New releases

Our research on how to find a job you love

Blog post by · Published December 18th, 2012

Note: this post has been superseded by our job satisfaction page and supporting research page.

Many people aren’t as satisfied as they could be with their careers. This is a big problem: not only is the person less happy, they also end up making less difference in society. The even bigger problem is that people don’t seem to know what to do about this – how to find a job that they’ll find satisfying. There’s a lot of psychology research on happiness that could be really useful, but people don’t seem to be aware of it or at least aren’t applying it. So we decided to start collecting together the research that seems most useful to job satisfaction, and explaining how it applies to your career decisions.

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How to judge your chances of success

Blog post by · Published December 16th, 2012

You want to make a difference. This means being as successful as possible in whatever high-impact path you pursue. In recent posts, I raised a worry that we might overestimate our chances of success. But at the same time we don’t want to underestimate them: something we do have reason to think we’re better than average at something.

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3 Ways to Advance Science

Blog post by · Published December 15th, 2012

There are three ways to contribute to scientific progress. The direct way is to conduct a good scientific study and publish the results. The indirect way is to help others make a direct contribution. Journal editors, university administrators and philanthropists who fund research contribute to scientific progress in this second way. A third approach is to marry the first two and make a scientific advance that itself expedites scientific advances. The full significance of this third way is commonly overlooked.

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Christmas gifts, goats and cash-transfer charities

Blog post by · Published December 12th, 2012

It’s getting closer to Christmas, and we’re running out of time to get presents for friends and family. It can be hard to work out what presents people will actually enjoy. An increasingly popular option is to make a donation on behalf of someone else as a present. What’s the best way to do that? Does it involve goats? You might be interested in Giving What We Can’s gift cards that let you donate to the world’s most effective charities .

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Want to be successful? Know your odds.

Blog post by · Published December 2nd, 2012

If you want to make a difference in your career, you need to think not just about which jobs have the most impact, but which jobs you’ve got the best chances of success in. This latter point can be easily neglected. It’s all very well working for an incredibly high impact cause, but if you do a rubbish job you won’t make much difference. Judging your chances of success is hard. Knowing the odds: the average person’s chances of success, is a good place to start.

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Do you think you’re better than average?

Blog post by · Published November 27th, 2012

Most people think they’re better than the average person: that they’re smarter, more likeable, more attractive. This tendency to think of ourselves as better than average is a well-established bias. But if we need to do this to feel better about ourselves, who cares? The problem is that we’ll also overestimate our chances of being successful. And if you want to work out where to make the most difference, you need to have a realistic idea of where your chances of success are best.

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Is microcredit mostly hype?

Blog post by · Published November 25th, 2012

Microcredit has become one of the most popular ideas in charity. 2005 was named the Year of Microcredit.The microcredit charity Kiva has over 800,000 lenders, the highest possible rating from Charity Navigator, and was endorsed by Oprah… The 2006 Nobel Committee boldly claimed that microcredit “must play a major part” in ending global poverty.

Recently, however, criticism of microfinance has been growing. And that’s a good thing, because it’s far from proven that microfinance, on average, has any positive effects at all.

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Triumphs of intuition

Blog post by · Published November 21st, 2012

Paramedics appear to make good, fast decisions based on “gut feeling”: knowing what to do without knowing how you know. Along a similar vein, chess grandmasters are able to identify and decide on the best moves incredibly rapidly, moves which mediocre players may not even spot at all.

But this ability to make astoundingly accurate judgements in the blink of an eye isn’t limited to experts. We all do it every day: when we judge what some else wants from their facial expressions, or catch a ball without doing any complex physics calculation. How are these triumphs of intuition possible?

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Why don’t people help others more? – part 2

Blog post by · Published November 18th, 2012

In part 1, I talked about some ways in which we might motivate people to be more altruistic. Providing a personal connection with the victim and appealing to a someone’s emotional responses seem to help. So too can instilling a sense of responsibility to help others, and an understanding that doing so is not futile.

All these observations are incredibly valuable. But I think there’s more to understanding why people don’t help others more, despite the fact they may believe in doing so in principle. A huge factor here is the behaviour of others. Most people appear to have a strong tendency not to want to help more than the other people around them.

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Why don’t people help others more? – part 1

Blog post by · Published November 16th, 2012

As Peter Singer writes in his book The Life You Can Save, “[t]he world would be a much simpler place if one could bring about social change merely by making a logically consistent moral argument.” Many people might agree that a social change movement is noble, yet don’t want to do anything about it. Why not? Why don’t people help others more?

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Interview with Brian Tomasik

Blog post by · Published November 10th, 2012

Brian Tomasik is a member of 80,000 Hours who has spent many years thinking and writing essays about how to most effectively reduce suffering in the world. Research Director Robert Wiblin sat down with Brian (metaphorically) to learn about his intellectual journey and at times unusual conclusions.

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What’s your true impact?

Blog post by · Published November 6th, 2012

We often confuse our true impact with what we do directly. Instead of focusing on what you do directly, ask yourself what would have happened if I hadn’t been there? The real difference we make is the difference between what happened because of us, and and what would have happened otherwise. Thinking about change like that opens up lots of new ways to make the world a better place.

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Find the gate

Blog post by · Published November 4th, 2012

There’s an easy way to tell a smart dog from a stupid dog. There’s a fence in front of you, and behind it is a delicious juicy bone. You’re starting to salivate just thinking about how amazing it will feel between your teeth. Now you have a choice. If you’re a stupid dog, you’ll run at the fence, stand in front of the bone and start to bark. If you’re a smart dog, you’ll look along the fence, find the gate, run happily through it and devour your prize.

Humans also have a hard time finding the gate. It’s easy to get preoccupied with the bone. It can look so inviting that you don’t take the time to look around, take things in, and choose the best path. Sometimes that path is indirect. It often means getting other people involved. But by spending the time, you can have far more impact…

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Should we stop interviewing people?

Blog post by · Published November 1st, 2012

Most employers rely heavily on interviews in recruiting. However, research suggests that the interview process is far from perfect. This is pretty worrying when we think about how much difference hiring the best candidate for an important job can make. It might sound crazy, but maybe we should stop interviewing people…

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Sunk Costs in Careers

Blog post by · Published October 31st, 2012

In my last post we looked at sunk costs. We saw that having paid for something distorts how you think about it later on.

This is a very common experience in career decisions. You might be in a degree course you don’t want to be on, or climbing the ladder in a company you aren’t sure about, or find out that the dream job you’ve spent years working for isn’t as good as expected. It is only by forgetting these sunk costs that you can make the right career decisions and have as much impact as you can.

But if you find yourself in this situation what can you do?

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