What do People think About?

Abstract

Conscious thoughts are fundamental to the human experience, yet they remain remarkably understudied. Using randomized daily surveys, subjects report their thoughts along with perceived cause, concurrent activity, and happiness. The data set reveals patterns in what people think about and why, which core relationships play center stage in people’s minds, people’s occupying wants and needs, and the objects of people’s love, hate, and worry. Thoughts explain more of happiness than what people are doing, demographics, and socio-economic status combined. We explore individual-level heterogeneity, identifying thought patterns in different clusters of thinkers. Finally, we conclude by showing a tradeoff between productive thoughts and consumptive thoughts, akin to a labor-leisure tradeoff, suggesting the presence of an economic thought-allocation problem in the mind.