Everybody Lies

"Everybody lies. We lie about how many drinks we had on the way home. We lie about how often we go to gym, how much the new shoes cost, whether we read that book. We call in sick when we’re not. We say we’ll be in touch when we won’t. We say it’s not about you when it really is. We say we love someone when we don’t. We say we’re happy while in the dumps. We lie to friends, to bosses, to our kids. We lie to parents, to doctors, to husbands, to wives. But worst of all we lie to ourselves."

Social media makes our lying habit even worse; we have no incentive to tell the truth on Facebook, in fact there is a large incentive to make ourselves look good as our online presence is not anonymous after all. On Facebook world, we show our cultivated selves. If you look at Facebook, the average adult seems to be happily married, vacationing in Caribbean, and perusing the Atlantic. In the real world, a lot of people are angry, on supermarket checkout lines, peeking on the National Enquirer. In the Facebook world, every young adult is at a cool party Saturday night. In the real world, most are home alone, binge-watching shows on Netflix.

Google world is different. I am guessing all of us occasionally typed things into that search box that reveal a behavior or thought that we would hesitate to admit. In fact, the evidence is overwhelming that a large majority of Americans, for instance, search for porn more than they search for weather. This is difficult to reconcile with the survey data since only about 25% of men and 8% of women admit they watch pornography.

There is a certain honesty in Google searches when looking at the way this search engine automatically tries to complete the queries. Its suggestions are based on the most common searches that other people have made. So auto-complete clues us in to what people are Googling. In fact, auto-complete can be a bit misleading. Google won’t suggest certain words it deems inappropriate. This means autocomplete tells us that people’s Google thoughts are less racy than they actually are.

If you type “why is …” the first two Google auto-completes are “why is the sky blue?” why is it rated r?” suggesting these are the two most common ways to complete this search. The third: “why is the world going to end?” (go ahead and try :)) Google auto-complete can get disturbing. Today, if you type in “is it normal to want to…” the first suggestion is “cheat.” If you type in “is it normal to want to kill …”, the first suggestion is “your ex.”

Even though Google presents itself as a source from which we can seek information directly, the search window also serves as a confessional when people type “I regret having children.” There are thousands of searches every year, for example for “I hate cold weather”, “people are annoying”, and I am sad”.

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz says he was going to call his book How Big Is My Penis? - most searched Google topic by men -, but instead decided to go with Everybody Lies. In his book, Davidowitz looks at Google and Facebook data for evidence of underlying realities. Surveys can sometimes offer inaccurate outcomes, when the people being queried do not provide honest answers. But one can look at what people enter into Google to get a sense of possible trends. The everyday act of typing a word or phrase into a compact rectangular white box leaves a small trace of truth that, when multiplied by millions, eventually reveals profound realities. Looking for queries on jokes involving the N-Word, for example, turns out to yield a telling portrait of anti-black sentiment, which also correlates with lower black life expectancy and pro-Trump vote totals in certain geographies. 

There’s lies, damned lies and then there are statistics. Do the lies get bigger as the data-sets grow, one must wonder. The availability of vast sums of new data not only allows researchers to make better predictions, but offers them never before available tools that can give insights that direct questioning through surveys never could. 

Although, we lie to friends, lovers, doctors, surveys, and ourselves, with Google we share embarrassing information, about sexless marriages, mental health issues, insecurities, and animosities against other races. Closets are not just repositories of fantasies. Google tells us, when it comes to sex; people keep many secrets – about how much they are having it, for example. Americans report using far more condoms than are sold every year. Men google more questions about their sexual organ than any other body part. They conduct more searches on how to make it bigger. Men’s top Googled concern about steroid isn’t whether they may damage their health but whether taking them might diminish the size of their penis.  

Some of the data collected and shared by Davidowitz is downright disturbing at times; Racist jokes rise about 30% on Martin Luther King Day in the US, and in the recent Republican primaries, regions that supported Donald Trump in the largest numbers made the most Google searches for “nigger”. Data shows that there are five expressions in particular that one should beware of when reviewing applications for loans: “God”, “promise”, “will pay”, “hospital” and “thank you”. Making promises “is a sure sign that someone will … not do something”. “God” is particularly bad news.

Davidowitz presents data in a manner most people can understand and also be humored and at times shocked by. I will never think about strawberry pop tarts without thinking about hurricanes. There are many facts waiting to be harvested from the big data. Data may work as the truth serum we all need, it can be used to uncover causal linkages in addition to mere correlations. Just the possibilities seem endless…