Is big data the guide to making better life decisions? Can millions of data points on behavior replace your own intuition?
In his book Don’t Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz shows how big data can provide scientific answers about which life choices lead to better outcomes. He argues that you should rely on data rather than your intuition.
Keep reading to discover how numbers, not narratives or instincts, can help you make smarter choices.
Overview of Don’t Trust Your Gut
The normal state of human existence is to stumble blindly through life, making it up as we go along. From time to time, we turn to experts—philosophers, spiritual teachers, business leaders, and self-help gurus—for guidance on how to live our lives. While people have found all these paths useful to some degree, the overall results can be decidedly mixed. Clearly, no one’s figured out the formula to a happy, well-lived life. But what if all our technological progress has inadvertently created a tool to do just that?
In Don’t Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life, a book published in 2022, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz argues that, with the advent of “big data”—the vast amount of information now available on human behavior—we can scientifically analyze the outcomes of millions of people’s life decisions. Doing so gives us definitive answers to which of the many choices we make have the most impact on our careers, our love lives, and our happiness. Stephens-Davidowitz says that, instead of merely using big data to decide which ads to show customers or which videos to suggest on streaming platforms, we can use this information to make more informed decisions in our lives.
A self-proclaimed “data nerd,” Stephens-Davidowitz has degrees in philosophy and economics, has analyzed data for Google, and is the author of 2017’s Everybody Lies, which explains how search engine data reveals truths about human behavior. Whereas that book focused on big data’s unexpected insights, Don’t Trust Your Gut was inspired by Michael Lewis’s Moneyball (2003), which is about how the baseball team, the Oakland A’s, used data analysis to improve their performance. Stephens-Davidowitz suggests that the same strategy can be used by everyday people to improve their lives.
In this overview of the book Don’t Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life, we’ll explain the benefits of big data—how it can guide us and how it reveals that some decisions don’t really matter. We’ll lay out Stephens-Davidowitz’s case that making choices based on data can help improve your romantic life, your chances of success in your career, your effectiveness as a parent, and your overall happiness.
The Power of Numbers
The title—“don’t trust your gut”—speaks directly to Stephens-Davidowitz’s basic premise: namely, that hard data is a better guide to making decisions than human intuition. Let’s look at the reasoning behind this statement, where the data we might turn to comes from, and what that data says about the role of deliberate decision-making versus chance.
Stephens-Davidowitz’s case against intuition is twofold. First he points out that the human mind is riddled with cognitive biases and misleading mental shortcuts. We can’t help it—these errors spring from the mental shorthand our brains use to quickly process information, making “common sense” on the individual level and “conventional wisdom” when applied to society at large. And we’re not always wrong—but Stephens-Davidowitz proposes that common sense is wrong often enough that we shouldn’t fully trust it if we have a better option.
In addition to our untrustworthy instincts, we also frequently fall victim to misleading narratives. The most common trend that Stephens-Davidowitz points to is that society fixates on extraordinary stories to the point that they’re not seen as outliers. For example, consider the age-old cliché of the Hollywood star who’s “discovered” by chance while waiting tables in an LA restaurant. Such stories draw attention because they’re unusual. But, because we hear them more often than the more common experience of persistence and rejection, we begin to think of the “one-in-a-million” rise to Hollywood fame as the rule, not the exception.
If commonplace narratives can’t be trusted, where can we turn for accurate information? For individuals, there’s no quick and easy answer. But Stephens-Davidowitz says that, for data scientists studying the human condition, smartphones are a goldmine. Using anonymized smartphone usage statistics, combined with census and tax return data, modern researchers can use analytics to measure and correlate aspects of human behavior to an unprecedented degree. Data scientists can use trends in internet searches, app usage, online commerce, and travel patterns to determine which choices people make have the greatest positive and negative outcomes.
The Role of Dumb Luck
While statistics highlight the relative importance of various life decisions, Stephens-Davidowitz says big data also illustrates how random chance plays a role in achieving success. For instance, consider the world of popular music. An artist might spend years writing songs, performing them in clubs, and sending tracks to record labels without being noticed by the world at large. Then, at random, someone creates a TikTok video using one of the artist’s songs. Out of millions of clips, that video goes viral and the struggling musician is launched into stardom.
But does this mean that people who achieve success are just luckier than everyone else? Not so, says Stephens-Davidowitz. While individual luck is hard to measure, he points to data studies of the corporate world that reveal that the most successful businesses experience the same amount of good and bad luck as companies that don’t perform as well. What this means is that luck is useful only if you take advantage of it. According to Stephens-Davidowitz, luck is fairly evenly distributed. All it does is create opportunities; it’s up to you to grab them.
As we examine Stephens-Davidowitz’s advice, keep in mind that none of the choices he highlights—whether in your love life, your career, or elsewhere—provide a guarantee of success. What he suggests is that making certain choices tips the odds in your favor. Therefore, like the struggling musician above, you can’t take one chance in the hopes that you’ll succeed. Whether you’re going on dates, starting a business, or writing a hit single, you’ll have to try again and again until your lucky break comes along. Statistically, the more times you roll the dice, the greater the odds that you’ll eventually win.
The Numbers on Love
The first aspect of life that Stephens-Davidowitz puts under the data microscope—and one where the “try and try again” rule clearly applies—is the realm of romantic attraction, dating, and marriage. Information from online dating platforms paints a pretty clear picture of what people search for in romantic partners, some of which, such as personal appearance, are factors you can improve to raise your dating marketability. However, the attributes that make someone initially attractive don’t carry any statistical weight when it comes to maintaining a lifelong relationship.
The Data of Attraction
Stephens-Davidowitz summarizes online dating data thusly: Good looks are the most important factor, especially for women, while men’s attractiveness also depends on income and career. Drilling deeper into the numbers, he finds that, when trying to find a date online:
- Being traditionally attractive accounts for nearly a third of women’s successes at finding a match, but isn’t as important for men (though it still matters). What does count for men is height, with tall men receiving the bulk of romantic attention.
- Income is also a strong determinant of success, but is twice as important a factor for men than it is for women.
- Even more than income, men’s careers strongly determine their success at finding dates, with policemen, firemen, lawyers, and doctors having much more success than other professions. For women, career choice doesn’t seem to matter.
According to Stephens-Davidowitz, dating data also reveals significant racial bias in the romantic marketplace. In general, the numbers show that people seek partners within their own racial demographic. However, even when people try to cross racial lines, the statistics clearly demonstrate the levels of prejudice baked into society at large. In short, white men sending messages online have the highest odds of any demographic group at getting a favorable response. Black women, on the other hand, get fewer responses than any other group, which Stephens-Davidowitz says severely limits their online dating options.
Spruce Yourself Up—Scientifically
Not all of the factors listed above are things you can change to improve your luck at dating, but the most significant variable—your appearance—is something you can control. Several studies Stephens-Davidowitz cites show that physical appearance strongly affects how people perceive you in all aspects of life, not just romantically. Research on people’s perceptions of faces makes it clear that we form opinions about strangers within an instant based on nothing more than how they look. However, similar studies also reveal that people respond differently to images of the same individual if the lighting is altered, if they have a different hairstyle, if they’re wearing glasses, and a host of other factors. What matters, then, is finding the right look for you.
The problem is that most of us pick our “look” without being methodical about it. This is where Stephens-Davidowitz says you should adopt a data-driven approach to your appearance. For instance, you can take a picture of yourself and use an app to see what you’d look like if you grew a mustache, wore different makeup, or changed your hairstyle. Then, instead of choosing what you “feel” looks best, save images of all your potential styles and use them to get feedback. You might ask friends for their opinions. When Stephens-Davidowitz did this, he used online survey apps to poll strangers. In his case, he discovered that growing a beard and wearing glasses greatly improves the first impression he makes.
The Math of “Happy Ever After”
As much as the numbers tell us about how to attract a romantic partner, they also reveal what’s perhaps more important—the attributes that make potential partners attractive have no impact whatsoever on a relationship’s long-term success. Stephens-Davidowitz says that study after study shows no correlation between what you look for in a relationship and whether that relationship will last. Therefore, the person your gut says will make an ideal lifelong partner is nonsense. Judging solely by the criteria that the online dating studies measured, achieving a happy long-term relationship would seem to happen entirely at random—but it doesn’t.
When analyzing relationship longevity, what the data suggests is that we ask the wrong questions when seeking a life partner. According to Stephens-Davidowitz, the most important statistical factor in determining a relationship’s success is your psychological state. If you’re already happy with yourself, feel secure in your life, and look kindly toward others, you’re four times more likely to be “lucky in love” than someone who doesn’t, even if they outscore you on all the traditional measures of attraction.
From all this data on romantic love, Stephens-Davidowitz draws the following conclusions:
- Stop being shallow. Since conventional attraction means nothing when it comes to long-term happiness, you can increase your odds of finding the right person by widening your search parameters so your dates aren’t confined to the “type” you’re looking for.
- Be more selective about personality. Since people who are secure in themselves and thoughtful toward others tend to make the best partners, focus on looking for these qualities in the people you date to decide which relationships to pursue.
There’s no guarantee for romantic happiness, but Stephens-Davidowitz argues that taking the statistics of long-term love to heart can certainly improve your chances.
The Numbers on Success
Just as hard data can give you the tools to be rational in your pursuit of love, it also acts as a guide to financial success. According to Stephens-Davidowitz, researchers working with anonymized taxpayer data have determined that more than 80% of the richest people in the US are those who started a business. However the data also reveals that popular beliefs about entrepreneurship are wrong, that the road to wealth is long and boring, and that your odds of achieving runaway financial success are highly dependent on which field you enter.
The Real Entrepreneurs
Stephens-Davidowitz describes the popular myth of entrepreneurship this way: A brilliant young person drops out of college, starts a company in their parents’ garage, invents some genius product that industry insiders would never dream of, and becomes an overnight millionaire. This rarely happens, but when it does, the media latches on to it and milks it for every ounce of drama it’s worth. As a result, all we hear are stories of young, maverick business founders to the point that we believe they’re whom we should emulate.
Despite the myth of the young entrepreneur, the data tells a different story. Stephens-Davidowitz writes that, after crunching the numbers on nearly three million entrepreneurs, two facts stand out:
1. Your chances of being a successful business founder increase with age. Tax data shows that the average person behind a successful new business venture is well into their 40s. The young, daring entrepreneurs of legend are outliers, not the norm.
2. Your chances of success are double if you already have experience in your field. Like the value of youth, the premise that innovative business plans only come from outside an industry is bunk. For the most part, to have a groundbreaking idea, you have to know and understand what’s been tried before.
Therefore, Stephens-Davidowitz argues that big data’s message is clear: To increase your odds of business success, spend the time to fully master your field before trying to start your own company. This may sound obvious, but the more exciting (if spurious) narrative of entrepreneurship has permeated the business world to the point that we now have to back up common sense with hard numbers.
The Unromantic Side of Business
In addition to discussing age and experience, Stephens-Davidowitz highlights studies showing that certain categories of businesses produce the most wealth for individual owners—and unfortunately, they’re not very glamorous. To increase your odds of becoming rich through your business, you’ll want to focus on (in no particular order) car sales, market analysis, real estate, financial investing, and wholesale distribution. None of these are businesses that spark many people’s ambitions when they’re young. Nevertheless, these are the paths that statistically provide the most return on investment.
Beyond the numbers, Stephens-Davidowitz suggests that these profitable businesses share two things in common—they’re relatively immune to competitive price wars, and they’re in industries that aren’t monopolized by multinational giants. The reasons vary from industry to industry: Some are highly localized, some rely on specialized knowledge, and some have legal protections from competition. In each case, these businesses benefit from structural barriers that statistically decrease the odds of defeat by small-business Davids or corporate Goliaths. As much as you may dream of starting some other type of business that aligns with your passions, the data says that if you want wealth, this is the way to achieve it.
The Numbers on Raising Children
In addition to finding love and success, many people dream of starting a family. Yet, once they have children, many worry that they’re doing too much or too little to raise them right. However, Stephens-Davidowitz says that statistical studies on parenting methods reveal something unexpected—that most of the parenting choices people make have very little impact on their children’s development. Nevertheless, there are two exceptions that do have a measurable impact on children’s success as they grow up—where you choose to raise them and, if they have athletic aspirations, which sports you help steer them to.
The idea that parenting styles are unimportant might be hard for many people to believe. Yet, Stephens-Davidowitz states that, when looking at statistically significant numbers of children, big data research supports the strength of genetics in the “nature versus nurture” debate. To differentiate between inborn and environmental factors, scientists study identical twins who grow up apart and families with multiple adopted children (who are genetically dissimilar but share the same upbringing). The numbers reveal that the decisions parents make—from what to feed them, how much screen time they’re allowed, to how strict you are about their grades—have only a marginal impact on children’s success in adult life.
The Community Effect
However, the numbers reveal that one factor has an oversized effect on your children’s development—where they grow up. Not only does it matter what city you raise your child in, but researchers can now determine which individual neighborhoods are best for children. Of all the possible reasons, Stephens-Davidowitz argues that the most compelling is that, by choosing where your children are raised, you determine what adult role models they’re exposed to. For example, neighborhoods with many college graduates produce more children who go on to college. Some neighborhoods are better for low-income families—for instance, if they provide role models who succeed despite their financial struggles and are active in their communities.
In short, Stephens-Davidowitz argues that, as long as you’re making an honest effort as a parent, don’t stress about your day-to-day decisions. However, if you’re concerned about your children’s upward mobility, visit the Opportunity Atlas, which organizes neighborhood research into a guide to help you find where to best raise your children.
How to Pick a Sport
The other decision—which children often make themselves—that adults can nonetheless help to encourage is what sports they might choose to go into. Not all children aspire to be athletes. But, for those who do, Stephens-Davidowitz suggests that big data can help determine the most likely path to athletic success. Once again, the question comes down to nature versus nurture—or in this case, genetic predisposition versus the willingness to train and work hard. Does a person have to be a born athlete, or can they learn to be one through effort? The statistical answer turns out to be “it depends on the sport.”
Stephens-Davidowitz points to research that tracks different siblings’ athletic success. The numbers show that some sports require the right genes to reach the top, while others are open to anyone willing to learn. Basketball, running, and swimming favor certain genetic traits and body types that align with the mental skills needed for the game, whereas in baseball and football, the genetic factor is smaller. Studies of siblings who qualify for the Olympics reveal that diving, weightlifting, and horseback riding reward effort and training over natural talent more than any other sport. So, as a parent, if your child has aspirations but isn’t “built” for athletics, you might gently guide them to sports they might find more fulfilling.
But, what does it matter what sport a child goes into? Stephens-Davidowitz argues that professional aspirations notwithstanding, athletic scholarships open many doors to college education. If your child is willing to pursue such a path, a statistical analysis of college admissions reveals which sports offer the greatest opportunities. The most popular sports are, of course, very competitive, and the average high school athlete’s chances for a scholarship are low. However, several less obvious choices offer greater odds because the ratio of scholarships to applicants leans more heavily in a student’s favor. These include gymnastics, fencing, and hockey for boys, and rowing, horseback riding, and rugby for girls.
The Numbers on Being Happy
So far, all the parts of life we’ve covered—love, success, and parenting—reflect an even larger goal—the desire to simply be happy. Once again, Stephens-Davidowitz argues that big data can offer a guide to happiness by correlating what people do and how they feel on a massive scale. He finds that certain behaviors tend to bring us down while others objectively improve our spirits, suggesting that the path to happiness isn’t that complicated at all.
In this case, the data Stephens-Davidowitz refers to comes primarily from the Mappiness smartphone app, which prompted millions of willing participants to record their daily activities as well as their emotional states. The result was a gigantic pool of information that data scientists have been able to mine so they can answer, scientifically, how to be happy.
Why We’re Miserable
The reason we need data to tell us about happiness is that the human brain is notoriously bad at determining what will make us happy or not. Stephens-Davidowitz points to specific mental errors discovered by psychologist Daniel Kahneman that warp how we remember our emotions and thus how well we can predict them. The first is that our brains ignore how long an experience lasts, pleasant or otherwise. The other is known as the “peak-end rule,” which states that, when we look back on an event, we judge whether we were happy or not by how we felt at the most intense moment and how we felt at the end. As a result, our memories are skewed, so we need to look at data collected during happy and unhappy times as they happen.
What the numbers reveal is that we spend most of our time doing things that objectively make us unhappy, such as chores, driving to work, and worst of all, work itself. According to Stephens-Davidowitz, work ranks at the bottom of the happiness scale, with nothing but illness listed as more unpleasant. For most of us, work is a necessity, and one might argue it leads to happiness later because of the money you earn. However, the research Stephens-Davidowitz cites is clear that money’s effect on happiness is very slight—you’d have to increase your salary by a lot to increase your happiness even by a little.
Stephens-Davidowitz also explains that we’re often wrong about what types of recreation make us happy. In the Mappiness data, “relaxing” pastimes such as watching television, playing video games, and reading books produced fewer feelings of enjoyment than expected. Meanwhile, scrolling through social media produces a decidedly negative effect on happiness—Stephens-Davidowitz references one study that showed that the best way to benefit from social media is to quit it. Doing so improves your emotional state in a way that’s comparable to therapy.
How to Have a Good Time
Thankfully, there’s good news to go along with the bad. Analysis of the Mappiness data as well as other studies concur that there are clear and relatively direct ways to improve your overall happiness. In general, what the top-ranked happiness-boosting activities have in common is that they involve being active in some way, rather than passive forms of recreation.
1. Sexual intimacy easily tops the list of things that make people happier. Therefore, the data-driven methods Stephens-Davidowitz provides to empower you in your romantic life may arguably have the largest impact on your life satisfaction overall.
2. Cultural events and demonstrations, such as concerts, theater performances, and museum exhibits, are next on the happiness list. While these may not seem “active” at first glance, Stephens-Davidowitz points out that they all involve more deliberate engagement than staying home and staring at a screen.
3. Physical exercise and other active hobbies scored higher in the happiness data than study participants expected. Stephens-Davidowitz attributes this discrepancy to the energy cost these activities carry, but once you engage in them and afterward, your happiness undergoes a measurable boost.
4. Socializing with others boosts happiness, but with a certain caveat—not all social interactions are created equal. Stephens-Davidowitz explains that socializing’s effect on happiness depends on how strong your relationships are. Spending time with loved ones and friends gives you a stronger boost than interacting with strangers.
5. Being outdoors improves happiness, especially in conjunction with any other activity on this list.
Compounding Happiness
To make things even better, Stephens-Davidowitz argues that happiness is additive, so combining different pleasurable activities magnifies their impact. In other words, if attending a concert makes you happier, attending a concert with friends does even more. The Mappiness data backs up this argument by correlating people’s reported mental state with what they’re doing, where they are, and who they’re with. This compounding effect also helps alleviate situations that make you unhappy. For instance, being sick isn’t quite as terrible if you have a loved one with you giving support.
Stephens-Davidowitz concludes by suggesting that being satisfied with your life isn’t as hard as we often make it out to be. Happiness, after all, doesn’t come from dramatic but fleeting life events, achieving great success, or becoming really rich. According to the numbers, happiness comes from living an active life, finding things to do outdoors, and sharing our time with friends and those we love. While none of this is shocking news, he says, we have such a bad habit of looking for joy in the wrong places that we need data science to remind us of the truth.
