andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2011 andrew_gelman_stats-2011-702 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: I took the above headline from a news article in the (London) Independent by Jeremy Laurance reporting a study by Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, James Fowler, and Bruno Frey that reportedly just appeared in the Journal of Human Genetics. One of the pleasures of blogging is that I can go beyond the usual journalistic approaches to such a story: (a) puffing it, (b) debunking it, (c) reporting it completely flatly. Even convex combinations of (a), (b), (c) do not allow what I’d like to do, which is to explore the claims and follow wherever my exploration takes me. (And one of the pleasures of building my own audience is that I don’t need to endlessly explain background detail as was needed on a general-public site such as 538.) OK, back to the genetic secret of a happy life. Or, in the words the authors of the study, a gene that “explains less than one percent of the variation in life satisfaction.” “The genetic secret” or “less than one percent of the variation”? Perhaps the secre
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 Or, in the words the authors of the study, a gene that “explains less than one percent of the variation in life satisfaction. [sent-6, score-0.69]
2 took responses to a question on life satisfaction from a survey that was linked to genetic samples. [sent-13, score-0.642]
3 You can have either 0, 1, or 2 alleles of the gene in question. [sent-16, score-0.68]
4 The more alleles you have, the happier you’ll be (on average): The percentage of respondents describing themselves as “very satisfied” with their lives is 37% for people with 0 alleles, 38% for those with one allele, and 41% for those with two alleles. [sent-18, score-0.58]
5 People with 2 alleles are 4 percentage points (more precisely, 3. [sent-21, score-0.461]
6 raises the average likelihood of being very satisfied with one’s life by 8. [sent-33, score-0.579]
7 Here’s the summary from Stephen Adams, medical correspondent of the Daily Telegraph: The researchers found that 69 per cent of people who had two copies of the gene said they were either satisfied (34) or very satisfied (35) with their life as a whole. [sent-40, score-1.377]
8 But among those who had no copy of the gene, the proportion who gave either of these answers was only 38 per cent (19 per cent ‘very satisfied’ and 19 per cent ‘satisfied’). [sent-41, score-0.459]
9 article, 46% of people who had two copies of the gene described themselves as satisfied and 41% described themselves as very satisfied. [sent-44, score-0.714]
10 Holding all else constant and changing the 5HTT gene of all subjects from zero to one long allele would increase the reporting of being very satisfied with one’s life in this population by about 8. [sent-67, score-1.012]
11 - They report (in Table 5) that whites have higher life satisfaction responses than blacks but lower numbers of alleles, on average. [sent-75, score-0.617]
12 All I can think of is that the difference between 0 alleles and 2 alleles corresponds to an average difference of 0. [sent-80, score-1.121]
13 “the 5HTT gene explains less than one percent of the variation in life satisfaction. [sent-92, score-0.745]
14 Let’s do a quick variance calculation: - Mean and sd of life satisfaction responses (on the 1-5 scale) among people with 0 alleles: 4. [sent-96, score-0.766]
15 8 - Mean and sd of life satisfaction responses (on the 1-5 scale) among people with 2 alleles: 4. [sent-98, score-0.674]
16 16 on a 1-5 scale ain’t nothing (it’s approximately the same as the average difference in life satisfaction, comparing whites and blacks), especially given that most people are in the 4 and 5 categories. [sent-108, score-0.55]
17 We all know people who appear satisfied with their lives but don’t seem so happy, but the presumption is that, in general, things associated with more life satisfaction are also associated with happiness. [sent-146, score-0.804]
18 ” This one, also from Add Health, reports: “Having one or both MAOA alleles of the low efficiency type raises the average likelihood of having credit card debt by 14%. [sent-155, score-0.744]
19 I don’t know if they’ve looked at credit card debt and life satisfaction together. [sent-158, score-0.668]
20 It’s certainly plausible that this gene could be linked to reported life satisfaction (maybe, for example, it influences the way that people respond to survey questions). [sent-176, score-0.851]
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