Everybody Lies

by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

122 When it comes to sex: Stephens-Davidowitz, “Searching for Sex.” Data for this section can be found on my website, sethsd.com, in the section “Sex.”

  122 11 percent of women: Current Contraceptive Status Among Women Aged 15–44: United States, 2011–2013, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db173_table.pdf#1.

  122 10 percent of them to become pregnant every month: David Spiegelhalter, “Sex: What Are the Chances?” BBC News, March 15, 2012, http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120313-sex-in-the-city-or-elsewhere.

  122 1 in 113 women of childbearing age: There are roughly 6.6 million pregnancies every year and there are 62 million women between ages 15 and 44.

  128 performing oral sex on the opposite gender: As mentioned, I do not know the gender of a Google searcher. I am assuming that the overwhelming majority of searches looking how to perform cunnilingus are by men and that the overwhelming majority of searches looking how to perform fellatio are by women. This is both because the large majority of people are straight and because there might be less of a need to learn how to please a same-sex partner.

  128 top five negative words: Author’s analysis of Google AdWords data.

  130 kill them: Evan Soltas and Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, “The Rise of Hate Search,” New York Times, December 13, 2015, SR1. Data and more details can be found on my website, sethsd.com, in the section “Islamophobia.”

  132 seventeen times more common: Author’s analysis of Google Trends data.

  132 Martin Luther King Jr. Day: Author’s analysis of Google Trends data.

  133 correlates with the black-white wage gap: Ashwin Rode and Anand J. Shukla, “Prejudicial Attitudes and Labor Market Outcomes,” mimeo, 2013.

  134 Their parents: Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, “Google, Tell Me. Is My Son a Genius?” New York Times, January 19, 2014, SR6. The data for exact searches can be found using Google AdWords. Estimates can also be found with Google Trends, by comparing searches with the words “gifted” and “son” versus “gifted” and “daughter.” Compare, for example, https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=gifted%20son,gifted%20daughter and https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=overweight%20son,overweight%20daughter. One exception to the general pattern that there are more questions about sons’ brains and daughters’ bodies is there are more searches for “fat son” than “fat daughter.” This seems to be related to the popularity of incest porn discussed earlier. Roughly 20 percent of searches with the words “fat” and “son” also include the word “porn.”

  135 girls are 9 percent more likely than boys to be in gifted programs: “Gender Equity in Education: A Data Snapshot,” Office for Civil Rights, U.S. Department of Education, June 2012, http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/gender-equity-in-education.pdf.

  136 About 28 percent of girls are overweight, while 35 percent of boys are: Data Resource Center for Child and Adolescent Health, http://www.childhealthdata.org/browse/survey/results?q=2415&g=455&a=3879&r=1.

  137 Stormfront profiles: Stephens-Davidowitz, “The Data of Hate.” The relevant data can be downloaded at sethsd.com, in the data section headlined “Stormfront.”

  139 Stormfront during Donald Trump’s candidacy: Google search interest in Stormfront was similar in October 2016 to the levels it was during October 2015. This is in stark contrast to the situation during Obama’s first election. In October 2008, search interest in Stormfront had risen almost 60 percent compared to the previous October. On the day after Obama was elected, Google searches for Stormfront had risen roughly tenfold. On the day after Trump was elected, Stormfront searches rose about two-point-five-fold. This was roughly equivalent to the rise the day after George W. Bush was elected in 2004 and may largely reflect news interest among political junkies.

  141 political segregation on the internet: Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro, “Ideological Segregation Online and Offline,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 126, no. 4 (2011).

  144 friends on Facebook: Eytan Bakshy, Solomon Messing, and Lada A. Adamic, “Exposure to Ideologically Diverse News and Opinion on Facebook,” Science 348, no. 6239 (2015). They found that, among the 9 percent of active Facebook users who declare their ideology, about 23 percent of their friends who also declare an ideology have the opposite ideology and 28.5 percent of the news they see on Facebook is from the opposite ideology. These numbers are not directly comparable with other numbers on segregation because they only include the small sample of Facebook users who declare their ideology. Presumably, these users are much more likely to be politically active and associate with other politically active users with the same ideology. If this is correct, the diversity among all users will be much greater.

  144 one crucial reason that Facebook: Another factor that makes social media surprisingly diverse is that it gives a big bonus to extremely popular and widely shared articles, no matter their political slant. See Solomon Messing and Sean Westwood, “Selective Exposure in the Age of Social Media: Endorsements Trump Partisan Source Affiliation When Selecting News Online,” 2014.

  144 more friends on Facebook than they do offline: See Ben Quinn, “Social Network Users Have Twice as Many Friends Online as in Real Life,” Guardian, May 8, 2011. This article discusses a 2011 study by the Cystic Fibrosis Trust, which found that the average social network user has 121 online friends compared with 55 physical friends. According to a 2014 Pew Research study, the average Facebook user had more than 300 friends. See Aaron Smith, “6 New Facts About Facebook,” February 3, 2014, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/02/03/6-new-facts-about-facebook/.

  144 weak ties: Eytan Bakshy, Itamar Rosenn, Cameron Marlow, and Lada Adamic, “The Role of Social Networks in Information Diffusion,” Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on World Wide Web, 2012.

  145 “doom-and-gloom predictions haven’t come true”: “Study: Child Abuse on Decline in U.S.,” Associated Press, December 12, 2011.

  146 did child abuse really drop: See Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, “How Googling Unmasks Child Abuse,” New York Times, July 14, 2013, SR5, and Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, “Unreported Victims of an Economic Downturn,” mimeo, 2013.

  146 facing long wait times and giving up: “Stopping Child Abuse: It Begins With You,” The Arizona Republic, March 26, 2016.

  147 off-the-books ways to terminate a pregnancy: Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, “The Return of the D.I.Y. Abortion,” New York Times, March 6, 2016, SR2. Data and more details can be found on my website, sethsd.com, in the section “Self-Induced Abortion.”

  150 similar average circulations: Alliance for Audited Media, Consumer Magazines, http://abcas3.auditedmedia.com/ecirc/magtitlesearch.asp.

  151 On Facebook: Author’s calculations, on October 4, 2016, using Facebook’s Ads Manager.

  151 top ten most visited websites: “List of Most Popular Websites,” Wikipedia. According to Alexa, which tracks browsing behavior, as of September 4, 2016, the most popular porn site was XVideos, and this was the 57th-most-popular website. According to SimilarWeb, as of September 4, 2016, the most popular porn site was XVideos, and this was the 17th-most-popular website. The top ten, according to Alexa, are Google, YouTube, Facebook, Baidu, Yahoo!, Amazon, Wikipedia, Tencent QQ, Google India, and Twitter.

  153 In the early morning of September 5, 2006: This story is from David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010).

  155 great businesses are built on secrets: Peter Thiel and Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future (New York: The Crown Publishing Group, 2014).

  157 says Xavier Amatriain: I interviewed Xavier Amatriain by phone on May 5, 2015.

  159 top questions Americans had during Obama’s 2014: Author’s analysis of Google Trends data.

  162 this time at a mosque: “The President Speaks at the Islamic Society of Baltimore,” YouTube video, posted February 3, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=LRRVdVqAjdw.

  163 hateful, rageful searches against Muslims dropped in the hours after the president’s address: Author’s analysis of Google Trends data. Searches for “kill Muslims” were lower than the comparable period a week before. In addition, searches that included “Muslims” and one of the top five negative words about this group were lower.

  CHAPTER 5: ZOOMING IN

  166 how childhood experiences influence which baseball team you support: Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, “They Hook You When You’re Young,” New York Times, April 20, 2014, SR5. Data and code for this study can be found on my website, sethsd.com, in the section “Baseball.”

  170 the single most important year: Yair Ghitza and Andrew Gelman, “The Great Society, Reagan’s Revolution, and Generations of Presidential Voting,” unpublished manuscript.

  173 Chetty explains: I interviewed Raj Chetty by phone on July 30, 2015.

  176 escape the grim reaper: Raj Chetty et al., “The Association Between Income and Life Expectancy in the United States, 2001–2014,” JAMA 315, no. 16 (2016).

  178 Contagious behavior may be driving some of this: Julia Belluz, “Income Inequality Is Chipping Away at Americans’ Life Expectancy,” vox.com, April 11, 2016.

  178 why some people cheat on their taxes: Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Emmanuel Saez, “Using Differences in Knowledge Across Neighborhoods to Uncover the Impacts of the EITC on Earnings,” American Economic Review 103, no. 7 (2013).

  180 I decided to download Wikipedia: This is from Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, “The Geography of Fame,” New York Times, March 23, 2014, SR6. Data can be found on my website, sethsd.com, in the section “Wikipedia Birth Rate, by County.” For help downloading and coding county of birth of every Wikipedia entrant, I thank Noah Stephens-Davidowitz.

  183 a big city: For more evidence on the value of cities, see Ed Glaeser, Triumph of the City (New York: Penguin, 2011). (Glaeser was my advisor in graduate school.)

  191 many examples of real life imitating art: David Levinson, ed., Encyclopedia of Crime and Punishment (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2002).

  191 subjects exposed to a violent film will report more anger and hostility: Craig Anderson et al., “The Influence of Media Violence on Youth,” Psychological Science in the Public Interest 4 (2003).

  192 On weekends with a popular violent movie: Gordon Dahl and Stefano DellaVigna, “Does Movie Violence Increase Violent Crime?” Quarterly Journal of Economics 124, no. 2 (2009).

  195 Google searches can also be broken down by the minute: Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, “Days of Our Digital Lives,” New York Times, July 5, 2015, SR4.

  196 alcohol is a major contributor to crime: Anna Richardson and Tracey Budd, “Young Adults, Alcohol, Crime and Disorder,” Criminal Behaviour and Mental Health 13, no. 1 (2003); Richard A. Scribner, David P. MacKinnon, and James H. Dwyer, “The Risk of Assaultive Violence and Alcohol Availability in Los Angeles County,” American Journal of Public Health 85, no. 3 (1995); Dennis M. Gorman, Paul W. Speer, Paul J. Gruenewald, and Erich W. Labouvie, “Spatial Dynamics of Alcohol Availability, Neighborhood Structure and Violent Crime,” Journal of Studies on Alcohol 62, no. 5 (2001); Tony H. Grubesic, William Alex Pridemore, Dominique A. Williams, and Loni Philip-Tabb, “Alcohol Outlet Density and Violence: The Role of Risky Retailers and Alcohol-Related Expenditures,” Alcohol and Alcoholism 48, no. 5 (2013).

  196 letting all four of his sons play football: “Ed McCaffrey Knew Christian McCaffrey Would Be Good from the Start—’The Herd,’ ” YouTube video, posted December 3, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boHMmp7DpX0.

  197 analyzing piles of data: Researchers have found more from utilizing this crime data broken down into small time increments. One example? Domestic violence complaints rise immediately after a city’s football team loses a game it was expected to win. See David Card and Gordon B. Dahl, “Family Violence and Football: The Effect of Unexpected Emotional Cues on Violent Behavior,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 126, no. 1 (2011).

  197 Here’s how Bill Simmons: Bill Simmons, “It’s Hard to Say Goodbye to David Ortiz,” ESPN.com, June 2, 2009, http://www.espn.com/espnmag/story?id=4223584.

  198 how can we predict how a baseball player will perform in the future: This is discussed in Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don’t (New York: Penguin, 2012).

  199 “beefy sluggers” indeed do, on average, peak early: Ryan Campbell, “How Will Prince Fielder Age?” October 28, 2011, http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/how-will-prince-fielder-age/.

  199 Ortiz’s doppelgangers’: This data was kindly provided to me by Rob McQuown of Baseball Prospectus.

  204 Kohane asks: I interviewed Isaac Kohane by phone on June 15, 2015.

  205 James Heywood is an entrepreneur: I interviewed James Heywood by phone on August 17, 2015.

  CHAPTER 6: ALL THE WORLD’S A LAB

  207 February 27, 2000: This story is discussed, among other places, in Brian Christian, “The A/B Test: Inside the Technology That’s Changing the Rules of Business,” Wired, April 25, 2012, http://www.wired.com/2012/04/ff_abtesting/.

  209 When teachers were paid, teacher absenteeism dropped: Esther Duflo, Rema Hanna, and Stephen P. Ryan, “Incentives Work: Getting Teachers to Come to School,” American Economic Review 102, no. 4 (2012).

  209 when Bill Gates learned of Duflo’s work: Ian Parker, “The Poverty Lab,” New Yorker, May 17, 2010.

  211 Google engineers ran seven thousand A/B tests: Christian, “The A/B Test.”

  211 forty-one marginally different shades of blue: Douglas Bowman, “Goodbye, Google,” stopdesign, March 20, 2009, http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html.

  211 Facebook now runs: Eytan Bakshy, “Big Experiments: Big Data’s Friend for Making Decisions,” April 3, 2014, https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-data-science/big-experiments-big-datas-friend-for-making-decisions/10152160441298859/. Sources for information on pharmaceutical studies can be found at “How many clinical trials are started each year?” Quora post, https://www.quora.com/How-many-clinical-trials-are-started-each-year.

  211 Optimizely: I interviewed Dan Siroker by phone on April 29, 2015.

  214 netting the campaign roughly $60 million: Dan Siroker, “How Obama Raised $60 Million by Running a Simple Experiment,” Optimizely blog, November 29, 2010, https://blog.optimizely.com/2010/11/29/how-obama-raised-60-million-by-running-a-simple-experiment/.

  214 The Boston Globe A/B-tests headlines: The Boston Globe A/B tests and results were provided to the author. Some details about the Globe’s testing can be found at “The Boston Globe: Discovering and Optimizing a Value Proposition for Content,” Marketing Sherpa Video Archive, https://www.marketingsherpa.com/video/boston-globe-optimization-summit2. This includes a recorded conversation between Peter Doucette of the Globe and Pamela Markey at MECLABS.

  217 Benson says: I interviewed Clark Benson by phone on July 23, 2015.

  217 added a rightward-pointing arrow surrounded by a square: “Enhancing Text Ads on the Google Display Network,” Inside AdSense, December 3, 2012, https://adsense.googleblog.com/2012/12/enhancing-text-ads-on-google-display.html.

  218 Google customers were critical: See, for example, “Large arrows appearing in google ads—please remove,” DoubleClick Publisher Help Forum, https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/dfp/p_TRMqWUF9s.

  219 the rise of behavioral addictions in contemporary society: Adam Alter, Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked (New York: Penguin, 2017).

  219 Top addictions reported to Google: Author’s analysis of Google Trends data.

  222 says Levitt in a lecture: This is discussed in a video currently featured on the Freakonomics page of the Harry Walker Speakers Bureau, http://www.harrywalker.com/speakers/authors-of-freakonomics/.

  225 beer and soft drink ads run during the Super Bowl: Wesley R. Hartmann and Daniel Klapper, “Super Bowl Ads,” unpublished manuscript, 2014.

  226
a pimply kid in his underwear: For the strong case that we likely are living in a computer simulation, see Nick Bostrom, “Are We Living in a Computer Simulation?” Philosophical Quarterly 53, no. 211 (2003).

  227 Of forty-three American presidents: Los Angeles Times staff, “U.S. Presidential Assassinations and Attempts,” Los Angeles Times, January 22, 2012, http://timelines.latimes.com/us-presidential-assassinations-and-attempts/.

  227 Compare John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan: Benjamin F. Jones and Benjamin A. Olken, “Do Assassins Really Change History?” New York Times, April 12, 2015, SR12.

  227 Kadyrov died: A disturbing video of the attack can be seen at “Parade surprise (Chechnya 2004),” YouTube video, posted March 31, 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHWhs5QkfuY.

  227 Hitler had changed his schedule: This story is also discussed in Jones and Olken, “Do Assassins Really Change History?”

  228 the effect of having your leader murdered: Benjamin F. Jones and Benjamin A. Olken, “Hit or Miss? The Effect of Assassinations on Institutions and War,” American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics 1, no. 2 (2009).

  229 winning the lottery does not: This point is made in John Tierney, “How to Win the Lottery (Happily),” New York Times, May 27, 2014, D5. Tierney’s piece discusses the following studies: Bénédicte Apouey and Andrew E. Clark, “Winning Big but Feeling No Better? The Effect of Lottery Prizes on Physical and Mental Health,” Health Economics 24, no. 5 (2015); Jonathan Gardner and Andrew J. Oswald, “Money and Mental Wellbeing: A Longitudinal Study of Medium-Sized Lottery Wins,” Journal of Health Economics 26, no. 1 (2007); and Anna Hedenus, “At the End of the Rainbow: Post-Winning Life Among Swedish Lottery Winners,” unpublished manuscript, 2011. Tierney’s piece also points out that the famous 1978 study—Philip Brickman, Dan Coates, and Ronnie Janoff-Bulman, “Lottery Winners and Accident Victims: Is Happiness Relative?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 36, no. 8 (1978)—which found that winning the lottery does not make you happy was based on a tiny sample.