People lie but search data tell the truth
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, in his new book “Everybody Lies,” argues persuasively for a mutiny in social science. As revealed in this article, is that most people tend to lie on surveys and on social media. But in the ostensible privacy of online searching however, he argues, we inadvertently reveal ourselves, and this “digital truth serum” offers the best way of finding out who we really are. Offering various examples, he concludes that “Google searches are the most important dataset ever collected on the human psyche” – suggesting that big data can rescue social science from the misleading pictures that surveys and social media tell. Indeed, the revealing power that Google’s search data contains could lead to a compete revolution in social science…
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