May Contain Lies

May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases – And What We Can Do About It

Penguin Random House, 2024.

• Amazon #1 category bestseller (UK and US)
• Amazon Top 100 across all categories (UK)
• Financial Times Business Books of the Month, 2024
• Axiom Business Book Awards, 2025
• ChatGPT routine for evaluating studies

Our lives are minefields of misinformation. It ripples through our social media feeds, our daily headlines, and the pronouncements of politicians, business leaders, and best-selling authors. Stories, statistics, and studies are everywhere, allowing people to find evidence to support whatever position they want. Many of these sources are flawed, yet by playing on our emotions and preying on our biases, they can gain widespread acceptance, warp our views, and distort our decisions.

In this eye-opening book, Alex Edmans, an economist and professor at London Business School, teaches us how to separate fact from fiction. Using colourful examples – from a wellness guru’s tragic but fabricated backstory, to the blunders that led to the Deepwater Horizon disaster, and the diet that ensnared millions yet hastened its founder’s death – Edmans highlights the biases that cause us to mistake statements for facts, facts for data, data for evidence, and evidence for proof.

Armed with the knowledge of what to guard against, he then provides a practical guide to combat this tide of misinformation. Going beyond simply checking the facts and explaining individual statistics, Edmans explores the relationships between statistics – the science of cause and effect – ultimately training us to think smarter, sharper, and more critically. May Contain Lies is an essential read for anyone who wants to make better sense of the world and take better decisions.

“A clear-headed guide to the exaggerations, sloppy research and the occasional downright lies peddled by companies, universities, authors and TED Talk gurus … It’s timely book and, despite the nerdy statistical theories, is often quite funny.”

Harry Wallop

The Times

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“A powerful and punchy explanation of why misinformation is a problem that affects us all – be that in finance, politics, media, business or anywhere else. Edmans offers clear ideas about how to counter this, not just in our own lives but also across society as a whole. Timely and very provocative!”

Gillian Tett

Editor-at-Large, Financial Times

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“May Contain Lies is a fascinating account of how our beliefs can be manipulated in a post-truth world. It is an easy read, full of examples on how we can be led astray. Importantly, this book by one of the leading academic experts on corporate governance in the world, offers a guide to the reader on how to navigate through lies and misleading statistics to arrive at a reasonable approximation of the truth. It will be a valuable aid to make sense of our confusing world.”

Raghuram G. Rajan

Former Chief Economist at the International Monetary Fund

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“Treat this endorsement with caution – or so would argue author Alex Edmans. This is simultaneously a passionate and dispassionate call to truth – and how to achieve it – in a world of growing disinformation in which truth and common ground are the casualties. Everyone reading this hard-hitting but still entertaining book will feel challenged; so we all should.”

Will Hutton

President of the Academy of Social Sciences and author of The State We’re In

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“A hard-hitting book with some great stories.”

Andrew Gelman

Professor of Statistics and Political Science, Columbia University