How People Rate Pizza, Jobs and Relationships Is Surprisingly Predictive of Their Behavior

Scientific American | Oct 17, 2022

Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-people-rate-pizza-jobs-and-relationships-is-surprisingly-predictive-of-their-behavior/

Summary: Despite the ubiquitous presence of scales everywhere we look, these ratings perplex scientists because they are subjective and thought to be of unclear relevance and accuracy. As a result, scientists have been slow to take stock of these surveys. A new study published October 3 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has found that human feelings can accurately be expressed numerically and have more predictive power for how we behave than formal studies of socioeconomic factors like household income and employment status. "These ‘made up’ numbers actually carry a huge amount of information, even though we don’t know how humans achieve this,” says study co-author Andrew Oswald, a professor of economics and behavioral science at the University of Warwick. Oswald and colleagues gathered information from three large data sets of nearly 700,000 people in Germany, Australia, and the United Kingdom. The study has shown that numbers can quantify feelings, but researchers are still a bit perplexed as to why estimates of seemingly subjective feelings can be such good predictors of future actions. According to Oswald, a number of factors could be at play. Humans are well-versed in comparative thinking and have the ability to scale their own life satisfaction against that of their neighbors.

Fun Facts:

1. Participants that rated their job as a 2/7 were a 25% probability to quit their job next quarter

2. Previous research has shown that data about feelings predict human outcomes, but not in such a linear way

3. those that rated their lives lower had a higher chance of suicide over a 20 year period