Quotes/Statements From the Book

Introduction: The Outlines of a Revolution

• Surveys cannot be trusted to tell us the truth about our sex lives.
• Women say they have sex, on average, fifty-five times per year, using a condom 16 percent of the time. This adds up to about 1.1 billion condoms used per year.
• Men say they use 1.6 billion condoms every year.
• Fewer than 600 million condoms are sold every year.
• On Google, the top complaint about a marriage is not having sex. Searches for “sexless marriage” are three and a half times more common than “unhappy marriage” and eight times more common than “loveless marriage.”
• Google searches for “sexless relationship” are second only to searches for “abusive relationship.”
• In the United States, the word “nigger”—or its plural, “niggers”—was included in roughly the same number of searches as the word “migraine(s),” “economist,” and “Lakers.”
• In fact, 20 percent of searches with the word “nigger” also included the word “jokes.” Other common searches included “stupid niggers” and “I hate niggers.”
• A person is significantly more likely to put the candidate they support first in a search that includes both candidates’ names.
• Different society from the one academics and journalists, relying on polls, thought that we lived in.
• Did you know that in India the number one search beginning “my husband wants . . .” is “my husband wants me to breastfeed him”?
• Porn searches for depictions of women breastfeeding men are four times higher in India and Bangladesh than in any other country in the world.
• Men are obsessed with their penis size may not be too surprising, the biggest bodily insecurity for women, as expressed on Google, is surprising indeed.
• Female equivalent of worrying about the size of your penis may be—pausing to build suspense—worrying about whether your vagina smells.
• Google searches are so valuable is not that there are so many of them; it is that people are so honest in them.
• People lie to friends, lovers, doctors, surveys, and themselves. But on Google they might share embarrassing information, about, among other things, their sexless marriages, their mental health issues, their insecurities, and their animosity toward black people.

1. Your Faulty Gut

• We tend to overestimate the prevalence of anything that makes for a memorable story.
• When asked in a survey, people consistently rank tornadoes as a more common cause of death than asthma. In fact, asthma causes about seventy times more deaths. Deaths by asthma don’t stand out—and don’t make the news. Deaths by tornadoes do.

2. Was Freud Right?

• Freud could say the gentleman dreaming of eating a banana on his wedding day was secretly thinking of a penis, revealing his desire to really marry a man rather than a woman. The gentleman could say he just happened to be dreaming of a banana. He could have just as easily been dreaming of an apple as he walked to the altar. It would be he-said, he-said. There was no way to put Freud’s theory to a real test.
• What makes us dream of foods? The main predictor is how frequently we consume them.
• The second predictor of how frequently a food appears in dreams is how tasty people find it.
• Bananas are the second most common fruit to appear in dreams. But they are also the second most commonly consumed fruit.
• Cucumbers are the seventh most common vegetable to appear in dreams. They are the seventh most consumed vegetable.
• For people to make errors such as “penistrian,” “sexurity,” and “cocks,” it is not necessary to have some connection between mistakes and the forbidden, some theory of the mind where people reveal their secret desires via their errors.
• If a monkey types long enough, he will eventually write “to be or not to be.”
• Number of people visiting mainstream porn sites are looking for portrayals of incest.
• PornHub, one of the most popular porn sites, sixteen are looking for incest-themed videos.
• They include “brother and sister,” “step mom fucks son,” “mom and son,” “mom fucks son,” and “real brother and sister.”
• Male incestuous searches are for scenes featuring mothers and sons.
• Nine of the top hundred searches by women on PornHub are for incest-themed videos, and they feature similar imagery—though with the gender of any parent and child who is mentioned usually reversed.
• Consider all searches of the form “I want to have sex with my . . .” The number one way to complete this search is “mom.”
• Three-fourths of searches of this form are incestuous.
• According to searches from wives about their husbands, some of the top fetishes of adult men are the desire to wear diapers and wanting to be breastfed, particularly, as discussed earlier, in India.
• The early years of life seem to play an outsize role in men’s adult fantasies.

3. Data Reimagined

• Google Correlate.
• Two newspapers employed strikingly different language to report the same story.
• “Homosexuals ‘Marry’ in Massachusetts.”
• “Homosexuals,” as used by the Washington Times, was an old-fashioned and disparaging way to describe gay people, whereas “same-sex couples,” as used by the Washington Post, emphasized that gay relationships were just another form of romance.
• The scholars wondered whether language might be the key to understanding bias.
• We can predict whether a man and woman will go on a second date based on how they speak on the first date.
• Women, on average, prefer men who are taller and share their hobbies; men, on average, prefer women who are skinnier and share their hobbies.
• One of the ways a man signals that he is attracted is obvious: he laughs at a woman’s jokes.
• He limits the range of his pitch.
• A monotone voice is often seen by women as masculine, which implies that men, perhaps subconsciously, exaggerate their masculinity when they like a woman.
• Woman signals her interest by varying her pitch, speaking more softly, and taking shorter turns talking.
• Woman is unlikely to be interested when she uses hedge words and phrases such as “probably” or “I guess.”
• Fellas, if a woman is hedging her statements on any topic—if she “sorta” likes her drink or “kinda” feels chilly or “probably” will have another hors d’oeuvre—you can bet that she is “sorta” “kinda” “probably” not into you.
• A woman is likely to be interested when she talks about herself. It turns out that, for a man looking to connect, the most beautiful word you can hear from a woman’s mouth may be “I”: it’s a sign she is feeling comfortable.
• Women like men who follow their lead. Perhaps not surprisingly, a woman is more likely to report a connection if a man laughs at her jokes and keeps the conversation on topics she introduces rather than constantly changing the subject to those he wants to talk about.
• If a man says, “That’s awesome!” or “That’s really cool,” a woman is significantly more likely to report a connection. Likewise if he uses phrases such as “That’s tough” or “You must be sad.”
• Physical appearance trumps all else in predicting whether a man reports a connection.
• If there are lots of questions asked on a date, it is less likely that both the man and the woman will report a connection.
• Adding the letter “o” to the word “so” is one of the most feminine linguistic traits. Among the words most disproportionately used by women are “soo,” “sooo,” “soooo,” “sooooo,” and “soooooo.”
• It isn’t just men and women who speak differently. People use different words as they age.

4. Digital Truth Serum

• Desirability bias.
• Our weakness for “white lies” is an important part of the problem.
• About one-third of the time, people lie in real life.
• People will admit more if they are alone than if others are in the room with them.
• People have no incentive to tell surveys the truth.
• Google can display a bias toward unseemly thoughts, thoughts people feel they can’t discuss with anyone else.
• Countrywide, I estimate—using data from Google searches and Google AdWords—that about 5 percent of male porn searches are for gay-male porn.