This is an update on the number of significant plan changes we’ve caused as of the end of Nov 2016.

We define a significant plan change as:

Someone tells us that 80,000 Hours caused them to change the career path they intend to pursue, in a way that they think increases their lifetime impact.

More on what counts as a significant plan change here.

Our total number of plan changes as of the end of Nov 2016 is 1,854, and after impact-adjusting these it’s 1,504.8.

Here’s a summary of our key figures:¹

Impact-adjustment of plan changes

In October 2015, we started rating plan changes with a value of 0.1, 1 or 10 based on our estimate of their counterfactual impact, in order to track the quality of plan changes over time. Read more.

Number of plan changes

Here’s the breakdown by year:

Note that we only started collecting plan changes in 2013, but started outreach in 2011. This means the 2013 figures reflect three years of work rather than one, so our growth from 2013 to 2014 was better than it looks from these charts. Also, the figures for 2016 don’t include December, so our year-on-year growth rates will be somewhat higher once all of 2016 is included.

Our month-on-month growth rates over 3 years are faster than our year-on-year growth rates, because we grew quickly during 2016. Here are our monthly impact-adjusted plan changes, with plan changes we learned about from our annual impact surveys amortised:

Here are the proportions of plan changes that we scored with the values 0.1, 1 and 10 each year. As you can see, most plan changes are scored as 0.1 or 1, and there are only a few 10s:

Here are our impact-adjusted plan changes per year, again broken down by their scores:

Finally, here our monthly impact-adjusted plan changes broken down by their scores (excluding those we learned about in our annual impact surveys):

Most of our growth has been driven by the 1s. This is because (as is shown below) growth has largely been driven by (i) workshops (ii) our online tools and the on-going impact survey (benefiting from higher web traffic) and (iii) more people taking the Giving What We Can pledge.

These sources tend to produce 1s rather than 10s, especially in the short-term. However, we think about 10% of these 1s will become 10s over the coming years. It’s hard to become a 10 right away because it requires a big shift.

How did we find out about the plan changes?

We learn about significant plan changes when our users fill out our online surveys, feedback forms, or through emailing users directly. The main sources are:

• Impact survey – we have a survey on our website which about 5-10 people fill out per week. Once a year we also send the survey out to everyone on our newsletter — we call this our ‘annual impact survey’.
• Online tools – our tools survey users on whether 80,000 Hours caused them to change their career plans.
• Workshops and coaching – all workshop attendees and people we coach are asked to fill out a feedback form which asks them if they changed their plans.
• Manual correspondence – we email a small fraction of our users to ask if they changed their careers plans due to us.
• From Giving What We Can – we email Giving What We Can members who say they heard of GWWC through 80,000 Hours to ask whether they took the pledge due to us.

How we learned about impact-adjusted significant plan changes in 2016:

Here are our monthly impact-adjusted plan changes broken down by how we learned about them:

Plan change statistics

What did the changes consist of?

You can see some examples of plan changes in our annual review (forthcoming). There are summary statistics below.

In October 2016 we added new questions to our plan change surveys, asking users for more information. One new multiple choice question we now ask is What did the change consist of?

446 people who made significant plan changes have answered this question so far (out of a total 1,414 people who made a plan change in 2016).

Here are the proportions of impact-adjusted plan changes which included the different options (note that people could select multiple options):

What did plan changes scored “10” switch into?

We categorised the plan changes which we scored as 10s in 2015 and 2016 by the paths they switched into:

What did plan changes scored “1” switch into?

We selected a random sample of 30 plan changes scored as 1s in 2016, and categorised them by what they now intend to do.

What did plan changes scored “0.1” switch into?

We did the same for a random sample of 30 plan changes scored as 0.1 in 2016:

How many people took the Giving What We Can pledge due to 80,000 Hours?

In 2016 we tracked 115 people who took the Giving What We Can pledge due to 80,000 Hours. This is 8% of our plan changes for the year, and 13% of our impact-adjusted plan changes.

We track this figure by emailing people who take the pledge and say that they first heard about Giving What We Can through 80,000 Hours, and ask them how likely it is that they would have taken the pledge if 80,000 Hours didn’t exist. We also track people who say in our impact surveys that they now intend to take the pledge due to 80,000 Hours, and who then become members.

Which causes are people planning to work on?

Another new question we added in October 2016 is: Which global problem or cause are you planning to work on with your career?

415 people who made significant plan changes have answered this question so far, with the following results (again, note that people could select multiple options):

15% of people who said that they now intend to work on a different global problem, chose at least one of the following, and didn’t choose any of the other causes:

• Promoting effective altruism
• Global priorities research
• Risks from artificial intelligence
• Biosecurity

So roughly 15% of the plan changes (based on the sample) are switching into our top priority areas.

How involved in the effective altruism community are people who make plan changes?

We also ask people who made a plan change: Do you consider yourself an active supporter of “effective altruism”? 466 people who made a significant plan change have answered this question so far, with the following responses:

How did they first hear about 80,000 Hours?

130 people who made plan changes answered the question How did you first find out about 80,000 Hours?, with the following results:

To sum up the main sources for the impact-adjusted plan changes: 30% came from word-of-mouth, 31% from the effective altruism community, and 21% from online outreach.

What caused the plan changes?

We ask each person who reports a plan change What was most significant in triggering these plan changes? Here are the breakdowns of what caused plan changes by year:

Compared with previous years, plan changes caused by online content and workshops have gone up, and the percentage of plan changes caused by our community and coaching have gone down. This is in line with our expectations because we spent 2016 focused on improving our online content and delivering workshops, and didn’t do much coaching.

Here is the same chart but with the absolute numbers of impact-adjusted plan changes each year:

As can be seen, most of our growth in 2016 was driven by plan changes caused by online content and by workshops.

Other ways we helped our users

We also asked our users if there are ways we’ve helped them with their careers besides changing their career plans. Here are the results:

The post End of year update on plan changes appeared first on 80,000 Hours.

I recently spoke to Trevor Shorb about how his career plans changed as a result of 80,000 Hours. After finishing university, Trevor worked in the Peace Corps in El Salvador and planned to work for an NGO in the developing world. But after reading our advice, he decided to gain skills in the private sector first, in order to have a bigger impact in the long run. Today Trevor does business development for an international education company in emerging markets in Latin America. He plans to start a nonprofit or for-profit in the developing world in the future.

How and why did he make this transition? Read our interview with him to find out.

How did you find out about 80,000 Hours and effective altruism, and what were you planning on doing with your career before that?

I first became interested in effective altruism when I read “The Life You Can Save” around the time I graduated college and had committed to serve in the Peace Corps.

Before that I had undergone a fundamental change in perspective. Recruited to college to play lacrosse, I was fully dedicated to the pursuit of being the best and leading the team. A case of chronic Lyme disease led to multiple operations and much time spent in doctor’s offices. After years of treatment and physical therapy, my sports career came to an end around the time I encountered the practice of mindfulness. I entered a serious exploration phase, dropped out of school, and experimented with different internships in a financial advisory firm, and a small start-up, as well as coaching lacrosse and leading international trips for teenagers.

During this time I saved money for a trip to Southeast Asia, where I intended to search for myself. I arrived with no plans other than the intention to be present. While wandering around, I realized how unfulfilling the endeavor was — I realized that I wanted not to move through cultures and take, but to plant myself and to give. I returned to school, immersed myself in my studies, finished my degree in political science while diving into philosophy and psychology classes, and committed to serve in the Peace Corps.

Before leaving for the Peace Corps though, I read “The Life You Can Save,” recommended by my brother and sister, and it immediately resonated with me. I took an advocacy internship with Oxfam America, largely because Peter Singer spoke so highly of the organization. I supported an effort to lobby for food aid reform. While I saw this as a worthy cause, the feeling at the end of the project was confusing. Our intentions were good, we lobbied hard, but it was difficult to tell whether anything changed in the end. My colleagues at Oxfam took a different view, and said the odds would certainly be lower if no one had done anything at all. But how much lower, I thought?

I left for the Peace Corps, determined to make a direct impact I could more easily measure. I constantly thought to myself, how can I maximize my impact here? I enjoyed the feeling of connecting with people directly, sharing cultures, and impacting many kids’ lives. I focused on providing more programming to youth in the community that would empower them to lead the community and the country in the future. I enjoyed the challenge of working without much money at my disposal, focusing on training people and coming up with creative solutions to problems, using little to no budget.

But the whole time I was there, I knew I could be doing more, according to the ideas of effective altruism. And people asked me for things I couldn’t provide at the scale they needed: jobs. I did not think hard about what I was going to do next. Knowing I was committed to El Salvador for two years, I decided to dedicate myself to my work and with time, plan the next steps. My general idea was to work at an NGO in Latin America next.

Then, Peace Corps suspended its program in El Salvador due to violence in the country and I got evacuated back home to Massachusetts two weeks later. I embarked on a full-time job search, taking little time to relax and reflect, but I was in working mode and was determined to continue making an impact. I began looking into NGOs in Latin America or other effective institutions like Oxfam where I could work in monitoring and evaluation or learn how to make an impact.

What were the steps that got you from your original plan to your current plan? What were some of the things you learned that were most important to your decision?

This is where 80,000 Hours came in handy. In a time when I wasn’t sure in which direction to head, 80,000 Hours provided structure and guidance. I had known of it from my brother, but never had enough internet signal or time in El Salvador to really investigate the site. Given my liberal arts college humanities degree, Peace Corps, and a majority of my work experience being leading youth, I was intimidated by many of 80,000 Hours suggestions. Software engineering, management consulting, data science and Economics PhDs — many of the paths are quantitative-heavy, which I felt I lacked.

But what helped me make my final decision was the article What do leaders of effective nonprofits say about working in nonprofits?. Four of the five recommended experiences in the private sector. I decided to pursue an entry-level position in the private sector where I would receive training and gain sales and marketing experience. This felt more accessible than more quantitative positions.

What are you doing now?

I now work at an international education company, responsible for business development in emerging country markets in Latin America. I have a lot of responsibility and will be gaining skills in sales and marketing in the developing world. I sell language immersion programs to the elite who can afford it, but I am developing valuable contacts with whom I may work in the future. I am conducting market research, designing promotional materials, managing travel agencies on the ground and also selling directly to customers in Latin America. I am also gaining entrepreneurial experience with the support and resources of an established, international corporation. I have colleagues from around the world, travel for work throughout Latin America, and speak Spanish everyday. I see opportunities to create and experiment with strategy and different aspects of developing a business. I hope this prepares me to start an NGO or business in the developing world in the future.

I didn’t expect that I would be in a corporate office in the Boston area, helping build a company and maximize profits. I imagined I would be working for a growing NGO in a Latin American city. With the help of 80,000 Hours, effective altruism literature, and Cal Newport’s “So Good They Can’t Ignore You”, I believe that in order to increase my impact and opportunities I can develop my skills more efficiently in the private sector and have a bigger impact in the long run.

What are your plans going forward?

I still am concerned about the fact that my background and experience continues to be in “softer” skills and I continue to be intimidated by my lack of enthusiasm for data science, finance, and the “harder” skills. But I hope to dive in anyway.

My plan is to gain more work experience, get an MBA at a top program, work as a management consultant, and go on to work in start-ups that are doing good and providing jobs in the developing world. Jobs, more than anything, were what the farmers in my village told me in my house-to-house surveys I conducted as Peace Corps Volunteer that they needed when I asked them, “What do you need?”

Do you think Trevor made the right call to change his career like this? How might he do even better? Let us know what you think in the comments.

The post Trevor decided to move from a nonprofit to a for-profit to do more good in the long run. Was it the right call? appeared first on 80,000 Hours.

This is a brief update on the number of significant plan changes we’ve caused as of the end of Dec 2015.

We define a significant plan change as:

Someone tells us that 80,000 Hours caused them to change the career path they intend to pursue, in a way that they think increases their lifetime impact.

More on what counts as a significant plan change here.

Our total number of significant plan changes as of the end of Dec 2015 is 453.

Here’s a summary of our key figures:¹

Note: “YoY growth rate” stands for “year-on-year growth rate”. Also note that our financial cost figures for 2015 are preliminary.

Impact-adjustment of significant plan changes

In October 2015 we decided to start estimating the relative value of the significant plan changes, so that we had a better sense of our overall impact. To do this, we now score each significant plan change with a value of 0.1, 1 or 10. The score is meant to represent how much extra counterfactual impact will result from a plan change.

A typical plan change scored 10 is someone who, in large part due to us, switched to working at a highly effective organisation like GiveWell, became a major donor (>$100k/year) to effective organisations, or become a major advocate of effective causes.

A typical plan change scored 1 is someone who has taken the Giving What We Can pledge or decided to earn to give in a medium income career. We also award 1s to people who want to work on the most pressing problems and who switch to build better career capital in order to do this, for instance doing quantitative grad studies or pursuing consulting; people who have become much more involved in the effective altruism community in a way that has changed their career, and people who switch into policy or research in pressing problem areas.

A typical plan change scored 0.1 is someone shifting to gain better career capital but where they’re less obviously focused on the most pressing problems, or where they’ve switched into an option that is less obviously higher impact than what they were planning before.

For brevity, in the remainder of this post, we’ll use the term ‘plan changes’ to refer to significant plan changes.

Number of plan changes

Our total number of plan changes as of the end of Dec 2015 is 453, and after impact-adjusting these it’s 606.6.

Here are our plan changes by year:

Here are the impact-adjusted plan changes by year, broken down by their scores:

Note that we only started collecting plan changes in 2013, but started outreach in 2011. This means the 2013 figures reflect three years of work rather than one, so our growth from 2013 to 2014 was better than it looks from this chart.

Our growth increased more in late 2015 than can be seen in the annual figures. Here is our growth by week (with plan changes we found out through our annual impact surveys amortised by week):

Causes of plan changes

We ask each person who reports a plan change “What was most significant in triggering these plan changes?”

In 2015, the most common causes of plan changes were reading our online content (42%), talking to someone in our community (20%) and one-on-one coaching (16%).

Compared with previous years, plan changes caused by online content have gone up, and the percentage of plan changes caused by our community and coaching have gone down.

The post Update on number of significant plan changes appeared first on 80,000 Hours.

Natural pandemics and new scientifically engineered pathogens could potentially kill millions or even billions of people. Moreover, future progress in synthetic biology is likely to increase the risk and severity of pandemics from engineered pathogens.

But there are promising paths to reducing these risks through regulating potentially dangerous research, improving early detection systems and developing better international emergency response plans.

In the profile we cover:

• The main reasons for and against thinking that biosecurity is a highly pressing problem.
• How to use your career to work on reducing the risks from pandemics.

Read our profile on biosecurity.

The post Why and how to use your career to work on biosecurity appeared first on 80,000 Hours.

50,000,000,000 animals are raised and slaughtered in factory farms globally each year. Most experience extreme levels of suffering over the course of their lives. But there are promising paths to improving the conditions of factory farmed animals and to reducing meat consumption.

In the profile we cover:

• The main reasons for and against thinking that factory farming is a highly pressing problem.
• How to use your career to work on ending factory farming.

Read our profile on factory farming.

The post Why and how to use your career to end factory farming 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

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What is the best career for someone whose main strengths are in visual design?

To start figuring that out we’ve released a new career review on web design.

Here’s a quick summary:

Pros

• Web designers can work on a broad range of high impact projects because they are in-demand across many types of organisations, including charities, governments and startups.
• As a backup, web designers can enter paths with good pay, like UX design ($80,000 median salary), and earn to give.

Cons

• Good design is hard to measure, which makes it hard to prove your abilities to potential employers, meaning entry and progression can be difficult.

Who should do it?

• You should consider web design if you studied graphic design or a related field; you’ve already spent several years developing web-design skills; and you are persuasive enable you to get a foot in the door when you’re starting out.
• However if you have the technical skills to do web development, we recommend you do that instead, since it wins over web design on most dimensions (salary, number of jobs, job growth rate, quality of work is easier to measure).

Read the full review.

Please comment with any important corrections or additions.

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You know how you should review your career at least once a year to make sure that you’re on the right path and set goals for the coming year?

You did that already, right?

Oh, no?

Well, in that case we’ve created a tool to make it quick and easy. Just answer the questions, and we’ll email you your answers when you’re done. There are only six key questions:

 
Once you’re done and have decided what steps to take, you can relax about your career trajectory for another 12 months!

The post Use our tool to decide whether you’re on the right career path 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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More details of the key points from the interview are below.

Summary of the interview

• Dillon’s original career plan was to go into philosophy academia – he was extremely passionate about it and couldn’t imagine doing anything else.
• He was introduced to Peter Singer and GiveWell in an Intro to Ethics class at Tufts.
• Midway through his second year at university, Dillon went to a talk at Tufts by our co-founder Will MacAskill. Will recommended to Dillon that he study Economics and/or Computer Science instead of philosophy.
• Dillon was unsure whether he would enjoy Economics and Computer Science, but he signed up for career coaching with 80,000 Hours to explore whether he should change his career plan.
• In his coaching session he was told about the End of History Illusion – that our interests change much more often than we expect them to. Thinking about how much his interests have changed in the past made him more open to trying out economics and computer science.
• As a result of this he took classes in Economics and Computer Science, enough to have a minor in both. He says underestimated how much he’d enjoy these subjects, and he’s now excited to be gaining skills and knowledge that will give him more options for having a social impact with his career.
• His plan now is to do an Economics PhD after which he’d be interested in working at the World Bank, IMF, or think tanks like RAND
• This year he applied for masters and PhDs in Economics.
• While studying abroad at Oxford, he became president of the 80,000 Hours student group there.
• When he came back to Tufts last fall, he started a new EA student group at Tufts. They’ve already run several events, including a talk by staff from MIT’s Poverty Action Lab, and they have many events lined up for this semester, including talks by Joshua Greene and Daniel Dennett.
• There’s now around eight people in leadership roles at the student group at Tufts — enough to ensure that the group will continue after he graduates at the end of this academic year.

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