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.
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.
Industry Reviews
Time and again my preconceptions about my country and my species were turned upside-down by Stephens-Davidowitz's discoveries -- Steven Pinker, author of The Better Angels of Our Nature
Absorbing and impassioned ... as an introduction to our fascinating new universe of data, Everybody Lies is hard to beat * Financial Times *
Everybody Lies is an astoundingly clever and mischievous exploration of what big data tells us about everyday life. Seth Stephens-Davidowitz is as good a data storyteller as I have ever met -- Steven Levitt, co-author, Freakonomics
Move over Freakonomics. Move over Moneyball. This brilliant book is the best demonstration yet of how big data plus cleverness can illuminate and then move the world. Read it and you'll see life in a new way -- Lawrence Summers, President Emeritus of Harvard University
A whirlwind tour of the modern human psyche ... The empirical findings in Everybody Lies are so intriguing that the book would be a page-turner even if it were structured as a mere laundry list * Economist *
Everybody Lies relies on big data to rip the veneer of what we like to think of as our civilized selves. A book that is fascinating, shocking, sometimes horrifying, but above all, revealing -- Tim Wu, author of The Attention Merchants
Freakonomics on steroids - this book shows how big data can give us surprising new answers to important and interesting questions. Seth Stephens-Davidowitz brings data analysis alive in a crisp, witty manner, providing a terrific introduction to how big data is shaping social science -- Raj Chetty, Professor of Economics at Stanford University
A sobering guide to how much of ourselves we're putting online and what private companies might do with that information -- Helen Lewis * New Statesman 'Books of the Year' *
Everybody Lies is a spirited and enthralling examination of the data of our lives. Drawing on a wide variety of revelatory sources, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz will make you cringe, chuckle, and wince at the people you thought we were -- Christian Rudder, author of Dataclysm
A tour de force - a well-written and entertaining journey through big data that, along the way, happens to put forward an important new perspective on human behaviour itself -- Peter Orszag, Managing Director, Lazard
Brimming with intriguing anecdotes and counterintuitive facts, Stephens-Davidowitz does his level best to help usher in a new age of human understanding, one digital data point at a time -- Fortune, Best New Business Books
Stephens-Davidowitz, a former data scientist at Google, has spent the last four years poring over Internet search data . . . What he found is that Internet search data might be the Holy Grail when it comes to understanding the true nature of humanity * New York Post *
It's a wonderful book, but I would say that, wouldn't I? -- Danny Doyle
Stephens-Davidowitz censures academics and other researchers for ignoring the largest data set ever collected, and he is probably not overstating it when he claims that the continuing study of these searches "will radically expand our understanding of mankind". This undemanding book is a useful first step towards that knowledge' -- Oliver Thring * Sunday Times *
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz in his book "Everybody Lies," tackles the discrepancy between the ideal version of ourselves we present to the world via social media and the confessions that we would never post there -- Judy Ketteler * International New York Times *
