Behavioral Grooves Podcast

When making big decisions, people often go with what feels right - who we marry, where we live, what career we pursue. We base these decisions on our gut instinct. But what if our gut is biased, misinformed or quite simply wrong?  Economist, former Google scientist, New York Times bestselling author and friend of the show Seth Stephens-Davidowitz has mined through thousands of data sets to prove that we are, in fact, frequently making ill-informed decisions when we only trust our gut. And we are delighted to be talking to Seth again about his fantastic new book, Don't Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life. From the data, Seth has uncovered what activities make us most happy, which isn’t always the most comfortable activity. “If you're on the fence, between walking with friends, and lying on the couch watching Netflix…go on that walk…it's been proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt that that's the more likely path to happiness.”  But surprisingly there is one aspect of life that data can