Everybody Lies: What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are

Perfect for fans of Freakonomics and The Tipping Point. Insightful, surprising and with ground-breaking revelations about our society, Everybody Lies exposes the secrets embedded in our internet searches, with a foreword by bestselling author Steven Pinker. Everybody lies, to friends, lovers, doctors, pollsters - and to themselves. In Internet searches, however, people confess their secrets - about sexless marriages, mental health problems, even racist views. Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, an economist and former Google data scientist, shows that this could just be the most important dataset ever collected. This huge database of secrets - unprecedented in human history - offers astonishing, even revolutionary, insights into humankind. Anxiety, for instance, does not increase after a terrorist attack. Crime levels drop when a violent film is released. And racist searches are no higher in Republican areas than in Democrat ones. Time and time again, data shows that the world works in precisely the opposite way to what we would expect. Stephens-Davidowitz reveals information we can use to change our culture, and the questions we're afraid to ask that might be essential to our health - both emotional and physical. Insightful, funny, and always surprising, Everybody Lies exposes the biases and secrets embedded deeply within us, at a time when things are harder to predict than ever. All of us are touched by big data every day, and its influence is multiplying.