Google Searches May Be the Best Measure of Human Nature Yet | Seth Stephens-Davidowitz | Big Think

Google Searches May Be the Best Measure of Human Nature Yet

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Seth Stephens-Davidowitz has a sneaking suspicion that everybody lies. Instead, we seem to be far more honest with a website than with each other. The things that people type into the Google search bar, Stephens-Davidowitz says, reveal far more about a person than any in-depth interviewer could ever dream of. Even how racist someone can be. What's alarming is that prior to the 2008 election, Stephens-Davidowitz saw a big uptick in racist searches coming from alarming places. He had expected the South to make perhaps a portion of these searches, but he was shocked to see the searches coming from Michigan, Pennsylvania, and more. And to cap that off, most of those searches were hardly fringe searches: they matched the amount of bigger-name searches like Lakers, migraines, and The Daily Show.

Stephens-Davidowitz is the author of Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are.

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SETH STEPHENS-DAVIDOWITZ:

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz has used data from the internet, particularly Google searches, to get new insights into the human psyche. A book summarizing his research, Everybody Lies, was published in May 2017 by HarperCollins.

Seth has used Google searches to measure racism, self-induced abortion, depression, child abuse, hateful mobs, the science of humor, sexual preference, anxiety, son preference, and sexual insecurity, among many other topics.

He worked for one-and-a-half years as a data scientist at Google and is currently a contributing op-ed writer for the New York Times. He is designing and teaching a course about his research at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, where he will be a visiting lecturer.

Seth received his BA in philosophy, Phi Beta Kappa, from Stanford, and his PhD in economics from Harvard. In high school, he wrote obituaries for the local newspaper, the Bergen Record, and was a juggler in theatrical shows. He now lives in Brooklyn and is a passionate fan of the Mets, Knicks, Jets, Stanford football, and Leonard Cohen. For more info, head to sethsd.com.

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TRANSCRIPT:

SETH STEPHENS-DAVIDOWITZ: So, the past 80 years if you want to know what people want, why they do the things they do, what they’re going to do, you ask them in a survey. But people may lie to surveys. But it’s been shown that people are really, really honest on certain internet sources, particularly their Google searches, so they tell Google things they might not tell to anybody else. They might not tell family members, friends, surveys, even themselves sometimes. And by mining this data we can get better insights into who we are.

All the data I analyze is anonymous and aggregate, but you can see patterns in this. So, for example, before an election if you ask people in a survey, “Are you going to vote,” pretty much everybody says yes, or a huge percentage of people say yes, even if they have absolutely no intention to vote just because it makes them feel good to tell a survey that they’re voting.

But you can actually see—based on where searches for how to vote or where to vote are highest—how high turnout really will be in different parts of the country. And that’s a very accurate predictor of who is actually going to vote.

When I started this research I measured how frequently people made racist searches in the United States. And the searches I looked at were very, very strikingly racist searches looking for basically jokes mocking African Americans. And I was struck by how frequently people are making these searches. In the time period I was looking at, it was as frequent as searches for “Lakers” and “migraine” and “Daily Show” — so not a fringe search. And I was also shocked by where these searches were located. If you had asked me, 'Where’s racism highest in the United States?' before I saw this Google data I would have said the South.

If you think of our country’s history, of slavery, the Civil War, we usually think of racism as a Southern issue. But the places with the highest racist search volumes included western Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio, upstate New York, industrial Michigan.

The real divide in racism these days is not north versus south. It’s east versus west, where you get a lot less of this west of the Mississippi River as compared to east of the Mississippi River.

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