Findings to date

Update 2    5/22/25

We just crossed 500 people, so we actually have enough data to find some interesting stuff now.

Here's an example: Anxiety looks different as we get older. The plots below show everyone so far, projected onto a 4-factor non-negative matrix factorization. (You know what that is, right?) Basically four "underlying components" of anxiety. The average for each group is plotted as the larger circles. (Take the baseline survey if you're already lost). Overall, younger people tend to report having anxiety characterized by "fidgetyness" or "racing thoughts". Older people tend to have less of that, and a little more fatigue / lack of motivation. BUT, in a more general sense, we see a small shift toward better mental health as people get older and/or coupled/married.

Nice.

First read-out    3/22/25

Here's a result from what we've collected so far (n=200 people). These are the correlations between people's answers to the first 15 questions. For a given pair of questions, a lighter square means the answers tend to positively correlate, a darker square means the answers tend to negatively correlate.

So far we see correlations where we'd expect them (people who are older are more likely to be coupled / have kids, people who self-describe as autistic tend to disagree with the statement "I regularly make new friends"). Is this an amazing result? Well - yeah, kind of. People seem to be willing to come to this random ass website and answer questions about themselves honestly. Also apparently people who like horror movies don't eat healthy. So yeah, eat healthier, horror movie enthusiasts.