Gottman's Divorce Predictions
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A story about Dr. Gottman's remarkable ability to predict divorce through observing couples' interactions.
"Dr. Gottman is the love doctor - literally. This guy studied marriages and his claim to fame is that he could watch a couple for 15 minutes having a conversation and predict with 90+% certainty if they were going to end up divorced or stay together.
He had something called the Love Lab, which was his research lab where he would bring couples in. He would say 'talk about X' and he knew that X would lead into a conversation where a little bit of resentment would come up. He could watch how they handled it and in just 15 minutes predict with 90% accuracy.
If you let just a normal marriage counselor or average person on the street watch that same 15 minutes, their accuracy was about 50% - just like flipping a coin. But this guy had 90% accuracy because he had done this so much and was able to identify what are the things to look for that would cause a couple to break up."
Shaan Puri
Host of MFM
Shaan Puri is the Chairman and Co-Founder of The Milk Road. He previously worked at Twitch as a Senior Director of Product, Mobile Gaming, and Emerging Markets. He also attended Duke University.