During the second half of the UCLA Winter quarter (February to March, 2025), the Effective Altruism group at UCLA and the Rational Altruism Lab co-hosted a 5-week journal club focused on moral psychology, with particular attention to the theme of moral circle expansion. The club was designed to help students and researchers explore recent work in the psychology of effective altruism while fostering reflection, structured discussions, and collaborative learning. We hope this write-up helps guide others into running something similar, or, gives a window into one possible format for a low-cost, intellectually energizing reading group.

Why we ran it

We frequently run into the problem of reading an exciting paper, have scattered thoughts about it, and then… do nothing with those thoughts. We wanted to create a space to process these papers more deliberately, test and develop our views, and build shared content for possible future projects – especially around the topics of the moral circle, moral learning, and how people come to foster and adopt altruistic values.

Key features of our format

The contents of our discussions were drawn from a curated list of readings prepared by members of the Rational Altruism Lab. Each week, one participant would write a 2-3 page summary of a paper which everyone would read and comment on in the session. Then, we would go through the comments and have a lively discussion on each person’s contribution. Our format was simple, but we boiled it down to seven key features which we reproduce below.

🗓️ Weekly meetings. We met once a week for an hour, and covered one paper per session from a curated reading list. The list was put together by the Rational Altruism Lab and included papers about the role of physical and social distance in shaping moral obligations, competing forces in determining moral circle expansion versus contraction, developmental differences in treatments of humans and animals, as well as familial obligations in impacting moral judgments and decisions (see the references list at the end of this post).

🔄 Rotating moderators with summaries. Each paper had an assigned moderator who summarized the reading in a document of about 2 to 3 pages and led the discussion. To help lower the barrier to writing, we suggested the use of ChatGPT to draft these summary documents, however, we did expect the moderators to personally read the paper, edit and critically engage with the GPT summary before sharing it.

⏰ Structured time for reading and discussion. We divided the hour into a few guiding segments. The initial five minutes were for settling in, and any announcements. The next 15-20 minutes were absolute silence during which everyone read and commented directly on the Google document that the moderator prepared. By the end of this, the moderator would take charge in the next half hour or so to pull from participants’ comments and lead the discussion. At the end, we would wrap up and get a volunteer for the next reading.

🤫 Silence was part of the plan. One unique element was building in 15-20 minutes of intentional silence at the start of each session. Participants read or re-read the summary document and added comments to the shared document. It was a little awkward at first, but became one of the best parts of the format – it gave people the time and space to think deeply and reflect before the discussion began.

❓Framing questions. Each session opened with a set of recurring questions, such as:

• What predictions are made?
• What are the main results?
• How do these findings relate to expanding or contracting the moral circle?

Moderators were at liberty to add further discussion questions they would have thought about in advance. Importantly, all of the framing questions were there to maintain some structure to an expanding open-ended debate.

🌟 Respectful disagreement encouraged. Everyone was encouraged to speak, but no one dominated. We emphasized thoughtful engagement, comfort with silence, and respect for different viewpoints.

🤗 Hybrid and inclusive. We ran the club in a hybrid format. Some participants joined in person, others via Zoom. The setup worked fine, we made sure that everyone joined the Zoom link (including the in-person attendees), had one of the in-person attendees unmute themselves while everyone else had their microphones muted and silenced their speakers. The hybrid format allowed us to include people from different departments and schedules.

What did we learn?

This format worked well for our goals, but we hope to keep iterating on it and brainstorm potential areas and mechanisms for improvements. Some takeaways:

• Giving people space to write before speaking helped improve the quality of discussion and ensure that everyone was at an acceptable baseline level of knowledge of the paper.
• Having a prepared deliverable (the summaries) helped people show up without the pressure to fully read the paper in advance.
• Hybrid journal clubs can work with some planning, e.g., centralized documents, moderation.

Next steps

We are currently expanding our list of readings on the topic, which we eventually hope to transform into a mini literature review. If you’re running a similar club – or thinking about it – we would love to hear from you or exchange notes. Feel free to borrow our format and adapt it to your needs.

Oh, and in case you’re at UCLA or nearby, we’re planning on having another club this Spring. Feel free to reach out if you’d like to join or co-host!

Our Winter Quarter reading list