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

We invite you to a conversation about what the vast amounts of information now instantly available to us reveals about ourselves and our world—provided we ask the right questions.

By the end of an average day in the early twenty-first century, human beings searching the internet will amass eight trillion gigabytes of data. This staggering amount of information can tell us a great deal about who we are—the fears, desires, and behaviors that drive us, and the conscious and unconscious decisions we make. From the profound to the mundane, we can gain astonishing knowledge about the human psyche that less than twenty years ago, seemed unfathomable. Everybody Lies offers fascinating, surprising, and sometimes laugh-out-loud insights into everything from economics to ethics to sports to race, sex, 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? Do parents secretly favor boy children over girls? Do violent films affect the crime rate? Can you beat the stock market? How regularly do we lie about our sex lives and who’s more self-conscious about sex, men or women? Investigating these questions and a host of others, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz offers revelations that can help us understand ourselves and our lives better. All of us are touched by big data everyday, and its influence is multiplying.

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz is a New York Times op-ed contributor and former Google data scientist. Aaron Retica is Chief of Research for New York Times Magazine. Sam Wang is Professor of Neuroscience at Princeton University. He is known for his books Welcome to Your Brain and Welcome to Your Child’s Brain, as well as for the Princeton Election Consortium website.

Co-sponsored by the Humanities Council’s Ferris Seminars in Journalism