Our life is built around coordinating efforts with others. This usually involves incentivizing others to do things, and sustaining our relationship with them. Using the wrong incentives backfires: it lowers effort and tarnishes our relationships. But what constitutes a ‘wrong’ incentive? And...

We explore the influence of genetic variation on subjective well-being by employing a twin design and genetic association study. In a nationally representative twin sample, we first show that 33% of the variation in life satisfaction is explained by genetic variation. Although previous studies...