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Don't Trust Your Gut
Book

Don't Trust Your Gut

Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
Dey Street, 2022
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9

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You often hear advice like “Go with your gut.” But that’s a bad idea, according to researchers who investigated decisions people made on the basis of their instincts. Working with ample internet data, researchers delved into metric-based advice on pressing issues such as whom to date, how to dress, when to start a business, and how to raise kids. Their findings: People should learn to use data to improve their life prospects. In this eye-opening, entertaining book, data scientist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz explains how you can follow the data path. In his words, it’s “Moneyball for your life.”

Summary

Scientists can use internet data to analyze fundamental human endeavors. 

University of Chicago professor Alexander Todorov researched how much people’s faces influence their success. He and his colleagues collected photographs of political candidates and asked research subjects who did not know them to identify the most competent ones. On average, the subjects made their decisions within a second, picking the winning candidate about 70% of the time. 

People’s appearance helps determine their political success, and it correlates strongly with military success. Having a face that looks dominating increases your chances of military promotion. When Todorov and a collaborator asked people to gauge someone’s trustworthiness from different pictures of that person, minor variations in the photos prompted differences in the observers’ perceptions.

Insecure about his looks, author Seth Stephens-Davidowitz decided to use studies and tech tools as guides for taking action.

Instead of going with his gut or asking a few friends, Stephens-Davidowitz downloaded FaceApp, an application that uses AI to alter pictures. ...

About the Author

Data scientist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz’s earlier book, Everybody Lies, was a New York Times bestseller and an Economist Book of the Year.

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