(This article was originally published at Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, and syndicated at StatsBlogs.)
Emma Pierson writes:
I’m a statistician working at the genetics company 23andMe before pursuing a master’s in statistics at Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship. I’ve really enjoyed reading your blog, and we’ve been doing some social science research at 23andMe which I thought might be of interest. We have about half a million customers answering thousands of survey questions on everything from homosexuality to extroversion to infidelity, which as you can imagine produces an interesting dataset.
1. We found that customers who answer our survey questions in the middle of the night are significantly less happy and significantly more likely to be manic. See here and here.
2. Using genetic data, we identified 15,000 couples along with the child they had had together. We showed that couples tended to be similar — 97% of traits showed a positive correlation between woman and man, even when we controlled for race and age — although there were often intriguing exceptions.
At this point Pierson shows an info graphic that says that “punctual people,” “skiers,” “hikers,” “non-smokers,” “fast food lovers,” and “apology prone people” are more likely to marry each other, while, in contrast, “early birds” are more likely to marry “night owls,” and “human GPSs” are more likely to marry “constant wrong turners.”
She continues:
We also showed that couples who were dissimilar in terms of BMI or age tended to be less happy (even when we controlled for individual BMI + age). See here and here.
What I’d really like to see is the full list. I’m not so interested in learning that skiers and hikers are likely to marry each other, but if I could see an (organized) list of all the traits they look at, this could be interesting.
Please comment on the article here: Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science
