Everybody Lies

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

by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

Number of pages: 352

BBB Library: Psychology and Strengths, Technology and Globalization

ISBN: 978-0062390851

About the Author

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz is a New York Times op-ed contributor, a visiting lecturer at The Wharton School, and a former Google data scientist. He received a BA in philosophy from Stanford, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa, and a PhD in economics from Harvard. His research—which uses new, big data sources to uncover hidden behaviors and attitudes—has appeared in the Journal of Public Economics and other prestigious publications. He lives in New York City.

Editorial Review

Everybody Lies offers fascinating, surprising, and sometimes laugh-out-loud insights into everything from economics to ethics to sports to race, gender and more, all drawn from the world of big data. What percentage of white voters didn’t vote for Barack Obama because he’s black? Does where you go to school affect how successful you are in life? Do parents secretly favor boy children over girls? Do violent films affect the crime rate? Can you beat the stock market? Investigating these questions and a host of others, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz offers revelations that can help us understand ourselves and our lives better.

Book Reviews

“A whirlwind tour of the modern human psyche using search data as its guide. . . . 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.” — The Economist

“The book is 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

“Stephens-Davidowitz, a former data scientist at Google, has spent the last four years poring over Internet search data. In addition to anonymous information about Google searches, he has “downloaded all of Wikipedia, pored through Facebook profiles,” and even received the complete (though anonymous) search and video view data” – New York Post

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