What do people want more than anything else in the world?
I explored this question by running two little studies across two different populations: mechanical turk (“mturk,” n=49, all U.S.) vs. my Facebook friends (“FB,” n=111, who tend to be in the U.S.) with different approaches, me hand categorizing written responses vs. participants selecting the category that best matches what they wrote using 24 categories in random order developed from the first study, including an “other” option.
Across the two studies, 71% of free form written responses to the question of “what you want more than anything else in the entire world” fell into just these nine categories:
1. a romantic partner (17% FB vs. 6% mturk)
2. the wellbeing of my family (5% FB vs. 17% mturk)
3. happiness (7% FB vs. 15% mturk)
4. money (8% FB vs. 14% mturk)
5. a markedly positive effect on the world (18% FB vs. 0% mturk)
6. good health (8% FB vs. 6% mturk)
7. a family or children (5% FB vs. 2% mturk)
8. a job with meaning (5% FB vs. 2% mturk)
9. freedom (5% FB vs. 2% mturk)
In the Facebook version, I also asked people to come up with something they could do in the next few days to increase the chance that they eventually get this thing they most want. Surprisingly, 95% of people were able to come up with something that they thought would increase their odds! When asked when they would do this thing, they came up with that would increase their odds of getting what they most want, 75% of people said they would do this thing within the next week, and 62% said they would do it within two days!
Tentative lessons from this data:
(1) The things that people most want in the U.S. tend to fall into just a small number of basic categories: a romantic partner, wellbeing of family, happiness, money, positive impact, health, family/children, meaningful work, freedom. In the mturk study, these nine categories covered 64% of responses, and in the FB study, 78% of responses.
(2) The median time for the entire FB study was 3 minutes, so if you take 3 minutes to think, you can decide how to take action toward the things you most want.
(3) There’s a good chance you can start really soon on this strategy to increase your odds of getting what you most want (e.g., within the next couple of days or at least within a week).
(4) If you have the nine things in the list below (or almost all of them), consider yourself very lucky! You have what people want! Extract every sliver of joy and meaning from what you have while you can!
If you’d like to try this procedure yourself in an easy, step by step fashion, here’s the link to the FB version of the study: http://bit.ly/2DtQQoK
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