applied research is Open Philanthropy, and the advantage of working there is that your findings will directly feed into how billions of dollars are spent (disclaimer: they are our largest funder). However, you can also pursue this research at other effective altruism organisations. At 80,000 Hours, for instance, we do a form of applied global priorities research focused on career strategy. Rethink Priorities is another great place to do applied global priorities research.

There have also been people who have pursued global priorities research independently, such as Carl Shulman. These researchers often start with blogging, and then take freelance work from donors and organisations.

Non-research paths

If you don’t want to pursue one of the research paths above, you can:

• Work as an academic manager or administrator, research manager, or in other support roles at organisations conducting global priorities research (listed below).
• Take a high-earning job and donate a percentage of your income to fund the research performed by the groups above. Read our advice on how to maximise the amount you’re able to donate.

You can also see roles supporting global priorities research, and some ways to help in addition to working on global priorities research as a career.

Which organisations could you work at?

We know of only a small number of groups doing research that tries to compare global problems at the highest level (e.g. climate change vs global health). Our top recommends here include:

• Open Philanthropy, which advises Good Ventures, a several-billion -dollar foundation, on its philanthropy. See current vacancies. (Disclaimer of conflict of interest: Open Philanthropy is our largest funder.) You could also consider working at their partner organisation, GiveWell, which carries out priorities research within international development.
• Rethink Priorities has research teams in animal welfare, global health and development, and longtermism and existential risk reduction.
• Global Priorities Institute at Oxford is the leading academic research centre focused on this topic (note that our cofounder, Will MacAskill, is a researcher there). See current vacancies.
• Forethought Foundation, where Will MacAskill is director, supports global priorities research through offering scholarships and research fellowships.

Some other relevant organisations include:

• The Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk houses academic experts studying different risks to human survival, which then facilitates comparisons among them. See current vacancies and subscribe to get notified of new job openings.
• Founders Pledge creates cause reports to help their pledges choose where to donate.
• Happier Lives Institute researches different ways to increase people’s wellbeing.
• Copenhagen Consensus Center brings together top economists to assess which solutions to global problems are most effective, with a focus on international development. However, we have reservations about their work on climate change. See current vacancies and subscribe to get notified of new job openings.
• Global Catastrophic Risk Institute compares different global catastrophic risks.
• Center on Long-Term Risk researches ways to reduce suffering risks especially.
• Future of Life Institute

A wider range of groups run trials or collect and compile data in specific policy areas. We don’t regard this as equally neglected, but it is a very complementary form of research:

• Washington State Institute for Public Policy
• The Pew-Macarthur Results First Initiative
• The Center for High Impact Philanthropy
• What Works Network
• Campbell Collaboration publishes meta-analyses that draw on large numbers of studies to determine the effectiveness of different types of social interventions
• Behavioural Insights Team
• Poverty Action Lab is an academic network that specifically studies the effectiveness of interventions designed to alleviate poverty
• Many other social scientists or medical researchers run trials on ways of improving wellbeing

Find opportunities on our job board

Our job board features opportunities in global priorities research:

View all opportunities

Where can you donate to help global priorities research?

You can donate to most of the organisations listed above, where currently the Global Priorities Institute seems like the best option (you can donate at the bottom of the Oxford Faculty of Philosophy page). Open Philanthropy isn’t funding constrained.

(To make a tax deductible donation to the Global Priorities Institute from the US, go here, select “Humanities division,” and write
“Global Priorities Institute” in the textbox.)

Learn more

Top recommendations

• YouTube playlist: 23 talks on global priorities research from EA Globals, including an introduction to the field.
• Ajeya Cotra on worldview diversification and how big the future could be
• Phil Trammell on how becoming a ‘patient philanthropist’ could allow you to do far more good

Further recommendations

Research

• See the research agenda produced by the Global Priorities Institute in Oxford.
• Here’s a shorter list of example research questions.
• And check out talks from the Global Priorities Institute.
• For examples of global priorities research, see Open Philanthropy’s cause reports and this series of posts on how to prioritise research.

Other articles and podcasts

• Podcast: Michelle Hutchinson hopes to shape the world by shaping the ideas of intellectuals. Will global priorities research succeed?
• The world’s biggest problems and why they’re not what first comes to mind
• Career review: Economics PhD
• Why the long-term future of humanity matters more than anything else, and what we should do about it, according to Oxford philosopher Dr Toby Ord
• Working in the government you can have a big impact on pressing global problems. Here’s how to get started.
• Career review: Help build the effective altruism community
• The psychologists in the race against collective stupidity and how you can join them
• Our problem prioritisation framework
• Leaders survey: What are the most important talent gaps in effective altruism — and which problems are most impactful to work on?
• Podcast: You want to do as much good as possible and have billions of dollars. What do you do?
• Podcast: Finding the best charity requires estimating the unknowable. Here’s how GiveWell tries to do that, according to researcher James Snowden.
• Why despite global progress, humanity is probably facing its most dangerous time ever
• GiveWell on strategic cause selection

The post Global priorities research appeared first on 80,000 Hours.

Many attempts to do good fail

Working out how to help others is difficult, and many attempts to make a difference fail. Most large US social programmes that have been rigorously evaluated, including those backed by expert opinion, turn out to produce weak or no effects, and in some cases negative effects.¹ Within US education, 90% of interventions evaluated by the Institute of Education Sciences have weak or no effects.² Within international aid, many projects fail, and for most programmes the effects are unknown. This suggests that if you get involved with a charitable programme without looking at the evidence, there’s a decent chance you’ll have no impact.

Large differences in effectiveness between successful approaches

Avoiding programmes which are harmful or which have no effect is obviously the right call. But even if you consider only strategies which have a positive effect, there are large differences in how much they help others.

First, let’s consider different global problems. If you want to help others, should you work on climate change, US education, animal welfare, or something else? When we used our framework to compare different global problems we found that you can do far more good working on some problems than others.

For example, within US education, providing one year’s worth of pre-kindergarten education costs between $6,400 and $8,000 per child.
By contrast, in international health and development, the same amount of money can save a child’s life through providing bed nets that protect people malaria, or deworm 6,000 children, or double the income of around 30 people for a year.³ And we think there are even more neglected and important problems than international development.

But there are also large differences between different ways of working on a specific problem. For example, if we look at interventions that treat illnesses in the developing world, we find that the best interventions are vastly more effective at reducing disease than others:

For instance, according to estimates in the Disease Control Priorities Report, $1,000 spent on treating HIV with antiretroviral therapy creates one extra year of healthy life, whereas $1,000 spent on educating high-risk groups about HIV creates 27 extra years of healthy life.⁴

The lesson here is that you can increase the amount of good you do many times over by changing which global problem you work on, and by focusing on the very best interventions. These large differences in impact are why one of the core principles of effective altruism is to use evidence and reason to work out what’s best for the world, and a commitment to do what’s best, whatever that turns out to be.

This makes it different from evidence-based policy (which only focuses on finding proven interventions within a given policy area) and evidence-based development (which only focuses on finding evidence-based approaches within international development). Effective altruism also considers the question of which area to work on in the first place, and doesn’t restrict itself to approaches for which there’s hard empirical evidence — rather, it aims to focus on whatever approaches produce the best results in expectation.

If more people made a significant commitment to helping others with their lives, and devoted those resources to the most effective approaches, they could each have far more positive impact on the world, and make a major contribution to ending challenges such as extreme poverty, factory farming, and risks to the future such as catastrophic pandemics and extreme climate change.

If you think effective altruism is a good idea, is there a case for taking an indirect approach of promoting it, rather than following effective altruist principles directly?

Why work on promoting effective altruism?

Multiplier effect

How could you double your lifetime impact?

Consider the following two options:

1. Pledge to give 10% of your income to effective charities.
2. Pledge to give 10% of your income to effective charities, and persuade a friend to do the same as well.

The second path does more good — probably about twice as much — and this illustrates the power of promoting important ideas. By promoting effective altruism you multiply your social impact because you increase the number of other people who take effective actions to help others.

This is exactly what the founders of Giving What We Can realised in 2009. Rather than just donating to effective charities themselves, they created Giving What We Can — a community of people who pledge to donate at least 10% of their income to effective charities. As of 2014, for every $1 Giving What We Can had spent on creating and growing its community, its members had already given more than $6 to effective charities. In total, in 2014, Giving What We Can members had pledged to donate over $1 billion over their lifetimes, which is vastly more than the founders could have ever given individually. Membership has about doubled in the years since.

We chose to start 80,000 Hours for the same reason. Rather than take whichever careers we thought would be highest impact, we thought we might be able to help hundreds of other people have a high-impact career, and so achieve hundreds of times as much.

These examples illustrate an important lesson: for whichever actions are highest impact, it’s always even more effective if you can mobilise more people to take them.

Flexibility

We don’t know which global problems will be the most pressing in the future, or which interventions will best solve them. So, if you commit to something today, you’re likely to be wrong — and have less impact in the long term. Instead, it’s useful to keep your options open.

Building the effective altruism community is one way to do this (another is working on global priorities research). One of the core principles of effective altruism is to change what you’re working on in response to changing circumstances and in light of new ideas and research.

For example, Giving What We Can promotes donating to the most effective charities, whatever those turn out to be. This means that future donations of members will change in response to new evidence (at least in part). This makes Giving What We Can far more flexible than organisations focused on a specific problem.

More generally, building the effective altruism community increases the number of people willing to switch into whichever problems are understood to be the most pressing problems in the future, and to tackle them in the most effective ways known at the time.

So promoting effective altruism is not only a multiplier on whichever problems are most pressing today; it’s also a multiplier on whichever problems turn out to be most pressing in the future.

Highly neglected

The ideas of effective altruism only coalesced in the 21st century, and the term was only coined in 2012. It’s currently highly neglected, and few people know about the ideas.

For comparison, this combined budget is similar to the annual operating budget of a single nonprofit dedicated to promoting conservative legal practice in the US — the Federalist Society.

The above figures overestimate spending on promoting effective altruism because these organisations also spend a significant part of their budgets on research and other programmes.

Why might you not want to work in this area?

The ideas of effective altruism are incorrect, or will be badly implemented

Some people think that the ideas of effective altruism are wrong in important ways. We think many objections are based on misconceptions about what effective altruism involves, but there are also more substantive criticisms. We won’t go over them here, but here’s a summary of the main objections, along with responses to them.

We think the most powerful objections are not that the ideas are wrong, but that the effective altruism community, as it currently exists, is going to fail to live up to them. For example, the community may end up focused on the wrong problems if it is too biased or lacks diverse perspectives; or it will lack the skills to build a successful movement that puts effective altruist ideas into practice.

There’s a specific problem that’s much more pressing

Promoting effective altruism has the effect of getting more people to work on the problems which the effective altruism community thinks are most pressing. Currently these are mainly international health and development, animal welfare, and ensuring a long and positive future for human civilisation. So, if you help to promote effective altruism, your impact will be spread out over these areas.

If, however, you think that one of these problems is much more pressing than the others and will remain so in the future, or that a different problem is much more pressing, it may be more effective to work on that problem directly, rather than promoting effective altruism in general.

There’s a better opportunity for advocacy

The multiplier effect isn’t unique to promoting effective altruism — you can increase your social impact by getting people to work on any problem. For example, you can get a multiplier through mobilising other people to work on climate change, nuclear war, risks from artificial intelligence, factory farming, and other global problems.

To think that promoting effective altruism gives you a higher value multiplier, you have to think that the problems effective altruism will prioritise over time are more pressing than other problems, or that it is easier to get people to work on them than on other problems. Hopefully the former is true, because the community will keep updating where it focuses as the situation changes, but you might disagree if you think the community is importantly mistaken about where to focus.

There’s a better way to gain flexibility

If you’re uncertain about which global problems to focus on, then instead of growing the effective altruism community, it may be better to:

• Build some other kind of capital (e.g. saving money which you can donate in the future)
• Do more global priorities research
• Work on a broad intervention that will help in many different scenarios in the future, such as:
  • Reducing the chance of great power conflict
  • Improving incentives and governance for global public goods
  • Improving democracy
  • Improving incentives and norms in academic research to better advance human knowledge
  • Improving collective decision making
  • Improving reasoning and cognition

Read some about these issues and others.

There is already a large amount of work being done on improving democracy and cooperation between countries, making it harder to make a significant contribution to them. But improving academic research, collective decision making, and improving reasoning and cognition are more neglected. If you have better personal fit for working on these areas than for promoting effective altruism, they may be better for gaining flexibility.

Widespread promotion of the current ideas of effective altruism may be premature

The current ideas of effective altruism are primarily based on research done by a handful of research groups over the last 15 or so years. Given that the effective altruism research programme has been relatively small in scale so far, it may be premature to promote its ideas and push for widespread adoption of its current recommendations.

One risk is that some of the current recommendations of effective altruism will have unintended harmful consequences, which could be discovered with more research. If this turns out to be true, then promotion of current recommendations would be harmful. Future research could also show some of the current recommendations to be misguided (even if not harmful) — and if these are aggressively promoted, the credibility of effective altruism might be damaged, and its brand could be significantly tainted. This would limit the future potential of the movement. (This is one reason we favour a high-fidelity model of movement growth — which promotes quality of outreach over speed of growth.)

Finally, it’s plausible that further research will uncover new recommendations that are many times more effective than current recommendations. If this is true, then promoting current recommendations is premature, and it would be better to invest more in global priorities research first. (Although it’s worth noting that effective altruism is one of the main ways people get involved in global priorities research, so these areas are not separate.)

It’s hard to know whether advocacy works

As with any advocacy work, it is hard to measure how successful past promotion efforts have been, and what has worked in the past may not continue to work with new audiences. To work on promoting effective altruism, you should be comfortable with the uncertainty that comes with advocacy work.

How to solve this problem

What are some top career options within this area?

There are several ways you can use your career to promote effective altruism:

• Working at organisations that figure out how to best promote the ideas of effective altruism, and spread them to their full potential. Read more about this option in our career review on working at effective altruist organisations.
• Promoting the ideas of effective altruism as a public intellectual — in journalism, UK party politics, UK civil service, or think tanks.
• If you have deep expertise in areas relevant to effective altruism — for example, in disciplines relevant to global catastrophic risks like AI research, biology, biosecurity, disaster risk, forecasting, and governance — use your position to strengthen the connections between your field and the effective altruism community.
• There’s also a need for founding new organisations. To do that, it’s best to get involved with the community first, then you might spot a good opportunity.

Which organisations do we recommend?

We recommend applying to work at the following organisations, which work directly on promoting effective altruism:

• The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) is the organisation that coined the term ‘effective altruism.’ It’s the leading organisation in charge of growing and strengthening the movement. It helps to run Effective Altruism Global conferences, local effective altruism groups, and effectivealtruism.org. It’s led by William MacAskill, who wrote the book Doing Good Better, an introduction to effective altruism. CEA includes the project Giving What We Can, which encourages people to pledge 10% of their income to the most effective organisations for helping others. If you want to promote effective altruism, CEA may be the best place to work. See current vacancies.
• 80,000 Hours — yes, that’s us. We do research into which careers do the most good and help people pursue them. See current vacancies.
• Founders Pledge encourages entrepreneurs to make a legally binding commitment to donate at least 2% of their personal proceeds to charity when they sell their business. It raised over $200 million in legally binding pledges in under two years. Read more about Founders Pledge in our interview with the founder.

The roles currently most needed at the above organisations include managers, web developers, operations staff, and marketing and outreach specialists.

Note that most effective altruist organisations have fewer than 30 staff, which means they don’t always advertise vacancies publicly. As a result, your best bet is to get in touch through a referral and try to do a trial or meet the people involved.

Example of someone pursuing this path

Find opportunities on our job board

Our job board features opportunities in building effective altruism:

View all opportunities

How to enter this area

How to get started

If you’re new, learn more about effective altruism by joining the Effective Altruism Newsletter, joining an Effective Altruism Virtual Program, or reading the Effective Altruism Forum.

To get involved in person, apply to attend an Effective Altruism Global conference to meet people who work at effective altruist organisations. You can also find a local group to meet other people in the community.

How to get a job within the community

If you’d like to get a job at one of the organisations, try to do freelance work, an internship, volunteer work, or a project with someone else in the community. The organisations usually only hire people who have a track record of working in the community and have referrals from other community members.

One type of volunteering that can be very high impact and also helps you get started promoting effective altruism is helping organise a local group. This gives you experience in talking about effective altruism, and you can easily get a couple of people to take the Giving What We Can pledge.

If you’re not yet ready to apply for work in these organisations, try to build one of the skills most in demand by working for a couple of years in a relevant area. The organisations mostly hire people with at least a few years experience. Alternatively, you could find your best earning to give option and donate to support the growth of effective altruism.

To get updates on the latest job openings each month, join the Effective Altruism Newsletter or our newsletter. You can also join the Effective Altruism Job Postings Facebook group.

We’re also happy to help people one-on-one who want to get a job at one of these organisations. Apply for our free careers advising.

How to help out part time

There are a few options if you just want to help build effective altruism part time:

• If you already have a public platform or expertise in areas relevant to effective altruism, get in touch with us.
• Help run a local group, as above.
• Apply to be a facilitator for an Effective Altruism Virtual Program.

Where to donate to help promote effective altruism?

If you’d like to start helping right away, you can donate to effective altruist organisations.

Finding promising donation opportunities in this area is especially challenging for individual donors, because existing charity evaluators (such as GiveWell and Animal Charity Evaluators) don’t evaluate organisations working on promoting effective altruism. As a result, we recommend donating to the Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund.

Donate to the Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund

Disclosure: 80,000 Hours has been a recipient of donations to this fund.

Otherwise, you can do your own analysis of the organisations listed above and donate to where you think is best.

Learn more

• Doing Good Better by William MacAskill (cofounder of 80,000 Hours) is an introduction to effective altruism.
• Podcast: Our descendants will probably see us as moral monsters. What should we do about that?
• Podcast: You want to do as much good as possible and have billions of dollars. What do you do?
• Podcast: Why it’s a bad idea to break the rules, even if it’s for a good cause
• Article: Why operations management is one of the biggest bottlenecks in effective altruism
• Career review: Help build the effective altruism community
• Leaders survey: What are the most important talent gaps in the effective altruism community?

The post Building effective altruism appeared first on 80,000 Hours.

This is an update on the number of significant plan changes we’ve caused as of the end of Nov 2016.

We define a significant plan change as:

Someone tells us that 80,000 Hours caused them to change the career path they intend to pursue, in a way that they think increases their lifetime impact.

More on what counts as a significant plan change here.

Our total number of plan changes as of the end of Nov 2016 is 1,854, and after impact-adjusting these it’s 1,504.8.

Here’s a summary of our key figures:¹

Impact-adjustment of plan changes

In October 2015, we started rating plan changes with a value of 0.1, 1 or 10 based on our estimate of their counterfactual impact, in order to track the quality of plan changes over time. Read more.

Number of plan changes

Here’s the breakdown by year:

Note that we only started collecting plan changes in 2013, but started outreach in 2011. This means the 2013 figures reflect three years of work rather than one, so our growth from 2013 to 2014 was better than it looks from these charts. Also, the figures for 2016 don’t include December, so our year-on-year growth rates will be somewhat higher once all of 2016 is included.

Our month-on-month growth rates over 3 years are faster than our year-on-year growth rates, because we grew quickly during 2016. Here are our monthly impact-adjusted plan changes, with plan changes we learned about from our annual impact surveys amortised:

Here are the proportions of plan changes that we scored with the values 0.1, 1 and 10 each year. As you can see, most plan changes are scored as 0.1 or 1, and there are only a few 10s:

Here are our impact-adjusted plan changes per year, again broken down by their scores:

Finally, here our monthly impact-adjusted plan changes broken down by their scores (excluding those we learned about in our annual impact surveys):

Most of our growth has been driven by the 1s. This is because (as is shown below) growth has largely been driven by (i) workshops (ii) our online tools and the on-going impact survey (benefiting from higher web traffic) and (iii) more people taking the Giving What We Can pledge.

These sources tend to produce 1s rather than 10s, especially in the short-term. However, we think about 10% of these 1s will become 10s over the coming years. It’s hard to become a 10 right away because it requires a big shift.

How did we find out about the plan changes?

We learn about significant plan changes when our users fill out our online surveys, feedback forms, or through emailing users directly. The main sources are:

• Impact survey – we have a survey on our website which about 5-10 people fill out per week. Once a year we also send the survey out to everyone on our newsletter — we call this our ‘annual impact survey’.
• Online tools – our tools survey users on whether 80,000 Hours caused them to change their career plans.
• Workshops and coaching – all workshop attendees and people we coach are asked to fill out a feedback form which asks them if they changed their plans.
• Manual correspondence – we email a small fraction of our users to ask if they changed their careers plans due to us.
• From Giving What We Can – we email Giving What We Can members who say they heard of GWWC through 80,000 Hours to ask whether they took the pledge due to us.

How we learned about impact-adjusted significant plan changes in 2016:

Here are our monthly impact-adjusted plan changes broken down by how we learned about them:

Plan change statistics

What did the changes consist of?

You can see some examples of plan changes in our annual review (forthcoming). There are summary statistics below.

In October 2016 we added new questions to our plan change surveys, asking users for more information. One new multiple choice question we now ask is What did the change consist of?

446 people who made significant plan changes have answered this question so far (out of a total 1,414 people who made a plan change in 2016).

Here are the proportions of impact-adjusted plan changes which included the different options (note that people could select multiple options):

What did plan changes scored “10” switch into?

We categorised the plan changes which we scored as 10s in 2015 and 2016 by the paths they switched into:

What did plan changes scored “1” switch into?

We selected a random sample of 30 plan changes scored as 1s in 2016, and categorised them by what they now intend to do.

What did plan changes scored “0.1” switch into?

We did the same for a random sample of 30 plan changes scored as 0.1 in 2016:

How many people took the Giving What We Can pledge due to 80,000 Hours?

In 2016 we tracked 115 people who took the Giving What We Can pledge due to 80,000 Hours. This is 8% of our plan changes for the year, and 13% of our impact-adjusted plan changes.

We track this figure by emailing people who take the pledge and say that they first heard about Giving What We Can through 80,000 Hours, and ask them how likely it is that they would have taken the pledge if 80,000 Hours didn’t exist. We also track people who say in our impact surveys that they now intend to take the pledge due to 80,000 Hours, and who then become members.

Which causes are people planning to work on?

Another new question we added in October 2016 is: Which global problem or cause are you planning to work on with your career?

415 people who made significant plan changes have answered this question so far, with the following results (again, note that people could select multiple options):

15% of people who said that they now intend to work on a different global problem, chose at least one of the following, and didn’t choose any of the other causes:

• Promoting effective altruism
• Global priorities research
• Risks from artificial intelligence
• Biosecurity

So roughly 15% of the plan changes (based on the sample) are switching into our top priority areas.

How involved in the effective altruism community are people who make plan changes?

We also ask people who made a plan change: Do you consider yourself an active supporter of “effective altruism”? 466 people who made a significant plan change have answered this question so far, with the following responses:

How did they first hear about 80,000 Hours?

130 people who made plan changes answered the question How did you first find out about 80,000 Hours?, with the following results:

To sum up the main sources for the impact-adjusted plan changes: 30% came from word-of-mouth, 31% from the effective altruism community, and 21% from online outreach.

What caused the plan changes?

We ask each person who reports a plan change What was most significant in triggering these plan changes? Here are the breakdowns of what caused plan changes by year:

Compared with previous years, plan changes caused by online content and workshops have gone up, and the percentage of plan changes caused by our community and coaching have gone down. This is in line with our expectations because we spent 2016 focused on improving our online content and delivering workshops, and didn’t do much coaching.

Here is the same chart but with the absolute numbers of impact-adjusted plan changes each year:

As can be seen, most of our growth in 2016 was driven by plan changes caused by online content and by workshops.

Other ways we helped our users

We also asked our users if there are ways we’ve helped them with their careers besides changing their career plans. Here are the results:

The post End of year update on plan changes appeared first on 80,000 Hours.

I recently spoke to Trevor Shorb about how his career plans changed as a result of 80,000 Hours. After finishing university, Trevor worked in the Peace Corps in El Salvador and planned to work for an NGO in the developing world. But after reading our advice, he decided to gain skills in the private sector first, in order to have a bigger impact in the long run. Today Trevor does business development for an international education company in emerging markets in Latin America. He plans to start a nonprofit or for-profit in the developing world in the future.

How and why did he make this transition? Read our interview with him to find out.

How did you find out about 80,000 Hours and effective altruism, and what were you planning on doing with your career before that?

I first became interested in effective altruism when I read “The Life You Can Save” around the time I graduated college and had committed to serve in the Peace Corps.

Before that I had undergone a fundamental change in perspective. Recruited to college to play lacrosse, I was fully dedicated to the pursuit of being the best and leading the team. A case of chronic Lyme disease led to multiple operations and much time spent in doctor’s offices. After years of treatment and physical therapy, my sports career came to an end around the time I encountered the practice of mindfulness. I entered a serious exploration phase, dropped out of school, and experimented with different internships in a financial advisory firm, and a small start-up, as well as coaching lacrosse and leading international trips for teenagers.

During this time I saved money for a trip to Southeast Asia, where I intended to search for myself. I arrived with no plans other than the intention to be present. While wandering around, I realized how unfulfilling the endeavor was — I realized that I wanted not to move through cultures and take, but to plant myself and to give. I returned to school, immersed myself in my studies, finished my degree in political science while diving into philosophy and psychology classes, and committed to serve in the Peace Corps.

Before leaving for the Peace Corps though, I read “The Life You Can Save,” recommended by my brother and sister, and it immediately resonated with me. I took an advocacy internship with Oxfam America, largely because Peter Singer spoke so highly of the organization. I supported an effort to lobby for food aid reform. While I saw this as a worthy cause, the feeling at the end of the project was confusing. Our intentions were good, we lobbied hard, but it was difficult to tell whether anything changed in the end. My colleagues at Oxfam took a different view, and said the odds would certainly be lower if no one had done anything at all. But how much lower, I thought?

I left for the Peace Corps, determined to make a direct impact I could more easily measure. I constantly thought to myself, how can I maximize my impact here? I enjoyed the feeling of connecting with people directly, sharing cultures, and impacting many kids’ lives. I focused on providing more programming to youth in the community that would empower them to lead the community and the country in the future. I enjoyed the challenge of working without much money at my disposal, focusing on training people and coming up with creative solutions to problems, using little to no budget.

But the whole time I was there, I knew I could be doing more, according to the ideas of effective altruism. And people asked me for things I couldn’t provide at the scale they needed: jobs. I did not think hard about what I was going to do next. Knowing I was committed to El Salvador for two years, I decided to dedicate myself to my work and with time, plan the next steps. My general idea was to work at an NGO in Latin America next.

Then, Peace Corps suspended its program in El Salvador due to violence in the country and I got evacuated back home to Massachusetts two weeks later. I embarked on a full-time job search, taking little time to relax and reflect, but I was in working mode and was determined to continue making an impact. I began looking into NGOs in Latin America or other effective institutions like Oxfam where I could work in monitoring and evaluation or learn how to make an impact.

What were the steps that got you from your original plan to your current plan? What were some of the things you learned that were most important to your decision?

This is where 80,000 Hours came in handy. In a time when I wasn’t sure in which direction to head, 80,000 Hours provided structure and guidance. I had known of it from my brother, but never had enough internet signal or time in El Salvador to really investigate the site. Given my liberal arts college humanities degree, Peace Corps, and a majority of my work experience being leading youth, I was intimidated by many of 80,000 Hours suggestions. Software engineering, management consulting, data science and Economics PhDs — many of the paths are quantitative-heavy, which I felt I lacked.

But what helped me make my final decision was the article What do leaders of effective nonprofits say about working in nonprofits?. Four of the five recommended experiences in the private sector. I decided to pursue an entry-level position in the private sector where I would receive training and gain sales and marketing experience. This felt more accessible than more quantitative positions.

What are you doing now?

I now work at an international education company, responsible for business development in emerging country markets in Latin America. I have a lot of responsibility and will be gaining skills in sales and marketing in the developing world. I sell language immersion programs to the elite who can afford it, but I am developing valuable contacts with whom I may work in the future. I am conducting market research, designing promotional materials, managing travel agencies on the ground and also selling directly to customers in Latin America. I am also gaining entrepreneurial experience with the support and resources of an established, international corporation. I have colleagues from around the world, travel for work throughout Latin America, and speak Spanish everyday. I see opportunities to create and experiment with strategy and different aspects of developing a business. I hope this prepares me to start an NGO or business in the developing world in the future.

I didn’t expect that I would be in a corporate office in the Boston area, helping build a company and maximize profits. I imagined I would be working for a growing NGO in a Latin American city. With the help of 80,000 Hours, effective altruism literature, and Cal Newport’s “So Good They Can’t Ignore You”, I believe that in order to increase my impact and opportunities I can develop my skills more efficiently in the private sector and have a bigger impact in the long run.

What are your plans going forward?

I still am concerned about the fact that my background and experience continues to be in “softer” skills and I continue to be intimidated by my lack of enthusiasm for data science, finance, and the “harder” skills. But I hope to dive in anyway.

My plan is to gain more work experience, get an MBA at a top program, work as a management consultant, and go on to work in start-ups that are doing good and providing jobs in the developing world. Jobs, more than anything, were what the farmers in my village told me in my house-to-house surveys I conducted as Peace Corps Volunteer that they needed when I asked them, “What do you need?”

Do you think Trevor made the right call to change his career like this? How might he do even better? Let us know what you think in the comments.

The post Trevor decided to move from a nonprofit to a for-profit to do more good in the long run. Was it the right call? appeared first on 80,000 Hours.

This is a brief update on the number of significant plan changes we’ve caused as of the end of Dec 2015.

We define a significant plan change as:

Someone tells us that 80,000 Hours caused them to change the career path they intend to pursue, in a way that they think increases their lifetime impact.

More on what counts as a significant plan change here.

Our total number of significant plan changes as of the end of Dec 2015 is 453.

Here’s a summary of our key figures:¹

Note: “YoY growth rate” stands for “year-on-year growth rate”. Also note that our financial cost figures for 2015 are preliminary.

Impact-adjustment of significant plan changes

In October 2015 we decided to start estimating the relative value of the significant plan changes, so that we had a better sense of our overall impact. To do this, we now score each significant plan change with a value of 0.1, 1 or 10. The score is meant to represent how much extra counterfactual impact will result from a plan change.

A typical plan change scored 10 is someone who, in large part due to us, switched to working at a highly effective organisation like GiveWell, became a major donor (>$100k/year) to effective organisations, or become a major advocate of effective causes.

A typical plan change scored 1 is someone who has taken the Giving What We Can pledge or decided to earn to give in a medium income career. We also award 1s to people who want to work on the most pressing problems and who switch to build better career capital in order to do this, for instance doing quantitative grad studies or pursuing consulting; people who have become much more involved in the effective altruism community in a way that has changed their career, and people who switch into policy or research in pressing problem areas.

A typical plan change scored 0.1 is someone shifting to gain better career capital but where they’re less obviously focused on the most pressing problems, or where they’ve switched into an option that is less obviously higher impact than what they were planning before.

For brevity, in the remainder of this post, we’ll use the term ‘plan changes’ to refer to significant plan changes.

Number of plan changes

Our total number of plan changes as of the end of Dec 2015 is 453, and after impact-adjusting these it’s 606.6.

Here are our plan changes by year:

Here are the impact-adjusted plan changes by year, broken down by their scores:

Note that we only started collecting plan changes in 2013, but started outreach in 2011. This means the 2013 figures reflect three years of work rather than one, so our growth from 2013 to 2014 was better than it looks from this chart.

Our growth increased more in late 2015 than can be seen in the annual figures. Here is our growth by week (with plan changes we found out through our annual impact surveys amortised by week):

Causes of plan changes

We ask each person who reports a plan change “What was most significant in triggering these plan changes?”

In 2015, the most common causes of plan changes were reading our online content (42%), talking to someone in our community (20%) and one-on-one coaching (16%).

Compared with previous years, plan changes caused by online content have gone up, and the percentage of plan changes caused by our community and coaching have gone down.

The post Update on number of significant plan changes appeared first on 80,000 Hours.

Natural pandemics and new scientifically engineered pathogens could potentially kill millions or even billions of people. Moreover, future progress in synthetic biology is likely to increase the risk and severity of pandemics from engineered pathogens.

But there are promising paths to reducing these risks through regulating potentially dangerous research, improving early detection systems and developing better international emergency response plans.

In the profile we cover:

• The main reasons for and against thinking that biosecurity is a highly pressing problem.
• How to use your career to work on reducing the risks from pandemics.

Read our profile on biosecurity.

The post Why and how to use your career to work on biosecurity appeared first on 80,000 Hours.

50,000,000,000 animals are raised and slaughtered in factory farms globally each year. Most experience extreme levels of suffering over the course of their lives. But there are promising paths to improving the conditions of factory farmed animals and to reducing meat consumption.

In the profile we cover:

• The main reasons for and against thinking that factory farming is a highly pressing problem.
• How to use your career to work on ending factory farming.

Read our profile on factory farming.

The post Why and how to use your career to end factory farming appeared first on 80,000 Hours.

Many people assume stress is obviously bad, and lots of people tell us they want to find a “low stress job”. But a new book (and TED talk with over 10 million views) by psychologist Kelly McGonigal claims that stress is only bad if you think it is, and that stress can make us stronger, smarter and happier. So are most people wrong, or is stress only bad if you have the wrong attitude towards it?

We did a survey of the literature, and found that as is often the case, the truth lies in between. Stress can be good in some circumstances, but some of McGonigal’s claims also seem overblown.

In summary, whether work demands have good or bad effects seems to depend on the following things:

Source for social support.¹ Source for altruism.²

Our main conclusions are:

• The consensus among researchers seems to be that stress is good when it’s moderate in intensity (not too low or too high) and when it’s short-term, rather than on-going.
• Intense and on-going stress is strongly linked to poor health, including a weakened immune system, heart disease, depression and anxiety disorders, and higher chance of death.
• Some studies have found a correlation between negative health outcomes and believing that stress is bad for your health, but it is hard to draw causal conclusions from these findings. However, there is experimental evidence that reframing stress as an opportunity rather than as a threat leads to better performance and better cardiovascular health at least in the short term.
• Some studies suggest that people in higher responsibility positions, with greater job demands, have better health outcomes and are less stressed than people in lower responsibility positions. This may be because those in higher responsibility positions also tend to have greater autonomy, control and power.

Research process

We surveyed the literature to find out how stress is usually defined, the causes of work stress, the evidence for its positive and negative effects and what the most effective stress management interventions are. See the sources at the end of this post.

How is stress usually defined by scientists?

From Stress and Health: Psychological, Behavioral, and Biological Determinants (all emphases ours):

“A widely used definition of stressful situations is one in which the demands of the situation threaten to exceed the resources of the individual.”

The Transactional Model of Stress and Coping, emphases the role of subjective perception in stress:

“Stress can be thought of… as occurring when “pressure exceeds one’s perceived ability to cope.”

What is work related stress?

From the World Health Organisation:

“Work-related stress is the response people may have when presented with work demands and pressures that are not matched to their knowledge and abilities and which challenge their ability to cope.”

What’s the evidence stress is bad? Why do people think it is?

Intense and on-going stress is strongly linked to poor health, including a weakened immune system, heart disease, depression and anxiety disorders, and higher chance of death.

One review of the scientific literature on the effects of stress finds that intense and prolonged stress is linked to negative health outcomes —Stress and Health: Psychological, Behavioral, and Biological Determinants (emphasis ours):

“… if stressors are too strong and too persistent in individuals who are biologically vulnerable because of age, genetic, or constitutional factors, stressors may lead to disease. This is particularly the case if the person has few psychosocial resources and poor coping skills.”

This is quite a mature field of research, which includes controlled studies, animal studies, and many proposed causal models. For example:

“… in a more controlled study, people were exposed to a rhinovirus and then quarantined to control for exposure to other viruses (Cohen et al. 1991). Those individuals with the most stressful life events and highest levels of perceived stress and negative affect had the greatest probability of developing cold symptoms.”

Another review concludes the same thing — RAND – Stress and Performance: A Review of the Literature and Its Applicability to the Military:

“However, while exposure to some level of stressor may help individual performance, the long-term effects of stress on the individual tend to be negative, according to the majority of research looking at prolonged exposure to stress.”

It also cites evidence (Table 3.1) that some stressors lead to worse job performance, and that long-term exposure to stress leads to emotional exhaustion and burnout.

The US National Institute of Mental Health fact sheet on stress claims that chronic stress may lead to various health problems:

“People under chronic stress are prone to more frequent and severe viral infections, such as the flu or common cold, and vaccines, such as the flu shot, are less effective for them.”

“Over time, continued strain on your body from routine stress may lead to serious health problems, such as heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, depression, anxiety disorder, and other illnesses.”

The same is stated by the American Psychological Association (emphases ours):

“Chronic stress can affect both our physical and psychological well-being by causing a variety of problems including anxiety, insomnia, muscle pain, high blood pressure and a weakened immune system. Research shows that stress can contribute to the development of major illnesses, such as heart disease, depression and obesity.”

A systematic review and meta-analysis of studies on the association between stress and risk of stroke concluded that:

“Current evidence indicates that perceived psychosocial stress is independently associated with increased risk of stroke.”

Finally, looking specifically at work related stress, an overview of systematic reviews (which is above even a systematic review in the evidence hierarchy), focused on the question of whether work related stress leads to higher cardiovascular morbidity and mortality concluded that:

“This OSRev [Overview of Systematic Reviews] confirmed that work-related stress is an important social determinant of CV [Cardiovascular] diseases and mortality.”

What are some puzzles in the literature that suggest this simple picture is wrong?

Some studies suggest that people in higher responsibility positions, with greater job demands, have better health outcomes and are less stressed than people in lower responsibility positions. This may be because those in higher responsibility positions also tend to have greater autonomy, control and power.

One puzzle is that people with higher responsibility jobs, which you’d expect to be more stressful, have been found to have better health outcomes than those with lower responsibility jobs.

From Why you should stop sweating everyday aggravations and embrace the benefits of stress (emphases ours):

“In a series of classic studies in Britain, dubbed the Whitehall studies for the road in London where the government resides, researchers examined nearly 30,000 employees in the British civil service. All had secure jobs, livable wages and access to the same health care; they also worked within a precise hierarchy, with six levels of ranks. The researchers found that heart disease and mortality rates increased steeply with every step down the ladder. Those on the lower rungs tended to lead less healthy lives—they smoked more, for example—but even factoring in lifestyle differences, the lowest-ranking employees had twice the mortality rate of the highest-ranking individuals. The researchers attributed this disparity to the psychological stresses of low status and lack of control.”

The Whitehall studies did find that higher rank was correlated with higher job demands (0.32 in men and 0.40 in women), but it was also correlated with higher control over skill use, time allocation and organisational decisions (0.51 in men and 0.55 in women). Overall, the studies actually found that higher job demands³ (and low control to a lesser extent) were associated with higher risk of heart disease and mortality:

“People with high demands, and to a lesser extent, low control, are at increased risk for heart disease.”

It seems the negative effects of higher job demands in higher ranks were offset by the higher sense of control, but overall, higher job demands were still associated with higher risk of heart disease.

Another study found a similar result. From Why you should stop sweating everyday aggravations and embrace the benefits of stress (emphases ours):

“High-ranking individuals may have demanding jobs, but they also enjoy a greater sense of autonomy. In a study that appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences just before the 2012 presidential election, researchers found that a group of leaders—military officers and government officials—had lower resting cortisol and self-reported anxiety than a comparable group of nonleaders. This is despite the fact that leaders appeared more taxed: They slept significantly fewer hours per night than nonleaders. Among the leaders, those who managed more people and had more authority also had lower cortisol levels and lower anxiety than those with less clout, and this association was directly related to their greater sense of control.”

However, as the authors of this study themselves note, it could be that leaders had a predisposition to low stress levels and that’s what caused them to get into leadership positions in the first place (emphasis ours):

“It is important to note that the low stress levels of leaders may both cause and result from leadership. That is, individuals with low stress levels may be particularly well-suited for leadership and as a result, may select into leadership positions. Conversely, leadership roles may confer lower stress because of the psychological resources that they afford.”

Also, the authors argue that leadership positions are actually associated with lower levels of stress: “… we found clear evidence that leadership is associated with lower levels of stress”. Therefore this study isn’t a finding that stress is linked to positive health outcomes, instead it’s pointing out that leadership positions are associated with lower stress than other positions.

The authors’ favored explanation for this finding is that the higher demands of leaders are offset by higher levels of control – having a large number of subordinates that you have authority over – making it the case that leaders experience less stress than non-leaders:

“Leaders possess a particular psychological resource—a sense of control—that may buffer against stress.”

In sum, these studies suggest that the increased control and power that comes with higher responsibility positions offsets the negative effects of higher job demands.

Another interesting finding is that there is an association between the negative health effects of stress and believing that stress has negative health effects. Some studies have found a correlation between negative health outcomes and believing that stress is bad for your health, but it is hard to draw causal conclusions from these findings. However, there is experimental evidence that reframing stress as an opportunity rather than as a threat leads to better performance and better cardiovascular health at least in the short term.

From Why you should stop sweating everyday aggravations and embrace the benefits of stress (emphases ours):

“In the early 1990s, researchers surveyed 7,268 participants from one of the Whitehall cohorts about their current stress levels and their perceptions of the impact of stress on their health. Independent of job rank, initial health status or the level of stress reported, those who believed that stress had a large effect on their health had double the risk of suffering a heart attack within the 18-year follow-up period compared with those who viewed stress as being unrelated to their health. Similarly, in a large U.S. study, people with high stress levels had an elevated mortality rate only if they also believed that stress greatly affects health.”

However, psychologist Robert Epstein points out that this correlation can also be explained in another way:

“There is a simpler, less mysterious way of accounting for the results: people who experience stress but who suffer minimal ill effects from it come to believe that stress cannot hurt them, whereas people who do suffer ill effects come to believe that stress is harmful. Voilà, we now have the correlation those researchers found but with belief as an outcome rather than a cause.”

This is indeed what the authors of the large US study themselves say:

“In addition, reverse causality may partially explain the findings in this study. Adults who reported poor health may have been more likely to report that stress impacts their health simply due to their poor health status; moreover poor health status could also have influenced the amount of stress reported. The cross-sectional nature of these data precludes us from examining the direction of causality among the amount of stress, the perception that stress affects health, and health outcomes.”

However, there is some evidence that changing how people view stress can, at least in the short term, affect their physiological responses. From Why you should stop sweating everyday aggravations and embrace the benefits of stress (emphases ours):

“Additionally, how people view stress—as a threat versus an opportunity—can alter their physiologic responses to it. In a 2011 study at Harvard, volunteers were exposed to positive messages about stress—that it’s adaptive and aids performance—prior to a public speaking task. They had healthier cardiovascular profiles (their hearts pumped more efficiently and their blood vessels constricted less) during the stressor than controls who were given no information or were told to suppress stressful emotions. “This shows that you can change your moment-to-moment cardiovascular physiology depending on how you think about stress,” McGonigal says.”

This fits well with the large amount of evidence for the effectiveness of cognitive-behavioral therapy, whose slogan is that changing your beliefs about a situation changes the emotions you feel.

However, psychologist Robert Epstein warns against taking this positive view of stress too far:

“Although this strategy might work for some, there are still thousands of studies showing the ill effects of stress on the immune system, mood, the brain, sleep, sexual functioning, you name it. If some people feel and function better when we tell them stress is good, I’m all for it. But stress is still a killer.”

What’s the evidence that some types of ‘stress’ are good?

The consensus among researchers seems to be that stress is good when it’s moderate in intensity (not too low or too high) and when it’s acute, rather than chronic. Moderate and short-term stress at work is linked with better performance and higher job satisfaction.

The American Psychological Association sees the view that stress is always bad for you as a common myth:

Myth 2: Stress is always bad for you.
“According to this view, zero stress makes us happy and healthy. Wrong. “Stress is to the human condition what tension is to the violin string: too little and the music is dull and raspy”; too much and the music is shrill or the string snaps. Stress can be the kiss of death or the spice of life. The issue, really, is how to manage it. “Managed stress makes us productive and happy”; mismanaged stress hurts and even kills us.”

From Stress and Health: Psychological, Behavioral, and Biological Determinants (emphases ours):

“Acute stress responses in young, healthy individuals may be adaptive and typically do not impose a health burden. Indeed, individuals who are optimistic and have good coping responses may benefit from such experiences and do well dealing with chronic stressors (Garmezy 1991, Glanz & Johnson 1999).”

RAND – Stress and Performance: A Review of the Literature and Its Applicability to the Military (emphasis ours):

“Research also suggests that moderate levels of stress can have positive effects on job satisfaction and organizational commitment while reducing turnover intent. These findings seem to be an extension of the inverted-U-shaped relationship discussed previously. Under this hypothesis, at moderate levels of stress, individual performance and productivity are likely to be higher and can also contribute to higher job satisfaction and organizational commitment.”

The good, moderate level of stress is when the demands of a situation roughly match the abilities of the person to deal with them:

Under what circumstances is ‘stress’, that is, high demands, good or bad?

See the summary table at the top of this post.

How can stress best be managed?

A meta-analysis of occupational stress management interventions found that cognitive-behavioural interventions (CBT) are the most effective.⁴

A great book which outlines a self-help CBT program for stress and anxiety management is Overcoming Anxiety. Or you can get CBT online through Lantern.

You can also take the Epstein Stress Management Inventory for Individuals for free, which will tell you how well you manage stress in each of four skill areas. This can help you target which skills to improve.

Sources surveyed

1. American Psychological Association: Chronic Stress
2. American Psychological Association: Stress Myths
3. Booth, Joanne, et al. “Evidence of perceived psychosocial stress as a risk factor for stroke in adults: a meta-analysis.” BMC neurology 15.1 (2015): 1.
4. Epstein, Robert. “The Upside of Stress: Why Stress Is Good for You, and How to Get Good at It.” Scientific American Mind 26.4 (2015): 70-70.
5. Falk, Anders, et al. “Job strain and mortality in elderly men: social network, support, and influence as buffers.” American journal of Public health 82.8 (1992): 1136-1139.
6. Fishta, Alba, and Eva-Maria Backé. “Psychosocial stress at work and cardiovascular diseases: an overview of systematic reviews.” International archives of occupational and environmental health 88.8 (2015): 997-1014.
7. Fullagar, Clive J., Patrick A. Knight, and Heather S. Sovern. “Challenge/skill balance, flow, and performance anxiety.” Applied Psychology 62.2 (2013)
8. Johnson, Jeffrey V., and Ellen M. Hall. “Job strain, work place social support, and cardiovascular disease: a cross-sectional study of a random sample of the Swedish working population.” American journal of public health 78.10 (1988): 1336-1342.
9. Johnson, Jeffrey V., Ellen M. Hall, and Töres Theorell. “Combined effects of job strain and social isolation on cardiovascular disease morbidity and mortality in a random sample of the Swedish male working population.” Scandinavian journal of work, environment & health (1989): 271-279. Health1989;15:271–9.](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2772582)
10. Kavanagh, Jennifer. Stress and Performance A Review of the Literature and its Applicability to the Military. RAND CORP SANTA MONICA CA, 2005.
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12. Kuper, Hannah, and Michael Marmot. “Job strain, job demands, decision latitude, and risk of coronary heart disease within the Whitehall II study.”Journal of epidemiology and community health 57.2 (2003): 147-153.
13. McGonigal, Kelly. The upside of stress: Why stress is good for you, and how to get good at it. Penguin, 2015.
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20. US National Institute of Mental Health fact sheet on stress
21. World Health Organisation: Stress at the workplace

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What is the best career for someone whose main strengths are in visual design?

To start figuring that out we’ve released a new career review on web design.

Here’s a quick summary:

Pros

• Web designers can work on a broad range of high impact projects because they are in-demand across many types of organisations, including charities, governments and startups.
• As a backup, web designers can enter paths with good pay, like UX design ($80,000 median salary), and earn to give.

Cons

• Good design is hard to measure, which makes it hard to prove your abilities to potential employers, meaning entry and progression can be difficult.

Who should do it?

• You should consider web design if you studied graphic design or a related field; you’ve already spent several years developing web-design skills; and you are persuasive enable you to get a foot in the door when you’re starting out.
• However if you have the technical skills to do web development, we recommend you do that instead, since it wins over web design on most dimensions (salary, number of jobs, job growth rate, quality of work is easier to measure).

Read the full review.

Please comment with any important corrections or additions.

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You know how you should review your career at least once a year to make sure that you’re on the right path and set goals for the coming year?

You did that already, right?

Oh, no?

Well, in that case we’ve created a tool to make it quick and easy. Just answer the questions, and we’ll email you your answers when you’re done. There are only six key questions:

 
Once you’re done and have decided what steps to take, you can relax about your career trajectory for another 12 months!

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