That’s it, here we are unmasked! On the number of hours spent in a gym, on our alcohol consumption, on our sexual orientations or even on our centers of interest, we make up reality. To embellish it, of course, but above all because we are lying to ourselves.
The hunter of our little daily lies is called Seth Stephens-Davidowitz. A former employee of Google, he analyzed hundreds of thousands of searches made by American Internet users on this engine for four years. To the polls that report the declarative, this economist preferred “the digital truth serum”.
Relayed by The worldthe summary of its work has been published on the website of the Guardian.
We discover that men have an obsession: the size of their penis. “Men’s Google searches for their penises outnumber those for their lungs, liver, feet, ears, nose, throat and brain combined,” he exclaims. . When a woman is interested in the size of the penis, it is because it is “too big”, but for her partner, it is the opposite.
Likewise, by immersing himself in this big data, this specialist highlights the persistence of our sexist behavior. The parents of a baby boy carry out 2.5 times more research “Is my son a genius” than those of a baby girl. For the latter, Google searches for “is my daughter overweight” are twice as numerous as “is my son overweight”.
But far from denouncing the failings of a society that disguises a dark reality, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz hopes to use these tools to fight, for example, against discrimination and racial hatred. Statesmen could also use them to better calibrate their speeches. Not to make themselves more popular, but to give grandeur to “living together”.
