Use It Too Much and Lose It? The Effect of Working Hours on Cognitive Ability [pdf]

https://www.melbourneinstitute.com/downloads/working_paper_series/wp2016n07.pdf

by analyst74 • 10 years ago

179 43 10 years ago

melbourneinstitute.com

dang• 10 years ago

Url changed from http://www.kansascity.com/news/nation-world/world/article976..., which points to this.

throwanem• 10 years ago

Why are there missing figures and tables? Is this a prepublication version that got uploaded and linked by mistake?

aab03• 10 years ago

Preprints are very common in economics. Their papers can float around for years before being 'published'. The figures & tables are at the end of the PDF.

ultramancool2• 10 years ago

I didn't read it in detail, so forgive me if this was accounted for, but I feel like this would be hard to control as people who are not working at all or working extremely long hours may not be as capable as those working a normal or slightly lower than normal numbers of hours to begin with.

For example, if I can get a job and make enough money in a shorter number of hours, I'm probably smarter than the person who can't get or a job or the person who has to work 65+ hours a week, even if accounting for degree or similar.

bunnymancer• 10 years ago

Intelligence and cognitive ability are not equatable.

ultramancool2• 10 years ago

Sure, 'smarter' was a poor choice of words, but the point is I suspect there may be a correlation between general cognitive performance and job attainment.

forgetsusername• 10 years ago

if I can get a job and make enough money in a shorter number of hours, I'm probably smarter than the person who can't get or a job or the person who has to work 65+ hours a week

This may or my not be true. I'm certainly not convinced; the smartest people I know work the longest hours.

johnfn• 10 years ago

I'm not convinced by this line of reasoning. Some of the highest paid jobs - Doctor, lawyer - have the longest hours. On the other hand, part time jobs are often minimum wage and low paying jobs (Walmart etc).

marcosdumay• 10 years ago

Hum... And the study concluded that both extremes correlate with lower cognitive ability.

thmcmahon• 10 years ago

It's mentioned in the abstract: 'We deal with the potential endogeneity of the decision of how many hours to work by using the instrumental variable estimation technique.'

Essentially they use 'instruments' which are just other variables to control for this issue. Page 7 has the variables that they're using.

xlayn2• 10 years ago

To me seems logical: As we get older more and more energy would be used on preservation (read it as fix damage and less efficient process as result of age), therefore shrinking/eliminating everything not being used it's necessary.

Edit: TL;DR: From the PDF conslussions:

it is found that working hours up to 25–30 hours per week have a positive impact on cognition for males depending on the measure and up to 22–27 hours for females. After that, working hours have a negative impact on cognitive functioning.

Noseshine7• 10 years ago

    > To me seems logical: As we get older...

Since the paper only looked at people above 40, I don't see how you can make any such conclusion. There is nothing about younger people. They may do better - they may also be the same or worse. They were not even included.

xlayn2• 10 years ago

Nice catch, there are two parts in trying to support my theory, first included in my post:

As we get older more and more energy would be used on preservation (read it as fix damage and less efficient process as result of age), therefore shrinking/eliminating everything not being used it's necessary.

The second is an entry on how our bodies are machines oriented to try to avoid wasting energy... or better said preserving it... for that part my canonical reference would be the Algernon argument:

http://www.gwern.net/Drug%20heuristics

Noseshine7• 10 years ago

The TL;DR summary from the abstract:

    > For working hours up to around 25 hours a week, an increase in working hours
    > has a positive impact on cognitive functioning. However, when working hours
    > exceed 25 hours per week, an increase in working hours has a negative impact
    > on cognition.

No significant difference between women and men.

Important detail: They only looked at people 40 or older, so no conclusions should be attempted based on this paper alone about differences between older and younger groups (above/below 40). Looking at their tables at the end of the paper I also didn't see any stratification by age within the sampled group, they only listed the sample size for three (15 years wide) age groups (Table II).

tjic• 10 years ago

No significant difference between women and men.

The article crisply called out differences between men and women, on page 13.

If your argument is that these differences are not significant, could you point to the part of the paper that justifies that statement?

kiliancs• 10 years ago

From the abstract:

"Interestingly, there is no statistical difference in the effects of working hours on cognitive functioning between men and women."

Swizec• 10 years ago

So is it okay to work more than 25 hours if I'm not Australian and/or not older than 40?

bernardlunn• 10 years ago

I doubt Australianess is a factor but then IANAS I Am Not A Scientist.

leshow• 10 years ago

no conclusions should be drawn from a single study period, and especially considering this was survey data.

incongruity• 10 years ago

Not entirely - the work hours were self reported but there were actual, validated measures used to assess cognition. At least that's what the abstract said.

Noseshine7• 10 years ago

    > no conclusions should be drawn from a single study period

I didn't see the point in pointing out the obvious - I thought that's as annoying as on reddit's /r/science the inevitable single-sentence comment "correlation is not causation" for no reason whatsoever (i.e. when nobody made that claim). I pointed out the age threshold because there was a comment (of only 6 or 7 total at that point) that attempted to draw the conclusion that older people are doing worse.

aab03• 10 years ago

This is one of the most unconvincing instruments I've ever seen in an economics paper. They don't even try to justify why variables like 'parents alive' (!), 'other public benefits' (!!), 'owning your own house' (!!!), or 'number of children' or 'work experience' (!!!!) are all causally independent of intelligence. There's no way these form a valid instrument allowing causal inference.

Hey, why not throw in education or grades while you're at it, after all, "The validity of the variables used to generate exclusion restrictions needs to be investigated in future research", since that would be as valid an instrumental variable as any of the others...

(I also object to the media framing this as an argument for 3-day work weeks. If cognitive performance peaked at 3-days, employee performance could still be way worse due to the few hours split up, in addition to the economic overhead for businesses of having many part-timers.)

kpil• 10 years ago

I'm not convinced about the low optimum.

There seems to be a clear correlation between employment and ability, but then they bend the data into a model that seems to exaggerate the differences between >35 and <35 cohorts.

I have worked to much to have energy to read the details, but if the "unemployed" group does not include retired people, then the causality might be in the other direction...

gexla• 10 years ago

I scanned this, but didn't catch where it defines what work is. I'm probably taking this paper out of context of what it's meant for. These sorts of things never seem to define work though. This is important for situations where you never have to leave the home to do your work. Is reading considered work? How about brushing my teeth? Does anyone actually do more work over 40 hours in the office than someone who would do the same tasks from home?

acd• 10 years ago

Here is a study from the game industry where game scores are compared to coding crunch. http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/PaulTozour/20150120/234443/Th...

There is GDP per hour worked. http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=PDB_LV

Loic• 10 years ago

This game industry study is a really really nice study. They take the time to analyse the effects of crunch/overtime at different levels and if voluntary or not. The first time I see such nice study for programming/creative work. We had many aggregate studies or on production lines, but not so much for creative work.

Really a recommended read.

Klockan• 10 years ago

I'd wager that this is mostly due to mental exhaustion making people unable to devote a lot of effort to these tests and that it will go away after a few weeks of vacation.

Use It Too Much and Lose It? The Effect of Working Hours on Cognitive Ability [pdf]

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