Today, I will provide you with knowledge on two topics.
We will discuss two very unique studies that have emerged this year, both focusing on the most common behaviors in our daily lives. One study examines your search behavior on the internet, and the other looks at sleep. Both studies have very special perspectives, which are worth exploring in detail.
Let’s start with the first study about search behavior, conducted by a team from the University of Pennsylvania. The main focus of the research is how a person’s personality traits are reflected in their search habits.
That’s right, your daily search behavior online not only reflects your thinking but also shapes your character.
This study was launched in 2021, and the initial findings were published in the journal Nature Human Behavior. The research team recruited 149 volunteers and asked them to browse Wikipedia for 15 minutes daily for 21 days, recording their search behavior.
The results revealed two distinct patterns. One group of people had a linear search behavior, progressing on a specific topic like determined hunters. These people were classified as “hunter-type” searchers. The other group had a more scattered search approach, exploring many unrelated topics at random, like someone just following the crowd, and were classified as “crowd-seeker-type” searchers.
In 2024, the study was further expanded, and the team studied search records from 480,000 users across 50 countries. The findings, published in Science Advances in October, revealed a third type of searcher, called the “dancer-type.”
These individuals also appear to search randomly across different topics, but their search behavior subtly connects different pieces of content. For example, the keywords “Su Dongpo,” “career wisdom,” and “self-healing in times of failure” may seem unrelated, but with deeper thought, they actually have subtle connections.
The study also found that these three styles of search are not just personal preferences but are influenced by cultural factors.
First, in countries with higher levels of education, users tend to be more curious and open-minded. “Crowd-seeker-type” users mostly come from these regions, and they tend to explore diverse topics without specific goals, eager to gain knowledge in an open manner. In contrast, countries with lower levels of education often have more “hunter-type” searchers, who focus on specific topics to fill knowledge gaps or solve practical problems.
Second, in societies with more gender equality, both men and women have more equal opportunities to access information. This leads to more diverse and exploratory search habits, much like “crowd-seeker-type” behavior. On the other hand, in societies with gender inequality, traditional gender roles limit women’s opportunities for learning and searching, leading them to adopt a more conservative, goal-oriented search approach, similar to “hunter-type.”
Third, the “dancer-type” search behavior is also shaped by cultural contexts. In environments that encourage creative thinking and interdisciplinary learning, individuals are more likely to exhibit flexible and creative search behavior.
In other words, your learning habits may be shaped by a larger, implicit environment.
Which of these three search habits is most recommended? Perhaps the dancer-type. We often say that the joy of learning lies in encountering knowledge by chance. That is, serendipitously discovering interesting information. Dancer-type search behavior is most likely to lead to this.
Dancers, when browsing the internet, may jump from one topic to another through hyperlinks, often unknowingly venturing far off. Researchers call this behavior “falling into the rabbit hole.” In the beginning of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice chases the White Rabbit and falls into the rabbit hole, entering a mysterious, unknown world.
It’s said that heavy “dancer-type” searchers often compete by clicking on internal hyperlinks within Wikipedia entries, seeing who can navigate from one entry to another the fastest. There is said to be a central point in this web, and that central entry is “philosophy.” If you open a Wikipedia English entry, click on the first blue link in the text, and repeat this action continuously, 97% of the time, you will eventually end up at the “philosophy” entry.
Finally, returning to search behavior itself, while search may seem a bit old-fashioned today, it remains one of the best ways to nurture curiosity and acquire knowledge.
As Professor Wan Weigang puts it, life is long, and only two things are worth spending limitless effort on: one is learning, and the other is searching. Because both are activities of the brain, which has the potential for infinite expansion. I hope you can also enjoy the pleasure of searching.
Now, let’s move on to the second study of today: the new research on sleep. This research comes from Jeremy Ney, a former macroeconomic policy strategist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Yes, this is a bank strategist researching sleep. His perspective is unique, as he studies the relationship between sleep and making money.
There are several interesting conclusions in the study:
First, from a regional perspective, areas with lower economic income tend to have more sleep deprivation. Many people used to think that higher income meant a faster pace of life and suboptimal health, which leads to sleep deprivation. But overall, the opposite is true: the poorer the area, the more likely people are to suffer from sleep deprivation.
Jeremy’s team analyzed data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in 2020 and found that people in low-income rural areas were the most likely to suffer from sleep deprivation.
For example, West Virginia is the most sleep-deprived state in the U.S., and Mingo County, located in West Virginia, has the highest sleep deprivation rate in the country. The poverty rate in Mingo County is as high as 25%, twice the national average, and its obesity rate is 10% higher than the national average. The smoking rate is three times the national average, and it also has the highest incidence of hypertension and heart disease in the state. Why is this the case? Researchers believe that economic pressure is the most important factor leading to poor sleep.
In contrast, Boulder County in Colorado is the region with the best sleep quality in the U.S. According to Jeremy’s team, Boulder County also has one of the lowest unemployment rates in Colorado, with a median household income of $92,000. It is also one of the healthiest counties in the U.S. As you can see, while we often say money can’t buy happiness, economic income may actually be linked to your sleep quality in real life.
Let’s narrow this perspective to the family level. The second conclusion from the study is that in families where the burden of child-rearing falls on one person, sleep problems are more severe.
For example, in 2020, Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands published a paper in Nature Human Behavior, collecting articles published between 2000 and 2017, with a sample size of over 1.1 million people. The conclusion was that in the U.S., U.K., and Netherlands, the number of women suffering from insomnia was higher than that of men. A significant part of the reason for insomnia was the pressure of raising children. If child-rearing responsibilities primarily fall on the father in a family, the father may also experience more severe insomnia.
From here, we can understand that, aside from individual decisions, sleep may also be influenced by social factors such as economic level and family division of labor. At the same time, sleep quality can also affect the functioning of the economy.
Jeremy’s third point is that improving the overall sleep level of society can lead to direct economic benefits.
For example, research shows that people with sleep disorders earn $2,500 less on average per year than their well-rested peers and are more likely to quit their jobs.
Moreover, studies have found that pushing back school start times to 8:30 AM or later for high schools and elementary schools could add $80 billion to the U.S. economy in the next decade.
In another example, the University of Bristol in the U.K. has tracked 14,541 pregnant women and their families in the Avon region since 1991, generating nearly thirty years of family tracking survey data. The conclusion is that if a mother’s sleep time increases by half an hour, her participation in the workforce increases by 2.5%, her working hours increase by 8.3%, and the household income increases by 3.1%.
Returning to the practical level, some regions in the U.S. have already implemented social policies to improve residents’ sleep. For example, as mentioned earlier, the CDC reports that 70% of U.S. high school students suffer from sleep deprivation. To address this issue, many states have delayed the start time for students in the morning. In 2019, California passed a law requiring all public high schools to start no earlier than 8:30 AM.
Moreover, hospital staff are also one of the groups with chronic sleep deprivation. In 2003, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) in the U.S. implemented a rule limiting the working hours of doctors to ensure their sleep and safeguard medical quality and patient safety. Specifically, residents are limited to 80 hours of work per week, with no more than 24 consecutive hours on duty, and there must be at least 8 hours of rest between shifts, with one continuous 24-hour rest period each week. Similarly, the U.S. transportation industry has related regulations protecting sleep. Truck drivers are required to limit their driving time on the road to no more than 11 hours at a time.
Previously, Fudan Development Institute published an article titled The Economics of Sleep, mentioning the research of British economist Costa Font, who studied the relationship between weekly sleep hours and employment income using data from Germany. His estimates show that every additional hour of sleep per week increases employment probability by 1.6% and weekly income by 3.4%.
In economics, there is also a concept called the “opportunity cost of sleep.” Opportunity cost refers
to the value of what you could have achieved if you had used your time differently. This is why sleep deprivation leads to productivity loss.
That’s it for today. Sleep matters in more ways than you might think.
Finally, to summarize today’s two topics:
First, how does the social environment influence search behavior? We discussed the study from the University of Pennsylvania. In short, the more open a society is, the more divergent people’s thinking becomes, leading to more scattered search behavior.
Second, the relationship between sleep and wealth. From a statistical perspective, sleep not only doesn’t cause you to miss opportunities, but it may also improve your income level. Therefore, before diving into your career, it’s important to get a good night’s sleep.
