Google Searches May Be the Best Measure of Human Nature Yet

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz has a sneaking suspicion that we might not be all that honest with each other. Instead, we seem to be far more honest with a website. 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.

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

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.

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