Attitudes towards Existential Risk
Increasing humanity’s chance of flourishing by understanding how we reason about our future
This profile is tailored towards students studying psychology, however we expect there to be valuable open research questions that could be pursued by students in other disciplines.
Why is this a pressing problem?
Preserving humanity’s future might be one of the most critical moral issues of our time. However, one key bottleneck that limits all efforts trying to address existential risk is highly neglected: human psychology. To date, relatively little research directly addresses the question of how people reason about existential risk and the long-term future. Even though there is little direct research on the question, there is a wealth of relevant findings and theories in psychology, which can be applied to reasoning about existential risks and longtermism. Therefore, this area might be highly tractable. For more information listen to the podcast below on the topic.
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Researchers who have worked on this direction
Stefan Schubert (postdoc in moral psychology/experimental philosophy at LSE)
Lucius Caviola (postdoc in moral psychology at Harvard University)
Joshua Lewis (assistant professor in marketing at NYU)
Maximilian Maier (PhD in cognitive and decision-making psychology at UCL) together with Adam Harris (Associate Professor at UCL)
Samantha Kassirer (PhD candidate in management & organizations at Kellogg School, Northwestern University)
Abigail Novick Hoskin (PhD candidate in neuroscience at Princeton)
Geoffrey Goodwin (Associate Professor at University of Pennsylvania)
Matthew Coleman (PhD candidate at Northeastern University)
Contributors: This profile was last updated 26/10/2022. Thanks to Maximilian Maier for creating this profile. Learn more about how we create our profiles.
