In the past decade, Google has become an indispensable part of American culture. And, much like American culture, Google is slowly but surely taking over the world — albeit while engendering far less resentment from its conquered. This is not surprising, as Google has revolutionized the way that people get information; its centralizing approach elegantly and efficiently fills needs we didn’t even know we had. Just in the past year or so, Google has introduced: Google Maps, which trounces Mapquest if only because of its lack of intrusive ads; Google Print, which allows you to search the full text of an ever-increasing number of books; and Google Scholar, which enables you to easily find research articles and, if you’re on a university network, locate them on campus (a windfall for those of us who have struggled with the Cornell Library Gateway’s cumbersome “Find Articles” feature). Google now also offers service through text messaging. I’ve never been prouder to be an American.

When it comes to the social sciences, however, Google serves an entirely different sort of purpose. While it is excellent for tracking down facts, figures, and research articles — all of which involve its capacity as a referrer to other sources of information — it also serves as a source of original information in its own right. It’s an index of nearly everything written in the public domain of the Internet, and as such it can provide information about the information that’s available — “meta-information,” if you will. Anybody who has begun a paper by citing Google statistics (“The phrase ‘I love tomatoes’ returns 9,370 search results in Google. Clearly, the tomato has become a beloved institution in the English-speaking world”) has taken advantage of this function.
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New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd took a brief sojourn from the Op-Ed pages this past Sunday, writing a feature article for the magazine section entitled “What’s a Modern Girl to Do?” In the article, Dowd ponders the question of whether feminism is dead; in support of this thesis she cites an apparent increase in adherence to traditional gender roles and seeming apathy in response to social inequality.

What surprised me most about the article — aside from the fact that, when not making up cutesy nicknames for politicians, Dowd can write eloquently and thoughtfully and almost completely non-irritatingly — was a statistic she provided in a section on “power dynamics.” Dowd writes: “A 2005 report by researchers at four British universities indicated that a high I.Q. hampers a woman’s chance to marry, while it is a plus for men. The prospect for marriage increased by 35 percent for guys for each 16-point increase in I.Q.; for women, there is a 40 percent drop for each 16-point rise.”

Holy crap. That’s quite the staggering figure, and it certainly bolsters Dowd’s assertion that “the aroma of male power is an aphrodisiac for women, but the perfume of female power is a turnoff for men.” But statistics are funny things sometimes. They carry with them an air of factuality, of incontrovertibility — if the numbers say it, it must be the case. And to an extent that’s true; statistics are descriptions of observations, and as such they don’t lie (assuming the numbers aren’t fudged).

The problem is that statistics can easily be abused and misinterpreted, and they all-too-frequently are. Researchers are usually pretty good about discussing the limitations and caveats of their own findings, but journalists — propelled by the goal of making information newsworthy — are notoriously bad at letting numbers speak for themselves. Since most of us rarely read the actual research articles, most of us never question the secondhand assertions framing the data.
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