They want to look good, even though most surveys are anonymous. This is called social desirability bias.

If you are deluding yourself, you can’t be honest in a survey.

Specifically we looked at whether when a company advertises a movie in the Super Bowl, they see a big jump in ticket sales in the cities that had higher viewership for the game. They indeed do. People in cities of teams that qualify for the Super Bowl attend movies that were advertised during the Super Bowl at a significantly higher rate than do th

It is based on data and numbers; it is illustrative and far-reaching. And yet the data is so rich that you can visualize the people underneath it. When we zoom in on every minute of Edmonton’s water consumption, I see the people getting up from their couch at the end of the period.

measure are often not exactly what we care about. We can measure how students do on multiple-choice questions.

“Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has no heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains.”

But sometimes we type our uncensored thoughts into Google, without much hope that it will be able to help us. In this case, the search window serves as a kind of confessional.

“The algorithms know you better than you know yourself,”

the world is complicated. Actions we take today can have distant effects, most of them unintended. Ideas spread—sometimes slowly; other times exponentially, like viruses. People respond in unpredictable ways to incentives.