Cause Neutrality: Why Being Open-Minded Can Boost Your Career Impact

Cause neutrality is the effort to remain impartial and open-minded when deciding which causes to prioritize. While true neutrality is difficult, supporters of cause neutrality aim to avoid getting attached to “pet causes” or limiting themselves to a narrow field. Instead, they focus on exploring a broad range of causes and choosing based on what will create the most impact, rather than personal preference or irrelevant considerations.

How to prioritize limited resources

When trying to help others (using our career or otherwise), the cause area we choose to work on can have a profound effect on what we can achieve. By cause area we mean, broadly, what goal we are working towards—whether it’s trying to eliminate hunger, reduce the burden of disease, prevent future pandemics, improve the pace of scientific research, mitigate climate change, or something else.

Even when applying the same resources, skill, or effort, there can be differences of a hundredfold or more in the scale or likelihood of your success, depending on how and where those resources are applied.

Choosing a cause area

For example, you’d likely have far greater impact if you spend your time working on an important political advocacy campaign than you would by volunteering at a popular animal shelter.

Because of this difference, those who want to help others and are not already committed to a specific cause area (due to existing skills or preferences) might ask themselves, how should I choose which cause area to work on?

Cause neutrality is the view that when comparing potential causes to work on, we should make the decision based primarily on how much impact that cause area would allow you to have. One approach for trying to compare different cause areas impartially is the Importance, Tractability, and Neglectedness framework, which tries to evaluate causes according to how big the problem is, how easy it is to solve, and how much attention it currently receives.

Avoiding Bias in Decision-Making

Different people prioritize different things, so deciding what’s an “impartial” comparison isn’t always clear-cut. However, advocates of cause neutrality emphasize avoiding obvious biases that could limit your potential for impact.

For example, it’s easy to become attached to the first cause you’re exposed to or to choose one based on a personal story that moved you. We also tend to favor people geographically and culturally similar to us. But these biases can lead us away from the most effective causes in terms of real-world impact. Instead, cause neutrality encourages us to stay open and explore the best opportunities for creating the greatest change.

Personal fit

Note that these considerations are distinct from personal fit; even under a fully cause neutral approach, there are strong reasons to take into account relevant skills or circumstances that might enable you to have more impact working in one cause or another. This can include prior experience, skills and even personal motivation.

Opportunities

Finally, it’s worth pointing out that even though choosing what cause area to work on is an incredibly important decision, this doesn’t mean you should always choose a cause area first and look for concrete opportunities later. As we mention in our career guide, we think it’s often useful to keep in consideration several cause areas that are good candidates for enormous impact, and compare the concrete opportunities you find within them.