A woman clicks on a BuzzFeed story showing the “15 cutest cats.”
A man sees the same story about cats. But on his screen it is called “15 most adorable cats.” He doesn’t click.
A woman Googles “Is my son a genius?”
A man Googles “how to get my daughter to lose weight.”
A woman is on a vacation with her six best female friends. All her friends keep saying how much fun they’re having. She sneaks off to Google “loneliness when away from husband.”
A man, the previous woman’s husband, is on a vacation with his six best male friends. He sneaks off to Google to type “signs your wife is cheating.”
Some of this data will include information that would otherwise never be admitted to anybody. If we aggregate it all, keep it anonymous to make sure we never know about the fears, desires, and behaviors of any specific individuals, and add some data science, we start to get a new look at human beings—their behaviors, their desires, their natures. In fact, at the risk of sounding grandiose, I have come to believe that the new data increasingly available in our digital age will radically expand our understanding of humankind. The microscope showed us there is more to a drop of pond water than we think we see. The telescope showed us there is more to the night sky than we think we see. And new, digital data now shows us there is more to human society than we think we see. It may be our era’s microscope or telescope—making possible important, even revolutionary insights.
There is another risk in making such declarations—not just sounding grandiose but also trendy. Many people have been making big claims about the power of Big Data. But they have been short on evidence.
This has inspired Big Data skeptics, of whom there are also many, to dismiss the search for bigger datasets. “I am not saying here that there is no information in Big Data,” essayist and statistician Nassim Taleb has written. “There is plenty of information. The problem—the central issue—is that the needle comes in an increasingly larger haystack.”
One of the primary goals of this book, then, is to provide the missing evidence of what can be done with Big Data—how we can find the needles, if you will, in those larger and larger haystacks. I hope to provide enough examples of Big Data offering new insights into human psychology and behavior so that you will begin to see the outlines of something truly revolutionary.
“Hold on, Seth,” you might be saying right about now. “You’re promising a revolution. You’re waxing poetic about these big, new datasets. But thus far, you have used all of this amazing, remarkable, breathtaking, groundbreaking data to tell me basically two things: there are plenty of racists in America, and people, particularly men, exaggerate how much sex they have.”
I admit sometimes the new data does just confirm the obvious. If you think these findings were obvious, wait until you get to Chapter 4, where I show you clear, unimpeachable evidence from Google searches that men have tremendous concern and insecurity around—wait for it—their penis size.
There is, I would claim, some value in proving things you may have already suspected but had otherwise little evidence for. Suspecting something is one thing. Proving it is another. But if all Big Data could do is confirm your suspicions, it would not be revolutionary. Thankfully, Big Data can do a lot more than that. Time and again, data shows me the world works in precisely the opposite way as I would have guessed. Here are some examples you might find more surprising.
You might think that a major cause of racism is economic insecurity and vulnerability. You might naturally suspect, then, that when people lose their jobs, racism increases. But, actually, neither racist searches nor membership in Stormfront rises when unemployment does.
You might think that anxiety is highest in overeducated big cities. The urban neurotic is a famous stereotype. But Google searches reflecting anxiety—such as “anxiety symptoms” or “anxiety help”—tend to be higher in places with lower levels of education, lower median incomes, and where a larger portion of the population lives in rural areas. There are higher search rates for anxiety in rural, upstate New York than New York City.
You might think that a terrorist attack that kills dozens or hundreds of people would automatically be followed by massive, widespread anxiety. Terrorism, by definition, is supposed to instill a sense of terror. I looked at Google searches reflecting anxiety. I tested how much these searches rose in a country in the days, weeks, and months following every major European or American terrorist attack since 2004. So, on average, how much did anxiety-related searches rise? They didn’t. At all.
You might think that people search for jokes more often when they are sad. Many of history’s greatest thinkers have claimed that we turn to humor as a release from pain. Humor has long been thought of as a way to cope with the frustrations, the pain, the inevitable disappointments of life. As Charlie Chaplin put it, “Laughter is the tonic, the relief, the surcease from pain.”
However, searches for jokes are lowest on Mondays, the day when people report they are most unhappy. They are lowest on cloudy and rainy days. And they plummet after a major tragedy, such as when two bombs killed three and injured hundreds during the 2013 Boston Marathon. People are actually more likely to seek out jokes when things are going well in life than when they aren’t.
Sometimes a new dataset reveals a behavior, desire, or concern that I would have never even considered. There are numerous sexual proclivities that fall into this category. For example, did you know that in India the number one search beginning “my husband wants . . .” is “my husband wants me to breastfeed him”? This comment is far more common in India than in other countries. Moreover, porn searches for depictions of women breastfeeding men are four times higher in India and Bangladesh than in any other country in the world. I certainly never would have suspected that before I saw the data.