EA - Effective altruism as a lifestyle movement (A Master’s Thesis) by Ada-Maaria Hyvärinen

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Effective altruism as a lifestyle movement (A Master’s Thesis), published by Ada-Maaria Hyvärinen on November 6, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Earlier this year, Jemina Mikkonen published her Master’s Thesis in Sociology on the topic of “Effective altruism as a lifestyle movement”. For her research, she interviewed 8 persons who were or had been involved in effective altruism through the university/city group Effective Altruism Helsinki. The purpose of the study was to find out if EA is a lifestyle movement as defined by Haenfler, Johnson, Jones (2012). Mikkonen concluded it is.If you understand Finnish, you can read the whole thesis here. Since the contents of the thesis might be of interest to non-Finnish-speakers as well, I will summarize her key points in this post. To my understanding, the thesis received the grade “good”, so the research is not exceptionally well done, but should fill the expected function of a thesis. Reading these findings you should keep in mind that this work was done by a student, not by an experienced researcher.To my knowledge this is the only time anyone has conducted sociology research on an EA group. Mikkonen could not find previous research on EA groups specifically, making it her main motivation to choose EA as a thesis topic. Mikkonen is not involved in EA, but followed the EA Helsinki Telegram chat for a while and participated in one online meetup for the purposes of her study.According to Mikkonen, EA is a lifestyle movementThe concept of a lifestyle movement was developed by Haenfler, Johnson, Jones (2012). Lifestyle movements are loosely organized or non-organized movements that aim for social change primarily by the means of individual lifestyle choices. They are different from “traditional” social movements that have an external focus, aim for collective (often political) action and have some degree of organization. They define lifestyle movements by the following characteristics:individual (as opposed to collective) action: participation occurs primarily at the individual level with the subjective understanding that others are taking similar action, collectively adding up to social changeprivate and ongoing action: participation occurs in daily life (so its not public and not episodic)action is understood as an effort towards social change (so it is not for example exclusively done as self-help or religious exploration)personal identity is a site of social change: adherents engage in identity work, focusing particularly on cultivating a morally coherent, personally meaningful identity in the context of a collective identityMikkonen found that EA satisfied this definition in the following way:Action is individual: the interviewees felt their impact comes from personal choices, such as donating and studying to later build an EA aligned careerEA is present in daily life: study and work are methods of doing good, donating influences finances and participants use their free time to learn more about EAAction is done for social change: Mikkonen noted that EA stands out from other lifestyle movements in the sense that in EA, actions are never taken just for the sake of participating in the movement, but they are always tied to the end goal of having an impactIdentity work: Usually, members of a social movement can see their actions as a sign of moral virtue, and taking action helps them keep up with the idea of themselves as a good person. However, in Mikkonen’s interviews nobody seemed to get this feeling out of EA. But many people described having experienced pressure to follow EA principles, and emphasized that they were “just ordinary people”, which Mikkonen interpreted as a way of coping with the high standards of EA. According to her, EA can act as a way of avoiding the identity of an immoral person, rathe...