How People Rate Pizza, Jobs and

Relationships Is Surprisingly
Predictive of Their Behavior
Researchers are perplexed as to why inner feelings
about life and love predict our actions better than
the best social science
Sara Novak • October 3, 2022

Credit: MicroStockHub/Getty Images

We’re constantly being asked how we feel about nearly every aspect of our
lives. Pop-up questionnaires collect data about common experiences like
doctor’s visits, restaurant meals or trips to the cell phone store. And they
can even pry into bigger life questions. How do you feel on a scale of, say, 1
to 10 about a job, a spouse, your health.

Despite the ubiquitous presence of “like” scales everywhere we look, such

ratings perplex scientists because they are wholly subjective and so thought
to be of unclear relevance and accuracy. Scientists, as a result, have been
slow to take stock of these surveys.

A new study published October 3 in the journal Proceedings of the National

Academy of Sciences (PNAS) has found that human feelings can accurately
be expressed numerically and have more predictive power for how we
behave than formal studies of socioeconomic factors like household income
and employment status. “These ‘made up’ numbers actually carry a huge
amount of information, even though we don’t know how humans achieve
this,” says study co-author Andrew Oswald, a professor of economics and
behavioral science at the University of Warwick.

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Oswald and colleagues gathered information from three large data sets of
nearly 700,000 people in Germany, Australia and the United Kingdom.
Participants were asked annually over a three-decade period how they felt
on a numerical scale about their job, spouse, health and home. Using the
data collected, researchers constructed statistical models to show how
people felt and the actions they took as a result of their reported feelings.
The study found that ratings of life satisfaction had a direct linear
relationship to actions people subsequently take. “The paper shows the link
between the feelings I report today and my actions tomorrow,” says
Oswald.

Participants who rated their job satisfaction as a 2 out of 7, for example,

had a 25 percent probability of quitting their job in the next quarter. Those
who rated their job satisfaction a 6 out of 7 had only a 10 percent
probability of quitting. The same was true across other measures like
marriage, health and housing. Similarly, those who rated their marriages
lower were more likely to get divorced, and those who rated their health
positively were less likely to end up in the hospital.

Previous research has also shown that data about feelings predict human
outcomes, but not in such a linear fashion; the degree of satisfaction or lack
thereof served as a good predictor of future actions. For example, a 2001
study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry found that those who
numerically rated their lives lower had a higher risk of suicide over a 20-
year period. A PNAS study co-authored by Oswald in 2012, found that life
satisfaction in adolescence was correlated with higher reported incomes in
adulthood.

Additionally, human measurement of feelings goes beyond psychology and

extends into the realm of economics. Economists have previously been
critical of feelings data because they deemed them unscientific and
unreliable. Instead they use metrics like gross domestic product (GDP) and
interest rates to predict human behaviors. But this new research shows that
it may be time to more readily embrace feelings in economics. “Our work
provides scientific evidence that using data on feelings is extremely
valuable and we need to bring it into the center of economics and social
policy making,” Oswald says. This study showed that socioeconomic factors
—including household income, relative income, employment status,
homeownership status, household size, number of children, marital status
and education—had a lesser probability of predicting human behavior than
data on feelings.

But while the study has shown that numbers can quantify feelings,
researchers are still a bit perplexed as to why estimates of seemingly
subjective feelings can be such good predictors of future actions. According
to Oswald, a number of factors could be at play. Humans are well versed in
comparative thinking and have the ability to scale their own life satisfaction
against that of their neighbors. “If you’ve seen a huge mountain, you know
whether or not you’re living next to a hill,” Oswald says. We’re also
accustomed to using measuring devices for other aspects of life like
temperature, distance and weight, so it shouldn’t be too surprising that
we’re able to measure our feelings in a similarly accurate way for life-
defining events such as relationships and a career. “Humans are somehow
able to look inside themselves and know intuitively how to scale their
feelings with others so that they can come up with numbers that are truly
meaningful,” Oswald says.

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Study co-author Caspar Kaiser, a research fellow at the Wellbeing Research

Center at the University of Oxford, says that it may also be because we
exercise these mental muscles every day. We communicate our feelings all
the time, and we do it in a scaled fashion. This could be why it comes out
in the data more accurately than in objective markers. “These days we’re
asked to rate nearly everything from movies to restaurants to podcasts and
this is just an extension of something we’re already doing,” he says.

Ori Heffetz, an economics professor at Cornell University and the Hebrew

University of Jerusalem, who was not involved in the study, says that this
research shows that feelings data shouldn’t be underestimated even if
they’re more difficult to study. “As economists it’s easy to count money but
we need to study what’s important, not just what’s easy. Scientists who
ignore this do so at their own risk,” he says. “If you want to understand
people’s behavior, you have to understand their perceptions, feelings and
expectations about their own reality.”

Looking ahead, Kaiser hopes that this same data can be studied in lower-
income countries so that it can be applied universally to places with varied
levels of economic development. But more than anything else he’s
interested in studying why feelings work so well. “While we know that
humans have a remarkable ability to encode their feelings along a cardinal
scale, we still don’t know for sure how it’s done,” he says.

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