Blending the informed analysis of The Signal and the Noise with the instructive iconoclasm of Think Like a Freak,
a fascinating, illuminating, and witty look at 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—unprecedented in history—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 to 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? Does
where you go to school effect 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? 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.
Drawing on studies and experiments on how we really live and think, he
demonstrates in fascinating and often funny ways the extent to which all
the world is indeed a lab. With conclusions ranging from
strange-but-true to thought-provoking to disturbing, he explores the
power of this digital truth serum and its deeper potential—revealing
biases deeply embedded within us, information we can use to change our
culture, and the questions we’re afraid to ask that might be essential
to our health—both emotional and physical. All of us are touched by big
data everyday, and its influence is multiplying. Everybody Lies challenges us to think differently about how we see it and the world.