There is (sometimes) such a thing as a free lunch

You live in a world where most people, most of the time, think of things as categorical, rather than continuous. People either agree with you or they don’t. Food is healthy or unhealthy. Your career is ‘good for the world,’ or it’s neutral, or maybe even it’s bad — but it’s only the category that matters, not the size of the benefit or harm. Ideas are wrong, or they are right. Predictions end up confirmed or falsified.

In my view, one of the central ideas of effective altruism is the realisation that ‘doing good’ is not such a binary. That as well as it mattering that we help others at all, it matters how much we help. That helping more is better than helping less, and helping a lot more is a lot better.

For me, this is also a useful framing for thinking rationally. Here, rather than ‘goodness,’ the continuous quantity is truth. The central realisation is that ideas are not simply true or false; they are all flawed attempts to model reality, and just how flawed is up for grabs. If we’re wrong, our response should not be to give up, but to try to be less wrong.

When you realise something is continuous that most people are treating as binary, this is a good indication that you’re in a situation where it’s unusually easy to achieve something you care about. Because if most people don’t see huge differences between options that you do, you can concentrate on the very best options and face little competition from others.

Sometimes the converse is also true: people may treat something as continuous, and work hard at it, despite the returns to working harder actually being very small.

An example that sticks in my mind from my time teaching maths is about how neatly work is presented. Lots of people care about neat work or good presentation, and sometimes there’s a very good reason for this. If work is messy enough that it’s difficult to read, or that the student is making mistakes caused by misreading their own writing, this is important to fix!

The problem is, the returns on neatness suddenly drop off a cliff when the work is clear enough to be easily readable, and yet some students will put huge amounts of effort into making their work look not just clear, but unnecessarily neat.

Worse still, some teachers will praise this additional effort, implying it’s a good thing that someone takes three times as long as they need to on every piece of work just to make it look nice. But it’s usually¹ not — that extra time could be used for learning, or just hanging out with friends!

I remember speaking to some students who were struggling with their workload, only to discover that they were doing each piece of work twice: once to get the maths, and another to copy everything out beautifully to hand in. It broke my heart.

Even when it’s fairly normal to try really hard at something, it’s worth checking that more effort is reliably leading to more of what you care about. That is to say, there are some things you should half-ass with everything you’ve got.

Thinking about these ideas as I tried to help my students — and now as I try to help the people I advise — I’ve noticed two ideas that frequently appear in the advice I give.

1. Try optimising for something.
2. Know what you’re optimising for.

In the rest of this article, I describe how I think about applying these two ideas, and the sort of mistakes that I hope they can prevent. I include lots of examples, and most of these are linked to career decisions inspired by real conversations I’ve had, though none were written with a specific person in mind, and all of the names are made up.

I also try to include some more abstract mathematical intuition, made (hopefully) clearer with the addition of some pretty graphs.

At the end of the article, I try to think of ways in which the advice might not apply or be misleading, though you may well generate others as you read, and trying to do so seems like a useful exercise.

Idea #1: Consider optimising for something

You are allowed to try really hard to achieve a thing you care about, even when it’s a thing not that many people try hard to achieve — in some ways, especially in those cases. You don’t have to stop at ‘enough,’ or even at ‘lots’ — you can keep going. You can add More Dakka.

The thought of trying really hard at something feels very natural to some people, including many who I expect might find useful ideas in the rest of the article. But to many others, it feels gross, or unnatural, or in some way ‘not allowed’ — ‘tryhard’ is a term some people even use to insult others! It’s for this last reason that I framed this idea in terms of permission — I don’t think you need it, but if you found the idea off-putting, now you have permission to do it anyways.

Idea #2: Know what you’re optimising for

This idea is about being deliberate in what you’re trying hard to achieve. It’s about trying to ensure that the subject of the majority of your effort is in fact the most important thing. In some sense, like optimising at all, it’s about permission: knowing that you are allowed to realise that one thing is much more important for you to get than all of the others, and trying to get it (even if it’s not the typical thing people want).

Know what you’re optimising for is also, I suspect, often about picking only one thing at a time, even if multiple things are important. Even in cases where picking one thing doesn’t seem best, asking the question “Which one thing should I optimise for?” seems like it might produce useful insights.

People often optimise for the wrong thing

I first saw people repeatedly optimising for the wrong thing when I was teaching. Students care about many things, from status among their peers to getting good enough grades for university. Many of these things are directly rewarded by people that students interact with: parents will praise good grades; other students will let you know what they think of you; and some teachers will be fairly transparent about who they think the smart kids are (even if they try to hide it).

Importantly, though several of these things are correlated with learning, none of them are perfect indicators of actually learning. Even though most people agree to some extent that one of the major purposes of school is learning, learning has a really weak reward signal, and it’s easy to drift through school without really trying to learn.

There’s a difference between doing things that are somewhat correlated with things you want (or even doing things that you expect to lead to things you want), and trying really unusually hard to actually get what you want. Sometimes working out what you actually want can be really hard — for many, working out what one ultimately values can be a lifetime’s work. However, I’ve been frequently surprised, during my time as an advisor, by how often it’s been sufficient to just ask:

It looks like you’re trying to achieve X here. Is X really the thing you want?

The mistake of optimising for not quite the thing you want can be particularly easy to miss if the thing is useful in general, but in this instance is not useful for you. For one thing, it’s hard to internally notice without specifically looking for it. But you’re also less likely to have others point out this mistake, because things that are useful in general seem more ‘normal’ to have as a goal. For instance, appearing high status seems pretty useful, and it’s a goal that many people have to some extent, so who’s going to stop and ask you whether you really endorse playing as many status games as you are?

Perhaps a more relevant example is that I often see (usually young) effective altruists optimising for impact per unit of time, rather than for the total impact they expect to have over their career. They ask themselves what the most impactful thing they can do right now is, and then do that. This often works well, and there are many worse heuristics to use. Unfortunately, it’s not always the case that trying to do the very best thing right now puts you in the best position to do the most good overall.

People seem to accept this when it comes to going to university. Choosing to do an undergraduate degree is to some extent like choosing to take a negative salary job — which usually doesn’t produce any useful output to others — purely to learn a lot and set yourself up well to achieve things later. For many people, this is a great idea! But then something strange happens when people graduate. For an altruist, taking a role in a for-profit company where you’ll gain a whole bunch of useful skills can look very unattractive, as you won’t be having any direct impact. Taking a salary hit for an opportunity to learn a ton also doesn’t look good (that is, unless the opportunity is called ‘grad school,’ in which case it looks fine again). Neither of these strategies are necessarily best, but they are at least worth considering! The lost impact or salary at the outset might be made up for many times over if you’re able to access more impactful opportunities later.

The law of equal and opposite advice applies in many places, and this is one of them. Just as you might make the mistake of under-investing in yourself, you can also stay in the ‘building up to have a big impact later’ phase for too long. Someone I advised not too long ago referred to themself as “an option value addict,” which I thought was a great way to frame this idea. While the idea of option value — that it can be useful to preserve your ability to choose something later — is a really valuable one, it’s only valuable to keep options that you actually have some chance of choosing. The smaller the chance that you ever take a particular option, the less valuable it is to preserve it — so thinking about how likely you personally are to use it ends up being important.

For example, it might be worthwhile for some people to keep an extremely low profile on all forms of social media in case a spicy social media presence prevents them from later working for an intelligence agency or running for office. But if you have absolutely no intention of ever working in government, this reason doesn’t apply to you! (There are, of course, other reasons one might want to limit social media exposure.)

Trying to optimise for too many things can lead to optimising for nothing in particular

As well as optimising for the wrong things, I often speak to people who are shooting for too many things at once. This typically plays out in one of two ways:

• People try to optimise for so many things that they don’t end up making progress on any.
• People just don’t optimise at all — because when so many things seem important, where do you even start?

In both cases, this often ends up with people trying to find an option that looks at least kind-of good according to multiple different criteria. Doing well on many uncorrelated criteria is pretty hard.² This often leads to only one option being considered… and that option not looking great.

What might this look like?

The examples below have been inspired by conversations I’ve had. Each involves a hypothetical person describing an option which seems pretty good. It might even be the best option they have. But all of these pretty good options follow the pattern of ‘this thing looks good for many different reasons’ — and ‘looks good for many reasons’ misses the importance of scale: that doing much, much better in one way is often better than doing a little better in several ways at the same time. The people in the examples would benefit from considering what their decision would look like if they picked one source of value, and tried to get as much of that as possible.

When facing a situation with multiple potential sources of value, you might be able to get outsized gains by just pushing really hard on one of them. In particular, it’s possible to get gains so big that they more than outweigh losses elsewhere.

It’s not always the case that you can completely trade off different good things against each other — many people, for example, want to have at least some interest in their work. But it is sometimes the case, and it’s worth noticing when you’re in one of those situations. In particular, if the different good things you’re achieving are all roughly described as ‘positive effects on the world,’ you can estimate the size of the effects and see how they trade off against each other. What matters is that you’re doing good, not how you’re doing it. Of course, be careful not to take that last part too far.

The ‘alternative framings’ in the examples above all replace optimising for nothing in particular with just optimising for one thing. The other things either got dropped entirely, or were only satisficed,³ rather than optimised for. This isn’t an accident. Picking one thing forces you to be deliberate about which thing you shoot for, and it makes it seem possible to actually optimise. I think those benefits alone are enough to at least consider just picking one thing.

But I actually suspect that something even stronger is true: often just having a single goal is best.

The intuition here is that when you value things differently to the population average, your best options are likely to be skewed towards the things you care relatively more about. Markets are fairly efficient for average preferences, but when your preferences are different to the average, you might find big inefficiencies. For example, if you’re househunting and you absolutely love cooking but never work from home, it’s worth looking for places that have unusually big kitchens compared to the size of the other rooms. Most people are willing to pay more for bigger rooms, or a home office — if you don’t need those things, don’t pay for them!

Let’s sketch some graphs to try to see what’s going on here. Consider the case where you care about two things — let’s say salary and interestingness. (Often you’ll care about more than two things, but 2D plots are easier to sketch, and I suspect that the effect I sketch below is even stronger in higher dimensions.) You might expect the job market to look something like Figure 1:

Let’s assume that the average person cares equally about salary and interestingness, and rates them by just adding up the two scores. When this is the case, we should expect that higher-salaried jobs that are more interesting will be harder to get.

In Figure 2, I’ve colour coded easy jobs to get as black/purple and harder jobs to get as orange/yellow below. But what if I care much more about my job being interesting than it paying well? In this case, the best jobs for me won’t be quite the same as the hardest for me to get. I’ve shown this preference in Figure 3 by colour coding a different plot from bright yellow (perfect for me) to dark purple (terrible for me). I assumed that I still cared about salary, but that interest was three times as important — so to rank the jobs, I multiplied the interest score by three before adding salary.

I want to look for jobs that are easier for me to get (darker on Figure 2), and that I’ll actually want (lighter on Figure 3). The easiest jobs for me to get are in the bottom left, which doesn’t help much, as I don’t want these. The jobs I want most are in the top right, which also doesn’t help much as these are hardest to get. If my theory is correct, I should get the best tradeoffs between these two things by focusing hard on the thing I care more about than average (interest), while not worrying as much about the thing I care less about than average (salary). This would tell me to look first in the bottom right of the graph.

It’s a little hard to tell from just these two figures exactly how well the theory is doing, so let’s make things a bit easier to see in Figure 4 below. First, I removed the top 10% most popular jobs among the general public, to represent some jobs being competitive enough to not even be worth trying. I then also removed the bottom 50% of the jobs according to my preferences, to represent wanting to look for something better than average. Both of these cutoffs are arbitrary, but the conclusion doesn’t change when you pick different ones.

As expected, the best-looking options I’ll actually be able to get look like very interesting, low-salary jobs.

In practice, all of the tradeoffs above will be much less clean. Preferences about different options probably shouldn’t be linear, for example, certainly not in the case of salary. Despite all this, the conclusion remains that if your preferences are in some way different from the average, some of the best places to look to exploit the differences are the extremes.

When do I expect this not to apply?

Multiplicative factors

In the sorts of situations I describe above, the total value tends to come from the values from each different consideration being added up: my job being interesting makes me a bit happier, and so does being paid more; donating money to effective charities saves lives, and so does working for one of those charities. In these cases, less of one thing pretty directly gets traded for more of another. Even in these cases, it can still be worth getting to some minimum level,³ if you get most of the gains from getting to that level and/or it’s easy.

Sometimes though, success looks more like a bunch of factors multiplied together than a bunch of things added together. When this is the case, it becomes really important that none of those factors end up getting set too low, which can be catastrophic.

In my view, the most important example of something that can be a multiplier on everything else you’re doing is personal health and wellbeing, especially when it is in danger of dropping below a certain level. Burnout is already a big risk when you’re optimising for doing as much as possible to help, especially among people who really care about others. In fact, one of my biggest concerns in writing this piece is that it might make this risk higher.

In some sense, we can frame this problem as a mistake of optimising for the wrong thing: impact right now instead of impact over the long run. But on this topic, the thing I care most about is not what it says about optimisation — I care most that you take care of yourself as your number one priority. These resources provide useful perspectives on this risk, as well as some ideas for how to reduce it:

• I burnt out at EAG. Let’s talk about it
• Aiming for the minimum of self-care is dangerous
• Podcast: Having a successful career with depression, anxiety, and imposter syndrome (and also see the links in the show notes for this episode)

Very good might be good enough

You’ll often find that as you keep trying to push the envelope further, it gets harder and harder to make progress. At some point then, even after you’ve seen substantial gains from deciding to optimise at all, you may reach a point where effort on the most important thing is going to pay off less than effort on something else.

This might happen because there are fewer and fewer people who you can learn from. It could be that you are in fact now making much fewer mistakes in your efforts, and the fewer mistakes you make, the harder it is to catch and eliminate them. Maybe it’s just that you’re starting to enter the domain of people who are really trying, and competition is heating up. Whatever the reason is, there’s a chance that this is the time to pick a second thing, and push on that too. In particular, when it comes to personal skill development, not only can it be easier to get extremely good at two things than truly world-class at one, in this case your skill set might look quite special.

Next steps

People who know what they are optimising for might ask themselves things like:

• Is what I’m trying to achieve in this situation the right thing?
• Am I trying to achieve multiple things at once? Is that the best strategy?
• Does the thing I’m trying to achieve actually lead to something I want?
• What would it look like if I focused on the most important thing and dropped the others?

It might be worth thinking about some aspect of your life, and ask yourself those questions now. Did one work particularly well, or can you think of an alternative question that works better for you?

After reading this article, you may well think that this kind of mindset isn’t well-suited to the way you think. If that’s the case, that’s fine! Hopefully you now at least have a different perspective you can look at some decisions with. Even if it seems unlikely you’ll use it often, it might shed some light on decisions made by people like me.

The post Know what you’re optimising for appeared first on 80,000 Hours.

I sped up the recording so it is quick to listen to:

Summary of the interview

The post Maria Gutierrez on doing good through art, Costa Rica and why 80,000 Hours changed her career appeared first on 80,000 Hours.

Many people assume stress is obviously bad, and lots of people tell us they want to find a “low stress job”. But a new book (and TED talk with over 10 million views) by psychologist Kelly McGonigal claims that stress is only bad if you think it is, and that stress can make us stronger, smarter and happier. So are most people wrong, or is stress only bad if you have the wrong attitude towards it?

We did a survey of the literature, and found that as is often the case, the truth lies in between. Stress can be good in some circumstances, but some of McGonigal’s claims also seem overblown.

In summary, whether work demands have good or bad effects seems to depend on the following things:

Source for social support.¹ Source for altruism.²

Our main conclusions are:

• The consensus among researchers seems to be that stress is good when it’s moderate in intensity (not too low or too high) and when it’s short-term, rather than on-going.
• Intense and on-going stress is strongly linked to poor health, including a weakened immune system, heart disease, depression and anxiety disorders, and higher chance of death.
• Some studies have found a correlation between negative health outcomes and believing that stress is bad for your health, but it is hard to draw causal conclusions from these findings. However, there is experimental evidence that reframing stress as an opportunity rather than as a threat leads to better performance and better cardiovascular health at least in the short term.
• Some studies suggest that people in higher responsibility positions, with greater job demands, have better health outcomes and are less stressed than people in lower responsibility positions. This may be because those in higher responsibility positions also tend to have greater autonomy, control and power.

Research process

We surveyed the literature to find out how stress is usually defined, the causes of work stress, the evidence for its positive and negative effects and what the most effective stress management interventions are. See the sources at the end of this post.

How is stress usually defined by scientists?

From Stress and Health: Psychological, Behavioral, and Biological Determinants (all emphases ours):

“A widely used definition of stressful situations is one in which the demands of the situation threaten to exceed the resources of the individual.”

The Transactional Model of Stress and Coping, emphases the role of subjective perception in stress:

“Stress can be thought of… as occurring when “pressure exceeds one’s perceived ability to cope.”

What is work related stress?

From the World Health Organisation:

“Work-related stress is the response people may have when presented with work demands and pressures that are not matched to their knowledge and abilities and which challenge their ability to cope.”

What’s the evidence stress is bad? Why do people think it is?

Intense and on-going stress is strongly linked to poor health, including a weakened immune system, heart disease, depression and anxiety disorders, and higher chance of death.

One review of the scientific literature on the effects of stress finds that intense and prolonged stress is linked to negative health outcomes —Stress and Health: Psychological, Behavioral, and Biological Determinants (emphasis ours):

“… if stressors are too strong and too persistent in individuals who are biologically vulnerable because of age, genetic, or constitutional factors, stressors may lead to disease. This is particularly the case if the person has few psychosocial resources and poor coping skills.”

This is quite a mature field of research, which includes controlled studies, animal studies, and many proposed causal models. For example:

“… in a more controlled study, people were exposed to a rhinovirus and then quarantined to control for exposure to other viruses (Cohen et al. 1991). Those individuals with the most stressful life events and highest levels of perceived stress and negative affect had the greatest probability of developing cold symptoms.”

Another review concludes the same thing — RAND – Stress and Performance: A Review of the Literature and Its Applicability to the Military:

“However, while exposure to some level of stressor may help individual performance, the long-term effects of stress on the individual tend to be negative, according to the majority of research looking at prolonged exposure to stress.”

It also cites evidence (Table 3.1) that some stressors lead to worse job performance, and that long-term exposure to stress leads to emotional exhaustion and burnout.

The US National Institute of Mental Health fact sheet on stress claims that chronic stress may lead to various health problems:

“People under chronic stress are prone to more frequent and severe viral infections, such as the flu or common cold, and vaccines, such as the flu shot, are less effective for them.”

“Over time, continued strain on your body from routine stress may lead to serious health problems, such as heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, depression, anxiety disorder, and other illnesses.”

The same is stated by the American Psychological Association (emphases ours):

“Chronic stress can affect both our physical and psychological well-being by causing a variety of problems including anxiety, insomnia, muscle pain, high blood pressure and a weakened immune system. Research shows that stress can contribute to the development of major illnesses, such as heart disease, depression and obesity.”

A systematic review and meta-analysis of studies on the association between stress and risk of stroke concluded that:

“Current evidence indicates that perceived psychosocial stress is independently associated with increased risk of stroke.”

Finally, looking specifically at work related stress, an overview of systematic reviews (which is above even a systematic review in the evidence hierarchy), focused on the question of whether work related stress leads to higher cardiovascular morbidity and mortality concluded that:

“This OSRev [Overview of Systematic Reviews] confirmed that work-related stress is an important social determinant of CV [Cardiovascular] diseases and mortality.”

What are some puzzles in the literature that suggest this simple picture is wrong?

Some studies suggest that people in higher responsibility positions, with greater job demands, have better health outcomes and are less stressed than people in lower responsibility positions. This may be because those in higher responsibility positions also tend to have greater autonomy, control and power.

One puzzle is that people with higher responsibility jobs, which you’d expect to be more stressful, have been found to have better health outcomes than those with lower responsibility jobs.

From Why you should stop sweating everyday aggravations and embrace the benefits of stress (emphases ours):

“In a series of classic studies in Britain, dubbed the Whitehall studies for the road in London where the government resides, researchers examined nearly 30,000 employees in the British civil service. All had secure jobs, livable wages and access to the same health care; they also worked within a precise hierarchy, with six levels of ranks. The researchers found that heart disease and mortality rates increased steeply with every step down the ladder. Those on the lower rungs tended to lead less healthy lives—they smoked more, for example—but even factoring in lifestyle differences, the lowest-ranking employees had twice the mortality rate of the highest-ranking individuals. The researchers attributed this disparity to the psychological stresses of low status and lack of control.”

The Whitehall studies did find that higher rank was correlated with higher job demands (0.32 in men and 0.40 in women), but it was also correlated with higher control over skill use, time allocation and organisational decisions (0.51 in men and 0.55 in women). Overall, the studies actually found that higher job demands³ (and low control to a lesser extent) were associated with higher risk of heart disease and mortality:

“People with high demands, and to a lesser extent, low control, are at increased risk for heart disease.”

It seems the negative effects of higher job demands in higher ranks were offset by the higher sense of control, but overall, higher job demands were still associated with higher risk of heart disease.

Another study found a similar result. From Why you should stop sweating everyday aggravations and embrace the benefits of stress (emphases ours):

“High-ranking individuals may have demanding jobs, but they also enjoy a greater sense of autonomy. In a study that appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences just before the 2012 presidential election, researchers found that a group of leaders—military officers and government officials—had lower resting cortisol and self-reported anxiety than a comparable group of nonleaders. This is despite the fact that leaders appeared more taxed: They slept significantly fewer hours per night than nonleaders. Among the leaders, those who managed more people and had more authority also had lower cortisol levels and lower anxiety than those with less clout, and this association was directly related to their greater sense of control.”

However, as the authors of this study themselves note, it could be that leaders had a predisposition to low stress levels and that’s what caused them to get into leadership positions in the first place (emphasis ours):

“It is important to note that the low stress levels of leaders may both cause and result from leadership. That is, individuals with low stress levels may be particularly well-suited for leadership and as a result, may select into leadership positions. Conversely, leadership roles may confer lower stress because of the psychological resources that they afford.”

Also, the authors argue that leadership positions are actually associated with lower levels of stress: “… we found clear evidence that leadership is associated with lower levels of stress”. Therefore this study isn’t a finding that stress is linked to positive health outcomes, instead it’s pointing out that leadership positions are associated with lower stress than other positions.

The authors’ favored explanation for this finding is that the higher demands of leaders are offset by higher levels of control – having a large number of subordinates that you have authority over – making it the case that leaders experience less stress than non-leaders:

“Leaders possess a particular psychological resource—a sense of control—that may buffer against stress.”

In sum, these studies suggest that the increased control and power that comes with higher responsibility positions offsets the negative effects of higher job demands.

Another interesting finding is that there is an association between the negative health effects of stress and believing that stress has negative health effects. Some studies have found a correlation between negative health outcomes and believing that stress is bad for your health, but it is hard to draw causal conclusions from these findings. However, there is experimental evidence that reframing stress as an opportunity rather than as a threat leads to better performance and better cardiovascular health at least in the short term.

From Why you should stop sweating everyday aggravations and embrace the benefits of stress (emphases ours):

“In the early 1990s, researchers surveyed 7,268 participants from one of the Whitehall cohorts about their current stress levels and their perceptions of the impact of stress on their health. Independent of job rank, initial health status or the level of stress reported, those who believed that stress had a large effect on their health had double the risk of suffering a heart attack within the 18-year follow-up period compared with those who viewed stress as being unrelated to their health. Similarly, in a large U.S. study, people with high stress levels had an elevated mortality rate only if they also believed that stress greatly affects health.”

However, psychologist Robert Epstein points out that this correlation can also be explained in another way:

“There is a simpler, less mysterious way of accounting for the results: people who experience stress but who suffer minimal ill effects from it come to believe that stress cannot hurt them, whereas people who do suffer ill effects come to believe that stress is harmful. Voilà, we now have the correlation those researchers found but with belief as an outcome rather than a cause.”

This is indeed what the authors of the large US study themselves say:

“In addition, reverse causality may partially explain the findings in this study. Adults who reported poor health may have been more likely to report that stress impacts their health simply due to their poor health status; moreover poor health status could also have influenced the amount of stress reported. The cross-sectional nature of these data precludes us from examining the direction of causality among the amount of stress, the perception that stress affects health, and health outcomes.”

However, there is some evidence that changing how people view stress can, at least in the short term, affect their physiological responses. From Why you should stop sweating everyday aggravations and embrace the benefits of stress (emphases ours):

“Additionally, how people view stress—as a threat versus an opportunity—can alter their physiologic responses to it. In a 2011 study at Harvard, volunteers were exposed to positive messages about stress—that it’s adaptive and aids performance—prior to a public speaking task. They had healthier cardiovascular profiles (their hearts pumped more efficiently and their blood vessels constricted less) during the stressor than controls who were given no information or were told to suppress stressful emotions. “This shows that you can change your moment-to-moment cardiovascular physiology depending on how you think about stress,” McGonigal says.”

This fits well with the large amount of evidence for the effectiveness of cognitive-behavioral therapy, whose slogan is that changing your beliefs about a situation changes the emotions you feel.

However, psychologist Robert Epstein warns against taking this positive view of stress too far:

“Although this strategy might work for some, there are still thousands of studies showing the ill effects of stress on the immune system, mood, the brain, sleep, sexual functioning, you name it. If some people feel and function better when we tell them stress is good, I’m all for it. But stress is still a killer.”

What’s the evidence that some types of ‘stress’ are good?

The consensus among researchers seems to be that stress is good when it’s moderate in intensity (not too low or too high) and when it’s acute, rather than chronic. Moderate and short-term stress at work is linked with better performance and higher job satisfaction.

The American Psychological Association sees the view that stress is always bad for you as a common myth:

Myth 2: Stress is always bad for you.
“According to this view, zero stress makes us happy and healthy. Wrong. “Stress is to the human condition what tension is to the violin string: too little and the music is dull and raspy”; too much and the music is shrill or the string snaps. Stress can be the kiss of death or the spice of life. The issue, really, is how to manage it. “Managed stress makes us productive and happy”; mismanaged stress hurts and even kills us.”

From Stress and Health: Psychological, Behavioral, and Biological Determinants (emphases ours):

“Acute stress responses in young, healthy individuals may be adaptive and typically do not impose a health burden. Indeed, individuals who are optimistic and have good coping responses may benefit from such experiences and do well dealing with chronic stressors (Garmezy 1991, Glanz & Johnson 1999).”

RAND – Stress and Performance: A Review of the Literature and Its Applicability to the Military (emphasis ours):

“Research also suggests that moderate levels of stress can have positive effects on job satisfaction and organizational commitment while reducing turnover intent. These findings seem to be an extension of the inverted-U-shaped relationship discussed previously. Under this hypothesis, at moderate levels of stress, individual performance and productivity are likely to be higher and can also contribute to higher job satisfaction and organizational commitment.”

The good, moderate level of stress is when the demands of a situation roughly match the abilities of the person to deal with them:

Under what circumstances is ‘stress’, that is, high demands, good or bad?

See the summary table at the top of this post.

How can stress best be managed?

A meta-analysis of occupational stress management interventions found that cognitive-behavioural interventions (CBT) are the most effective.⁴

A great book which outlines a self-help CBT program for stress and anxiety management is Overcoming Anxiety. Or you can get CBT online through Lantern.

You can also take the Epstein Stress Management Inventory for Individuals for free, which will tell you how well you manage stress in each of four skill areas. This can help you target which skills to improve.

Sources surveyed

1. American Psychological Association: Chronic Stress
2. American Psychological Association: Stress Myths
3. Booth, Joanne, et al. “Evidence of perceived psychosocial stress as a risk factor for stroke in adults: a meta-analysis.” BMC neurology 15.1 (2015): 1.
4. Epstein, Robert. “The Upside of Stress: Why Stress Is Good for You, and How to Get Good at It.” Scientific American Mind 26.4 (2015): 70-70.
5. Falk, Anders, et al. “Job strain and mortality in elderly men: social network, support, and influence as buffers.” American journal of Public health 82.8 (1992): 1136-1139.
6. Fishta, Alba, and Eva-Maria Backé. “Psychosocial stress at work and cardiovascular diseases: an overview of systematic reviews.” International archives of occupational and environmental health 88.8 (2015): 997-1014.
7. Fullagar, Clive J., Patrick A. Knight, and Heather S. Sovern. “Challenge/skill balance, flow, and performance anxiety.” Applied Psychology 62.2 (2013)
8. Johnson, Jeffrey V., and Ellen M. Hall. “Job strain, work place social support, and cardiovascular disease: a cross-sectional study of a random sample of the Swedish working population.” American journal of public health 78.10 (1988): 1336-1342.
9. Johnson, Jeffrey V., Ellen M. Hall, and Töres Theorell. “Combined effects of job strain and social isolation on cardiovascular disease morbidity and mortality in a random sample of the Swedish male working population.” Scandinavian journal of work, environment & health (1989): 271-279. Health1989;15:271–9.](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2772582)
10. Kavanagh, Jennifer. Stress and Performance A Review of the Literature and its Applicability to the Military. RAND CORP SANTA MONICA CA, 2005.
11. Keller, Abiola, et al. “Does the perception that stress affects health matter? The association with health and mortality.” Health psychology 31.5 (2012): 677.
12. Kuper, Hannah, and Michael Marmot. “Job strain, job demands, decision latitude, and risk of coronary heart disease within the Whitehall II study.”Journal of epidemiology and community health 57.2 (2003): 147-153.
13. McGonigal, Kelly. The upside of stress: Why stress is good for you, and how to get good at it. Penguin, 2015.
14. Poulin, Michael J., and E. Alison Holman. “Helping hands, healthy body? Oxytocin receptor gene and prosocial behavior interact to buffer the association between stress and physical health.” Hormones and behavior 63.3 (2013): 510-517.
15. Poulin, Michael J., et al. “Giving to others and the association between stress and mortality.” American journal of public health 103.9 (2013): 1649-1655.
16. Richardson, Katherine M., and Hannah R. Rothstein. “Effects of occupational stress management intervention programs: a meta-analysis.” Journal of occupational health psychology 13.1 (2008): 69.
17. Sainani, Kristin. Why you should stop sweating everyday aggravations and embrace the benefits of stress. Stanford Magazine.
18. Schneiderman, Neil, Gail Ironson, and Scott D. Siegel. “Stress and health: psychological, behavioral, and biological determinants.” Annual review of clinical psychology 1 (2005): 607.
19. Sherman, Gary D., et al. “Leadership is associated with lower levels of stress.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109.44 (2012): 17903-17907.
20. US National Institute of Mental Health fact sheet on stress
21. World Health Organisation: Stress at the workplace

The post Will high stress kill you, save your life, or neither? appeared first on 80,000 Hours.

We haven’t found much support for this idea so far. The most in-depth attempt to study “match” is Holland-types, but several meta-analyses have found no or only a very weak relationship between Holland-type match and performance (or job satisfaction). On the other hand, we’ve encountered some important general predictors of success. For instance, hundreds of studies have found that the smarter you are, the more likely you are to succeed in almost every career. With a general predictor like intelligence, more is always better – it’s not that it means you’ll do well in some jobs but worse in others depending on your “match”.

However, a new line of research into “strengths” might shift the picture. There have been two attempts – the Virtues in Action (VIA) Signature Strengths test and Strengths Finder – to determine people’s character strengths, and study the importance of leading a career in line with them.

We did a review of the literature to see whether we should incorporate them into our advice, which we summarise below. We found that strengths don’t seem especially useful for choosing a career in the first place; however, once you’re in a career, you’ll probably be a bit happier if you find ways to regularly use your strengths.

Our recommendation: If you’re already in a job, then we’d recommend taking the VIA signature strengths test and finding more ways to use your strengths. Though because the evidence is still relatively weak, we wouldn’t make it a top priority.

To get started:

1. Take the VIA Signature Strengths test.
2. Make a note of what your top five signature strengths are.

Then consider these exercises:

1. At the start of each day, think of one new way in which you’ll use one of your signature strengths that day.
2. At the end of each day, note down which strengths you used that day.
3. Try redesigning your role so that you use your strengths more. See ideas of 340 ways to use signature strengths.

Our research process

For Strengths Finder we read the StrengthsFinder 2.0 book; took the assessment; read a technical report by Gallup which summarises the evidence for the assessment and did a search for more studies relating to it on google scholar.

For the Virtues in Action Signature Strengths test we read the chapter on Strengths of Character and Work in the Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology and Work, read two overviews of studies on signature strengths and followed up on the most relevant papers, and read two meta-analyses on positive psychology interventions.

Our findings

What is the Virtues in Action Signature Strengths test?

The Virtues in Action Signature Strengths test is an assessment designed to identify a person’s top ‘signature strengths’. These are character strengths that you feel authentic to you, that you frequently exercise and that you find energising. Here’s the list of all 24 character strengths:

What is Strengths Finder 2.0?

Strengths Finder 2.0 is an assessment to identify people’s top strengths in the workplace. It was popularised in the book StrengthsFinder 2.0. It is an updated version of the original Clifton Strengths Finder assessment made by Gallup.

How do Strengths Finder 2.0 and the VIA signature strengths test differ?

• Strengths Finder 2.0 is more focused on workplace relevant strengths than the VIA Survey is: “VIA strengths were initially chosen for study because they are widely recognized and valued, in contrast to the more workplace-specific strengths of interest to the Gallup Organization” (“Strengths of character and work.” Oxford handbook of positive psychology and work (2010))
• Both are designed by psychologists (Clifton for Strengths Finder, Seligman and Peterson for the VIA Survey).
• The list of strengths in Strengths Finder 2.0 (34 in total) is based on analysis by Gallup of ~100,000 semi-structured interviews of people in a wide range of occupations.¹ The list of strengths in the VIA Survey (24 in total) is based on analysis that drew on a literature survey of virtues from different religious and philosophical traditions across many cultures.²
• Both assessments are tested for reliability (results are stable over time) and validity (they measure what you want them to).
• Strengths Finder 2.0 gives you personalised descriptions of your top 5 strengths (i.e. two people with the same strengths can get different text descriptions of their strengths depending on exactly how they answered questions on the assessment). The VIA Survey gives the same descriptions of strengths for everyone.
• Both recommend using your top 5 strengths more. Both give recommendations of how to use your top strengths more.
• Strengths Finder 2.0 costs ~$15 to take, the VIA Survey is free.
• Using Strengths Finder 2.0 has been studied by Gallup and linked to increased employee engagement, productivity and profitability, as well as reduced turnover. The sample sizes are quite large, and there are a couple are experimental and quasi experimental studies with wait-list controls. However, most/all of these studies were sponsored by Gallup, so there’s likely to be bias there, and more importantly, it looks like none of the studies are published in peer reviewed journals.³ Because of this, we decided to focus the rest of our research on the VIA Signature Strengths test.
• The VIA Signature Strengths test has been studied by independent academic psychologists, and there are Randomised Controlled Trials (RCTs) that show using signature strengths in new ways (or monitoring one’s use of strengths) increases general happiness.

What’s the evidence that the VIA Survey can be useful for (i) job satisfaction (ii) job performance?

In sum, there is some evidence that using signature strengths at work is useful for job satisfaction and performance, but it’s relatively weak.

There are RCTs that show using signature strengths in new ways (or monitoring one’s use of strengths) increases general happiness, but we didn’t find RCTs testing the effects on increasing job satisfaction or job performance:

• Seligman, Martin EP, et al. “Positive psychology progress: empirical validation of interventions.” American psychologist 60.5 (2005): 410.
• Mongrain, Myriam, and Tracy Anselmo-Matthews. “Do positive psychology exercises work? A replication of Seligman et al.().” Journal of clinical psychology 68.4 (2012).
• Gander, Fabian, et al. “Strength-based positive interventions: Further evidence for their potential in enhancing well-being and alleviating depression.” Journal of Happiness Studies 14.4 (2013): 1241-1259.
• Drozd, Filip, et al. “Better Days–A randomized controlled trial of an internet-based positive psychology intervention.” The Journal of Positive Psychology9.5 (2014): 377-388.
• Duan, Wenjie, et al. “Character strength-based intervention to promote satisfaction with life in the Chinese university context.” Journal of Happiness Studies 15.6 (2014): 1347-1361.

We found 6 correlational studies which suggest that deliberately using signature strengths at work increases job and life satisfaction and job performance.⁴

However, a meta-analysis of RCTs of positive psychology interventions (which include signature strengths) concludes:

…the quality of the studies was not high, and no study met all of our quality criteria.
…there is a need for more high-quality studies, and more studies in diverse (clinical) populations and diverse intervention formats to know what works for whom.

How relevant are signature strengths for career selection?

From the evidence there so far, not very.

From Peterson, Christopher, et al. “Strengths of character and work.” Oxford handbook of positive psychology and work (2010) (emphases ours):

“It does not appear that individuals with different character strengths necessarily choose different occupations, or that different occupational constraints and opportunities strongly foster or discourage different character strengths”

“However informative and interesting measures like the VIA-IS may be, they are not strong diagnostic tests, and their results should never be used in and of themselves as the basis for selection or placement. Rather, knowledge of a worker’s character strengths is probably more useful in helping a worker craft the job that he or she already has.”

“Although we find differences across occupations in the level of the strengths and their association with work satisfaction, these differences are small. In general, there are more similarities across occupational type than differences in the strengths that relate to satisfaction at work.”

They also found that there was a negative (but small) correlation between job satisfaction and having a signature strength that’s common among others in an occupation. They suggested that might be because you are less likely to stand out and contribute if your strengths are already common (emphases ours):

“If a worker in a given occupation scored higher on a less typical strength of character within that occupation, then he or she was more likely to be satisfied with work. Perhaps such an individual brings to bear strengths that are especially needed at work. Or perhaps such an individual feels distinct from his or her co-worker.”

“Further research is needed to verify and understand this intriguing but tentative pattern.”

There is possibly some weak evidence for jobs varying by how much they let you use different strengths in this paper, but we’re not sure if it actually just shows that some jobs are better in general (for everyone) for using strengths rather than better for some individuals.

Should you take and apply the VIA signature strengths test?

Yes – it’ll probably make you a bit happier. The evidence is still weak, but it’s an intuitive idea and doesn’t cost much, so seems worth doing, if not as a top priority. It’s especially worth doing if you’re already in a job, since signature strengths are not helpful for career selection.

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In it, Ben sets out what we’ve learned through our research about finding fulfilling work. Rather than following your passion, find something you’re good at that helps others. If you aim to do what’s valuable, passion for your work will emerge. And you can also make a big difference with your life.

If you like what you see, please go ahead and share the video. We’d like to get it listed on the main TED channel!

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Some of the key changes include:

• We’ve added a positive account of what you should do if you want to find work you’re passionate about.
• We’ve explained the good idea behind “follow your passion” – it’s worth seeking work that’s a good personal fit.
• We’ve improved our work on the predictors of job satisfaction, making the case more solid (I’ll explain the changes in an upcoming post).

The problem with following your passion.

Some have claimed “follow your passion” is the definitive career advice of our time.¹

The idea behind the slogan “follow your passion” is that the best way to choose a career is to:

1. Identify your passions through self-reflection.
2. Identify careers that involve those passions.
3. Try to get one of those careers.

The reason this advice works is because:

1. Matching your career with your passions in this way is the best way to be truly satisfied with your work.
2. If you’re satisfied with your work, you’ll be good at what you do.
3. Being good at what you do is the best way to make the world a better place.

We mainly disagree with the first and last claims: matching your career with your passions is not a particularly good way to find satisfying work, and being good at what you do is only one factor that matters for having a social impact.

Passion is not all that matters for having a social impact

If your passion is dealing crack cocaine, should you do it? It’s easy to see there are cases in which being passionate and having a social impact come apart.

Indeed, being good at what you do isn’t enough to guarantee you’ll make a difference. If you would be the world’s best cocaine dealer, that’s even more reason not to do it! So, even if it were true that following your passion is the best way to find a career you’re good at, you’d still need to do more than “follow your passion” to make a difference.

We think it’s clear there are other factors besides passion and being good at your job that matter for having a social impact. We list them in our framework. They include the value of the skills you build, the effectiveness of the cause you’re working on, and how much influence you have in your role.

Focusing on what you’re passionate about is not the best way to find a satisfying career

The cocaine dealer example is an uncharitable interpretation of “follow your passion” advocates. A more reasonable position is that you should start from a list of plausibly good careers, then “follow your passion” to decide from among those. Exclude potentially evil careers like tobacco sales, arms dealing, drugs dealing, and so on.

However, we still don’t think this is good advice. The core claim behind the value of following your passion is that if you find a career that matches your passions, you’ll be satisfied in your work. However, our research has shown that matching your work with your passions is not an especially good way to find a satisfying job. Why?

First, we’re bad at predicting in which jobs we’ll be most happy in and most good at just by thinking about it. This suggests that reflecting on where you’ll be most passionate won’t give you accurate results. We tend to only hear the stories in which someone followed their passion and it worked out. But there’s likely to be many stories of people who followed their passions and didn’t end up as happy as they expected. Cal Newport tells the story of a young investment banker, who quit his job to live in a zen monastery,² and found he was just as miserable as before!

Second, research shows the degree of match between your interests and your work is not especially important for predicting where you’ll be most satisfied Following your passion, therefore, causes you to overly focus on just one criterion, and it’s not even the most important one. We found that the most important four factors for being satisfied in your work are:

1. Engaging, meaningful work: the extent to which you have variety, autonomy, a sense of completion, feedback and work you feel makes a difference.
2. Getting on with your colleagues: the extent to which you get help from, like and form meaningful relationships with your colleagues.
3. Personal fit: the extent to which you’re good at your job.
4. Hygiene factors: do you have reasonable hours, job security, a short commute and sufficient pay?

Although having a match between your interests and your work should be helpful (in particular, it’ll increase the personal fit factor), it’s possible to have a job that satisfies all these factors without having much of a match. Indeed, psychologists have tried for decades to show the degree of match between your job and your interests and personality predicts job satisfaction, but they’ve only found weak effects.³

This means you should be able to find satisfying work that doesn’t fit your passions, and you probably shouldn’t follow your passion if it means working with people you don’t like, or doing repetitive work with little autonomy. It also means you can be satisfied in many different areas – you don’t have “one true calling”. We know lots of examples of people who didn’t follow their passion but ended up satisfied. For instance, Rachel was passionate about drawing cartoons,⁴ but found it depressing to turn into a job because it was too hard to make ends meet. She ended up far more satisfied in web development, where she receives professional recognition, is in-demand and can pick up interesting work with ease.

Third, following your passions can cause you to be too narrow in your search for work. You can only be passionate about activities you’ve already tried, but when you’re twenty, you probably haven’t tried much of the world of work. Instead, many people are passionate about sports and music,⁵ which are very hard to turn into good jobs.

Moreover, focusing on passion can encourage you to only consider careers that are immediately satisfying (because when you find your “match”, you’ll be satisfied). But, as Cal Newport has argued,⁶ most careers are not immediate satisfying. First, it takes time to become good at your job, which is important for being satisfied. Second, you normally have to become good at your job before you can also find work that is engaging, with colleagues you like and that satisfies all your hygiene factors. That’s because having work that satisfies these criteria is valuable, and if you want something valuable, you’ll have to offer something valuable in return. Rather than focus inwards by asking “is this what I’m truly passionate about?”, if you want satisfying work, focus on asking “what can I do that’s valuable?”

Focusing on what you can offer the world is also a more fulfilling approach to take to your career. Helping others is a cause of deep satisfaction.

Finally, “follow your passion” encourages the idea that there’s one perfect path for you – the one you’re passionate about. As we’ve seen, this is wrong because you can become passionate about many different areas. More problematically, it raises your expectations extremely high. Career decisions are difficult, involve lots of uncertainty and require tough tradeoffs. You won’t be able to find the perfect path straight away. Rather than try to immediately identify your perfect career, accept that careers take time to build. Focus on taking good steps in the right direction, and continuously improving over time.

Overall, we don’t think following your passion is a good way to find a satisfying career. In the next section, we’ll suggest a better approach.

If you want to make a difference, what’s the truth within “follow your passion”?

Although we don’t think “follow your passion” is helpful advice, we do think there’s some truth in it. First, we completely agree that it’s better to strive for meaningful work than money. More importantly, we think you’ll have more impact (and enjoy yourself more) if you excel at what you do. We call your chances of excelling in the role your degree of personal fit, and it’s one of the key criteria we use to judge career options.

The importance of personal fit means that if you’re fortunate enough to have discovered something you’re really passionate about, that’s great, and you should strongly consider continuing with it.

It also means it’s worth striving to find work that you’re passionate about, because it’ll raise your chances of excelling. The problem is that if you want work you’re passionate about, you shouldn’t simply “follow your passions”.

What should you do instead?

How can you find the most satisfying career?

1. At the start of your career, explore your options, learn about yourself and try out different areas. This is important because it’s difficult to predict what you’ll be good at just by thinking about it, and if you stick to what you already know, you could easily miss a great area.
2. After you’ve identified a promising area, build up valuable career capital, while keeping your options open and continuing to explore. If you want satisfying work, you need something to offer.
3. Third, identify the most satisfying options open to you, by taking the steps on our job satisfaction page. Don’t just consider whether the work matches your passions, since there are other routes to being satisfied.
4. Work hard to excel in your role, and use that to negotiate for more engaging, meaningful work that you’re good at, with people you like, and that allows you to fulfill your priorities outside of work.
5. Keep learning, and find better and better work over time.

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The Terman study is the longest running longitudinal studies ever to be carried out in psychology. The study included 1,528 of the most intelligent children born between 1900 and 1925. It started in 1921, and the participants have been followed up every four to five years ever since. Data was collected on their personality, habits, life-choices, health and much more. This allows researchers to track the results of different life choices over decades.

Two of the leading researchers working on the Terman study recently released a book: The Longevity Project, which aims to uncover the factors that lead to the participants having long and healthy lives.

The book has a fascinating chapter on career choice (though I’d recommend the whole thing).

Here’s a summary of the key conclusions:

The factors leading to career success

• Intelligence predicts success, but it’s no guarantee. All of the participants in the Terman study were very bright, but a quarter ended up in less prestigious occupations, like clerical workers and craftsmen. Only one fifth ended up ‘highly successful’ – prominent doctors or lawyers, accomplished in the arts, or leading scientists. One fifth ended up ‘unsuccessful’ within their professions.
• The more successful, the longer they lived. The most successful men lived on average five years longer than the least. In fact, Terman’s rating of success at age 30 predicted life-span decades later.
• This effect was not explained by greater wealth, avoiding smoking and drinking, a happier marriage, more education, or conscientiousness (although conscientiousness did explain part of the effect).
• A stable career with a clear progression of rising responsibilities also predicted longevity, compared to a ‘drifting’ career through many different professions.
• Continuing to work into old age was a significant predictor of longevity.
• Overall, the findings do not suggest that avoiding stress and responsibility is a good strategy for having a healthy life. Rather, they suggest that the becoming the type of person who perseveres to achieve ambitious goals leads to both success and health.
• This links to a broader theme in positive psychology – in Flourish, Seligman proposes that achievement is one of the five key components of a flourishing life.

What else predicted career satisfaction?

• Choosing your occupation rather than drifting into it.
• Being ambitious and enjoying challenges.
• Productive, hardworking people tended to be happier, healthier and more socially connected than their more laidback peers.

The real causes of career stress

• Despite the common sense advice to relax more if you want to avoid stress, the findings of the study don’t suggest that facing difficult challenges damages your health.
• However, having poor relationships with your co-workers or boss can damage your health, especially if you’re naturally low on agreeableness. This ties up with the literature on the importance of social support at work.
• Another path to damaging stress is having lots of responsibilities, but insufficient resources and influence to control outcomes: think of being a middle manager, relying on many others to achieve your goals, but lacking the political power and budget to easily make things happen.

Is it important to be a good ‘match’ with your career?

• There was no evidence that having a good match between your personality and occupational environment (an analysis performed using Holland types) predicted a longer life.
• In some cases, a high degree of match was even harmful. For instance, the assertive and persuasive ‘enterprising’ men, who sought jobs in sales and management, ended up living less long than the same personality types who sought jobs in other professions. It seems that the match between their workplace and personality reinforced stresses and unhealthy habits common to each.
• In some cases, a good match was helpful. For instance, men with social personality types benefited from being in social environments, like counseling.
• Overall, there wasn’t a strong relationship either way between personality and environment fit. This matches up with the other literature we’ve come across.
• Based on this, we don’t think you should prioritise having a good match between your personality or interests and your type of work (e.g. don’t avoid becoming a consultant, because you’re not the right ‘type’ of person). It’s further evidence against the do what you’re passionate about approach to finding a good job.
• Rather, focusing on finding work that’s engaging, that contributes to something larger than yourself, which lets you form positive social relationships, and in which, if you persevere, you can be successful. Engagement, meaning, positive relationships and achievement are all ingredients of a flourishing life.

The post What we can learn about career choice from the Terman study appeared first on 80,000 Hours.

Of course, we don’t think that this is the end of it – that all that matters when it comes to job satisfaction are five simple factors. So we’ve spent a bit more time delving into the job satisfaction literature to get a better sense of what personal or social factors might be most important alongside this. One finding that seems to be fairly well supported is that, whilst “personality fit” might not matter that much, feeling socially supported at work on the other hand, does.

In summary:

• Feeling like you are socially supported at work – that you are able to get help and advice from your supervisors and coworkers – correlates with increased satisfaction at work

• This is pretty intuitive, and seems to be both due to the direct benefits of social interactions, and the fact that support from coworkers also means we’re less likely to suffer from stress

• This suggests it may be worth explicitly focusing on finding a working environment where you feel supported e.g. having a manager who you can go to with problems, perhaps above things like “personality fit” or “being the right type of person.” It also means that organisations (like 80,000 Hours!) should make creating this environment high priority

The evidence for social support:

Social support at work is defined as “the extent to which a job provides opportunities for getting assistance and advice from supervisors and coworkers.”¹ A meta-analysis looking at the effect of social support on both job satisfaction and performance across over 250 studies found that social support was positively related to both job satisfaction (p=.36) and internal work motivation (p=.26). They also found that other social factors, including interdependence (the extent to which your work is contingent on and requires you to deal with others) and feedback from others, were linked to increased satisfaction.

It also just seems pretty intuitively plausible that social support is important for job satisfaction: if you don’t have anyone to turn to with your problems, you seem much less likely to be happy at work. The aforementioned paper also cites a number of past studies which together suggest that:

• Having good relationships with your coworkers makes you much more likely to perceive your work as meaningful, which is important for job satisfaction

• Social interactions have been linked to improved mood, and also help with role clarification and task identity (components of the work itself that have been shown to be linked to job satisfaction.)

• Social support reduces job stress by creating buffers against negative events.²

There seem to be two potential mechanisms here by which social support increase satisfaction: directly by improving mood, sense of contribution or task identity, and indirectly by acting as a buffer against negative events. A meta-study looked at these two explanations (referred to as the “direct model” and “buffer model” respectively) and found that in fact both might play a part: depending on exactly how we define and measure “social support”.³ Evidence for the direct model was found when social support was measured as the extent to which people feel they are integrated in a large social network. When social support was measured by the extent to which people feel they have resources available to help them deal with stressful events, evidence in favour of the buffering model was found.

You might also enjoy:

Our research on how to find a job you’ll love

How important is fitting in at work?

Does your personality matter when choosing a career?

Notes and references:

The post More on What Really Matters for Finding a Job You Love appeared first on 80,000 Hours.

In order to work out best practice within career advising, we looked into personality testing. Several people we’ve asked for advice have recommended that we consider using it.

Having investigated the leading personality tests, however, we’ve concluded they’re not very useful in choosing your career. This is because they haven’t been shown to predict the real world outcomes that matter: (i) finding careers you will find satisfying (ii) finding careers that you will succeed in.

Key takeaways: given our findings, what do we recommend?

1. Personality tests have not yet shown to be directly useful in picking which careers will fit you, so don’t put much weight on them
2. Be more sceptical about claims about which career might suit you based on personality
3. To judge your chances of success, put more weight on IQ, grit and experience.
4. When looking for job satisfaction, put more weight on the nature of the work and the quality of the social support in the workplace you’re considering
5. Do plenty of trial and error. There’s a lot we can’t yet predict and don’t know. If you’re wondering whether a job will suit you, the best way to find out is to try it.

Our findings on personality testing

The most widely used personality test in the world is the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). There are plenty of reasons to doubt that this test is a good measure of personality. More importantly, there has been very little testing (and nothing within the academic community) of the predictive power of the test.

Holland Career Types

The most well-tested and popular personality test developed specifically for career choice is the Holland Type Test. The academic community has attempted to show that a matching between the Holland type of a person and their workplace is predictive of job satisfaction. To date, meta-studies have shown no correlation or only a very weak correlation. There’s a good chance this is partly due to some confounding factors and more work needs to be done, but the balance of the evidence now it that Holland type matching is only weakly predictive.

The most widely used personality measure among academic psychologists is the Big 5. This measure does at least have some predictive power in career outcomes. The strongest and most widely agreed finding is that conscientiousness predicts job performance, across a very wide variety of professions.¹ Turn to the size of the effect, however, and you’ll discover it’s tiny. Typically, conscientiousness only explains several percent of the variance in performance. My impression is that it’s similar for the other well-established predictions based on personality.

What does this mean? Either:
1. Personality is important, but it’s difficult to demonstrate because the interactions are so complex. Further research will show stronger effects.
2. Personality is less important in picking a career than we think.

I think both of these explanations are likely true to some extent. The existing research is pretty crude. For instance, it might be that the personality of your immediate colleagues is very important, but not the personality type of the people who do the work in general. It’s also difficult to design studies that show the full correlation, due to range restriction effects and others. But overall I lean slightly towards (2) being true.

We’ve found other factors that do make a big difference in picking a career. In predicting performance, intelligence, as measured by IQ, seems to be very important across a very wide range of careers. Often, it explains 30-60% of the variance, meaning that it dwarfs conscientiousness.

An emerging line of research suggests that grit – the propensity to stick to your goals over long periods of time – matters more than conscientiousness. One recent paper² showed that grit could explain 5% of the variance in performance across six different areas, compared to only 2% for conscientiousness. (Though note that IQ was still found to be a much better predictor of performance than grit). Grit is partly is measure of personality, but it’s also partly based on your mindset, which is a product of your beliefs not your personality. Another line of research, for instance as explored in a pop form by Carol Dweck in the book “Mindset”, suggests that certain beliefs about the world can also impact your success, though we’re not yet sure how much.

What could explains the rest of the variance besides personality? We don’t know. Experience can matter. In particular, there’s a fairly strong line of research³ showing that thousands of hours of deliberate practice are necessary for expert performance in a wide variety of fields. Some genetic factors have been linked to success, like physical attractiveness and height. A big chunk is likely down to luck. We’d like to explore these factors in the future.

What about finding a satisfying job? We’ve found that the nature of the work itself is the most important thing. After that, what’s important is whether the social environment at work is generally supportive (which doesn’t depend on personality matching).

All in all, there is plenty of room for these other factors to dominate the role of personality in career decisions.

Why is there so much focus on personality in career choice then? And why do personality tests continue to be so popular? We suspect it’s because the message that certain types of personality suit certain types of job is a nice one. Many of these other factors are much less encouraging. If the nature of the work is what’s important in job satisfaction, then that means that on average some jobs are more satisfying than others. And you can’t change your IQ or height. The message of the other factors is that you need to change your beliefs about the world and do a ton of work to succeed. That’s also not an easy line to take in a brief careers advising session.

You might also be interested in:

• Our research on finding a job you’ll love
• Does fitting in a work matter?
• Intelligence matters more than you think
• Reasons to be suspicious of Myers Briggs

Notes and References

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