538 and we will viciously attack seth and the book he has produced. Seth will get the opportunity to defend the supplemental will take questions from the audience and follow the same procedure. Seth, do you want to go first . Thanks dan for the introduction and for inviting me to this panel and this is a book , everybody lies about five years of research i have been doing. I will describe what it is and for the last 80 years if you want to know what people want, why people did the things they did, what people are going to do you have basically one main approach. You ask them. You conduct a randomized survey said gallup or peel or quinnipiac will go out and ask people questions and there is a main problem with this approach which is that people tend to lie and surveys to make themselves look good. If you ask people immediately before an election are you planning to vote the overwhelming majority of americans in the survey will say sure i want to vote in the election. They dont want to admit that they are not voting in the election. Its kind of considered socially unacceptable to not vote in an election. My favorite example is the General Social survey asking the men and women and the United States have frequently they have sex, whether its heterosexual or sex and use a. You can do the math on this. American women say they have sex about once a week and use 20 of the time and that means they use 1. 1 billion in heterosexual sexual encounters. American men if you asked them the same question, they say they use 1. 6 billion every year in heterosexual and sexual encounters. Think about for second goes by definition are the same so we are to know that somebody is lying. Who is telling the truth, men or women . Neither according to data from nielsen which only 600 million are sold in the United States so everyone is lying about how much sex they have. Men are lying more than women. Generally we have relied on surveys because thats the only thing we have had so i think we now have a new tool to understand the human psyche which is the searches people make on google. Thats the stuff ive been researching for the last five years and the idea behind this is people are honest on google and tell things that they might not tell to anybody else. They will confess things to google that they wouldnt tell two friends, family members and keep to themselves. So why are people so there are couple of reasons. One is that you have an incentive to tell the truth to google so if you are someone who doesnt usually vote in an election you dont have an incentive to tell a pollster the truth about whether you are planning to vote in the upcoming election but you have an incentive, you probably need information on voting. You may not know where polling places because you dont usually vote so you have to search in the weeks before the election where to vote, how to vote at polling places and you can see clearly in the Google Search data that people that search and search volumes where an area where voting information is high in the weeks leading up to election turns out to be high in that area. No matter what people say to polsters you can see based on the searches they make whether theyre actually going to vote. That is one reason that people are honest on google. The most intuitive and makes the most sense because you need information the second way people tend to be more honest on google which is one of the more surprising things i learned when i began doing this research is a lot of people just confess like full sentences to google with no obvious reason. You see searches on google for i hate my boss or im happy or im sad or im drunk and you kind of go why are people telling google this . I think it maybe relates to and catholicism of the confessional. People seem to use google in big numbers to just say what is on their mind which definitely i was not expecting at all when i started this research but it definitely caught me by surprise. So what can we learn when we look at these searches . If you remember in the 2008 president ial election all the way back then barack obama was elected president. There was a big question after this election did race matter in the voting, do people care that obama was black when deciding whether to vote for him . This is a classic question that could the complicated by social desirability. The overwhelming majority of americans, 98 or 99 of americans say they didnt care that obama was black. That was why a lot of people included a postracial society back in the day. There was an idea that voters voted for obama and they didnt care that obama was black. Could you use Google Searches to potentially because people are so on is because people tell google things that they might not tell anybody else on socially unacceptable attitudes could we use Google Searches to get the rail answer if race played a part in peoples voting decision. What i did is i made a map of search volume on google and this is a of Google Searches that include charge racist word. I wont say it out loud but you can guess what it is and the first thing that struck me about this data bursts without, and the search was at the time. Back i was using people are making these racist searches in the same frequency as they were searching migraines and daily show and economists. It wasnt by an imagination of french search. These were mostly for jokes. The other thing that struck me about this as it looked very different from the map i would have expected of racism. If you have asked me where racism was highest against africanamericans in the United States i would have guessed racism is predominantly concentrated in the south. If you think it the countrys history the civil war and slavery we think of racism is having a strong divide. Definitely racism is highest, some of the places it is highest for the deep south like southern mississippi in southern louisiana but you can see the maps with darker red with a higher frequency of searches is also higher in many places in the north in western pennsylvania and eastern ohio industrial michigan upstate new york or l. A. I think the real divide by the search data reveals is not a north versus south, is east versus west. You see that is much higher east of the Mississippi River and it drops substantially west of the Mississippi River. Once i have this map i wanted to see because people are so honest here could you use this data to measure how much obama really lost in the 2008 election and of course you cant just compare racist searches to vote for obama because it might mean places have higher racist searches would apply to any candidate in 2008 so that wouldnt be a fair comparison. I compared obamas vote total to previous Democratic Candidates such as john kerry. What you see when you do that and you can read the paper or read it in the book is a very strong significant relationship that places the highest volume in places like appalachia or industrial michigan support obama much less than previous candidates pretty good start controlling for anything you would like. Control for education are demographics or political views or cultural views and nothing changes the relationship. That was a big factor and overall i conclude obama lost to four Percentage Points from racism which is much higher than you get from any other measure. Very recently when the trump phenomenon was starting, trump was saying a lot about racially charged comments and people were questioning how is he doing so well. Hes saying things to you are not supposed to say and was racism driving some of this forward and nate cohen of the news york times asked me for the daytona race of search volume. Yet data on the research for trump and the republican primary at all the variables were their age or education are at thenomics are the single highest correlation he could find was the racist search volume for trump. This of course does not mean that everybody who supports trump is racist but it does mean that some of his supporters were ended to track some of his progress in the primary. I think there are all kinds of things you can do it this day then i talk about them in the book whether its predicting turnout or measuring child abuse you can measure the data or ive done data on doityourself abortion, pretty much all depressing topics. This book is really depressing and horrifying but i put a lot of jokes since he wouldnt notice. I think there is a lot of value to knowing these parts of the human psyche that we dont usually, that arent usually talked about so i will give one more example of the research i have done. If you remember the San Bernardino terrorist attack in december of 2015 when two americans, Muslim Americans shot up their coworkers at a party and right afterwards as soon as this attack happened almost within minutes we saw a huge spike in nasty searches about muslims. The number one search about muslims immediately after the sand or need to know attack was kill muslims which is another one where its not clear but people do express these random thoughts on google so they search things like kill muslims are muslims are evil or i hate muslims and they were really getting out of control immediately after this attack. Four days after the San Bernardino attack barack obama gave a speech to the nation basically trying to calm down some of the islamaphobia because he wanted to address these attitudes they were getting out of control. It was a nationally televised speech that was covered by all the big news outlets. The speech was unlike a lot of people in this room im an obama supporter but i found the speech totally beautiful and spec tacky alert and obama at his best. He talked about, it was really moving. He talked about how its the responsibility of all americans not to give in to fear and appeal more to freedom and its our responsibility to treat everybody the same no matter their religion. It was a moving speech and all the traditional sources really loved the speech and gave it great reviews read in the news york times were other organizations. Great job obama you really hit this one out of the park as far as explaining to people why they should not give in to islamaphobia. I decided you can break down google data minute by minute so i decided to see the searches were kill muslims and i hate muslims and all these angry searches and how they compare to before the speech during the speech and after this beach. I did the comparison and found not only did these not drop as obama hopes. They skyrocketed. Everything obama was saying backfired as far as calming the angry mob. So this was kind of surprising. There was one line that obama did give that seem to have a different response which is obama says we have to remember Muslim Americans are friends and neighbors. They are sports heroes and the men and women who will die for our country and as soon as obama said this you could see clearly on google this huge spike to this statement. For the first time it was muslim athletes followed by muslim soldiers. These searches stayed up for a week afterwards. I think you can kind of compare most of the lines in that speech about responsibility. They were election, they were a sermon. He didnt tell anybody anything they didnt argue no any compare that to the line about athletes and military heroes. I was provoking curiosity and new information. So we wrote this up in the New York Times our analysis of the speech and i dont think its crazy when you write an article in the news york times is some powerful people will see that including people in the president s office because two weeks later obama again gave a speech about islamaphobia this time in the baltimore mosque. He basically stopped with all the lecturing in the sermons. He didnt talk about how it was anybodys responsibility to do anything. He instead really double down or quadruple down on the curiosity strategy so he talked about how the Muslim Americans are athletes and soldiers but he also talked about farmers and merchants and he said Thomas Jefferson had a copy of the koran and Muslim Americans built the skyscrapers of chicago. The speech got a lot of attention and was also a national tv. You do see many of the searches immediately after this speech actually did go down. Saw a drop in searches. Muslims and i hate muslims in the hours after his speech. Thats just two speeches and i dont say that the science of how you come down islamaphobia but i think it does show the power of data that you could maybe turn something as seemingly unpredictable as how come an angry mob into Something Like a science and obviously more research has to be done but now we have minute by minute data on these people that are not necessarily, they are a small number of people. They might not be picked up by surveys and theyre probably not going to come into princeton or harvard to participate in the Laboratory Experiment but they do make these crazy searches on google and we could use this data to potentially try to understand how to calm down an angry mob. A lot of the things we thought worked probably dont work and a lot of times we pat ourselves on the back for speeches we did which may just be back firing. Thats kind of the theme of this book. Theres so much that we can now learn about people from all this data on internet. I think now i will take the attacks from the other panelists. [applause] thank you, seth. We are going to have a conversation about the book. Its a relatively small part of it a large part of the book is about internet. So we are going to find a bunch of topics that were not necessarily in the opening. I very much enjoyed this book. I found the jokes to be a little bit corny. I wanted to first give him the opportunity to share his initial thoughts on the book and one of the things you appreciated and for hats that were deeply misguided. I think we will take some lessons from seth presentation and learn the science of stirring up an angry mob. Maybe its too bad that he happened to have done that but its too late for that to discuss that any further. Today, i came here a little bit early and went to the museum of American History where they had an old direct, telephone direct tree but it was from 1800 so i guess it was a directory from philadelphia and it had each person and for the man in the direct. Have their perceptions. There was a captain, a shop lab, a gents i guess a gentleman a gardener milliner and haldeman accord winner of gunsmith to shoot some of his occupation or business is listed as the shoemakers tools, baker and a turpentine distiller and a few others. It made me realize there used to be a lot of available data and everybody used to mill everybody so in some sense what set this thing look now we have the source of data that we didnt have before and look how much we can learn maybe part of that is theres a feeling that we need to learn about such data because people are harder to know about. 100 years ago or 200 years ago maybe you didnt need a lot of polling to find that people would vote. Just as the neighborhood precinct captain how many people they could get out to the polls next month. Its good for us to have a historical respective about this. Regarding everybody everybody lies i had a couple of thoughts on this. As a person who does use a lot of opinion polls im actually impressed at how honest people are. I always tell people if you want to find out what people are doing the ideas to ask them. You wont get it completely right so 60 of americans vote, maybe 70 will say they were planning to vote or that they voted after the election. Certainly more people plan to vote than actually vote. Its not lying if you plan to vote and decide not to because something comes up right after the election they asked people if they voted in a few Percentage Points more say they did than actually do but its not that far off. When you ask people who they plan to vote for the polls are very accurate. Hillary clinton had 52 of the twoparty vote in the polls and she actually got 51 . The polls were off in states which i do not think the evidence and that the evidence points to people lying. The clue to why people are so honest and polls was given by seth when he talked about motivations. Why you should respond to a survey in the first place, that i have no i. D. A. I dont respond to surveys. Someone is trying to make money off of me taking 45 minutes answering peoples questions. Thats silly, not going to do it but if you are going to answer poll you might as well be honest and in some sense the whole point of answering a political poll is to say yes i support him or her support her. In 1950s it was all different. In the era of the gallup poll not that many people were surveyed. If you are surveyed by gallup you would be one of 1500 americans. Your vote would be counted. It would be in the newspaper the next day. 51 of americans whenever they talked about in 1951 like i think we should bomb china whatever it was, whatever gratitude was it would have a big impact and it was very rational to respond to polls predict youre going to respond you might as well tell the truth maybe not about how many balloons to use when youre having sex and i think people might beam misremembering too. Sometimes you dont remember everything that happened in the past year. When it comes to voting i see no reason to think people arent sincere. Its kind of interesting because theres this question is what is the true self . Is the true self a person who googled is that who you really are . I dont know about that. You dont spend 24 hours of the day googling either. Who you are when you are googling racial jokes is not necessarily your truth either. Its just another aspect of who you are. The really interesting question is what is the incentive for us to tell the truth . When someone gives a talk that says everybody lies a racist a certain paradox of go element to it. Seth i think does have an incentive to get things right in the sense that if he gets things wrong than people like me will pick on him and of course also i think seth has the goal of discovery and i would like to learn things. Im very interested in this idea Data Journalism. We have the data journalist lets say we have three data journalist on this panel right here. Data journalism is playing a large role in my personal life and you could save the life of our society. We have had a lot of discussion recently in science about can we trust science just