Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are

Author: Steven Pinker

Using the insightful analysis of The Signal and the Noise and the enlightening iconoclasm of Think Like a Freak, this book offers an intriguing, insightful, and humorous look at what the enormous amounts of information that are instantly available to us today can reveal about who we are and the world we live in—as long as we ask the right questions.

People using the internet in the early twenty-first century will generate eight trillion gigabytes of data by the end of a typical day. We may learn a great lot about ourselves from this astounding quantity of historical data, including our underlying fears, wants, and behaviours as well as the conscious and unconscious choices we make. We may learn astounding things about the human mind that were incomprehensible less than twenty years ago, from the sublime to the banal.

Drawing on large data, Everybody Lies provides intriguing, unexpected, and even belly-laugh-inducing insights into a wide range of topics, including race, sex, gender, ethics, sports, economics, and more. What proportion of white voters abstained from voting for Barack Obama due to his race? Does one's educational background affect their chances of success in life? Do parents secretly prefer their boys over their girls? Do violent films impact the rate of crime? The stock market: can you beat it? Who is more self-conscious about sex, men or women? How often do we lie about our sexual lives?

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz explores these and many other problems and provides insights that might improve our understanding of ourselves and our lives. He illustrates in intriguing and often humorous ways the degree to which the whole world is, in fact, a lab by drawing on research and experiments on how humans really live and think. He explores the power of this digital truth serum and its deeper potential, revealing deeply ingrained biases, information that can be used to change our culture, and questions we're afraid to ask that may be crucial to our emotional and physical health. His conclusions range from strange but true to thought-provoking to disturbing. Big data is affecting all of us on a daily basis, and its impact is growing. Everybody Lies pushes us to reconsider how we see the world and ourselves.