Have you ever gone along with something you didn't actually believe in just because everyone else seemed to?
Maybe at work, online, or even with friends.
There's a name for that phenomenon, collective illusions.
And it turns out they may be shaping our culture, our politics and even our personal decisions far more than we realize.
That's why today's SYSK trending topic is the dangers of collective illusions.
In my conversation with author and researcher Todd Rose, we discuss how entire groups of people can privately disagree with an idea while publicly supporting it.
If you've ever wondered why bad ideas can spread so quickly or why it sometimes feels risky to say what you really think, this conversation will make you see human behavior in a completely different way.
And we'll get to it right after this.
I doubt you've ever heard of before.
It's about something called collective illusions.
And trust me, this is really fascinating.
You see, it's human nature to want to conform, to be part of the group.
The problem is that we often conform even when we don't want to, when we don't believe in what we're conforming to.
How many times have you not disagreed with someone and either stayed silent or just went along?
Well, why did you do that?
Well, it turns out we all do it, and it can lead to some real trouble.
So I want you to meet Todd Rose.
He's a social scientist professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and author of a book called Collective Illusions Conformity, Complicity and the Science of Why We Make Bad Decisions.
Hey, Todd, thanks for coming on Something You Should Know.
Hey, thanks for having me, Mike.
So explain what's going on here.
Explain what collective illusions are.
Look, I mean we all know that human beings have a conformity bias, which is we're hardwired to want to be with our groups, not against them.
That's not new.
And We also know that that can lead to kind of groupthink where we just go along with the group just because we want to belong.
What I'm writing about is a darker side to that conformity, which is what we call collective illusions, and it's this
They're social lies.
They happen in situations where most people in a group go along with a view they don't agree with, just because they incorrectly think that most other people in the group agree with it.
And so as a result, the entire group can end up doing something that almost nobody really wants.
That seems really stupid.
And yet, I think when I hear you say that...
And I think when anybody hears you say that, they go, yeah, I've kind of suspected that.
It does seem that we go along, maybe thinking well, you know, it's not worth speaking up and we'll just go along and do what the group wants.
Okay, it's one thing to go along, but it seems wild that we would just be wrong about the group to begin with right,
It's how our brains are wired.
But here's the trick.
For conformity to work, you have to know what the group actually thinks.
Otherwise, what are you conforming to?
And this is the rub.
So the way your brain figures out what group consensus is, is a pretty flimsy shortcut.
Your brain assumes the loudest voices repeated the most are the majority.
And so you can kind of already see the problem with that, right?
Like, if you are wrong about the group to begin with because you've got a vocal fringe and a bunch of people are self-silencing, then you're going to think they're the majority and if you want to conform, you'll conform to that fringe and it becomes reality.
Again, that's so stupid.
And here's the thing.
This idea of collective illusion goes back 100 years in research and hundreds of years just in general understanding.
But they were rare because it just was hard to get a lot of people to self-silence and get that kind of misread of the group.
But because of social media today, they're just rampant.
I mean, they are all over the place.
And let me give you more specifics about that, which is, if you take just Twitter, so we know that about 80 of all content on Twitter is generated by 10 of the users.
And it turns out that 10 isn't remotely representative of the.
They tend to be more extreme on almost every social issue.
But you can see the problem there, right?
Like, if only 10 of people hold an opinion, but you think it's 80, then your brain will treat that as the majority.
And if you're not willing to go against that group, you'll just say nothing, you'll self silence right.
And if enough of us do that, than the results of collective illusion.
And right now in America, that's exactly what's happening.
Our research and other people's research have shown that about two-thirds of Americans admit to self-silencing right now.
Two-thirds.
So no wonder we have collective illusions all over the place.
Like our self-silencing guarantees it.
Wow.
Two-thirds of people...
Don't speak up for fear of not conforming.
Yeah, and here's what's interesting.
Some of them report that it's due to cancel culture.
That gets all the attention, but it's actually a small percentage.
The overwhelming reason why most people self-silence is decency.
They actually don't want to hurt people's feelings.
They don't want to create conflict.
And they believe incorrectly that other people are just too sensitive these days.
And yet when we ask people in private opinion research about their own views, 75 of Americans are like I'm not sensitive.
I would like to hear other opinions.
But they are so convinced that everybody else is just fragile that they're just self-silencing.
And now we're just living under this like cascade of illusions.
So in daily life, give me an example of where this is a problem.
Maybe not so much political or social media kind of things, but it happens just every day, right?
It does.
I mean, you think about it, just anyone who's listening, you know what I mean.
We've all had those moments where we thought we're the only ones in the room who hold a certain view.
And rather than speak up, we just say nothing, right?
And that's happening.
It's happening in our families.
It's happening in our workplaces.
It's certainly happening in higher education.
And it's affecting, like you said, not just our politics although, for sure, our politics.
It has seeped into everyday issues that matter like, for example, even our definition of a successful life right.
What could be more personal than the life you want to live?
Well, at my think tank Populous, we did one of the largest private opinion studies ever on what people mean by a successful life.
And in private.
What you get is their trade-off priorities, including you wish people cared about, like relationships and character, just being a good person you know, getting a good education and making a contribution in life.
But when you ask them what most Americans would say, you get a completely different picture.
They think everybody else cares about zero-sum.
Someone's got to lose for me to win, and it's all about wealth, status and power.
And to put a finer point on that, out of 76 possible items that we had, people trade off in terms of what matters to them for success.
They thought that most Americans valued being famous more than anything else.
So they just think most Americans want to be famous, and that's their view of success.
And it turns out, in private, it is actually dead last.
So illusions don't get bigger than that.
But you can think about just the practical consequences here.
If we're all under this illusion of fame, then advertisers and TV producers, when they want to signal success, they sell us fame back to us because they think that's what we want.
And then we look at those commercials and storylines and say well, obviously people care about fame.
Why would they sell it to us if we didn't?
And so we're stuck in this illusion.
And I'll say one more thing about this that the practical consequences of collective illusions are that this generation's illusions tend to be next generation's private opinion.
And in the case of fame, this is exactly what we're seeing.
So my colleagues at UCLA have been studying middle school kids for quite a while.
Like, what are they internalizing from society and from media?
And up until a few years ago, the dominant theme every year was character related.
I want to be a good person, want to be honest, want to have friends.
A few years ago, it changed to I want to be famous.
And it hasn't changed back.
Now kids say things like, I want to have a million followers.
And you're like, at what?
And they can't tell you.
They just want to be famous.
So it's bad enough when the illusions start to warp our children's views of the kind of life that's worth living.
But it gets even worse when we think about the illusions related to the aspirations we have for our country, the way we want to treat one another right.
Even what we want out of our institutions.
And I'm telling you like at this point, if you name anything that matters in society, I think it's a coin toss, whether we're under a collective illusion or not.
So is this kind of collective illusion, what happens when there's a pandemic and everybody runs out and buys toilet paper?
It's exactly right.
I fell for this with the toilet paper one, and I'm embarrassed to admit it, because I was literally writing a book about it as it happened.
But we all thought, uh-oh, there's not going to be enough toilet paper.
Well, I happen to know someone who actually owns one of the companies that makes toilet paper.
So I actually got firsthand verification that in fact, there was no shortage, right?
Like, and if everybody just settled down, it's going to be fine.
However, I couldn't help shake the feeling that I thought everybody else thought there was a shortage.
And so I thought well, wait a minute, if I don't get the toilet paper, they're going to gobble it up, and then I won't have enough toilet paper.
So, sure enough I'm, I'm going to my grocery store and I'm grabbing toilet paper, and I became part of the problem.
And lo and behold, there was a shortage because we all rushed to grab it.
And it's all your fault.
Exactly.
I take full responsibility for that.
Here's what's funny.
My wife was like, what are you doing?
And we still haven't gotten through all the toilet paper that I grabbed.
What you said at the very beginning, though, I just keep thinking about it.
It's very troubling that amongst people, whoever speaks the loudest repeatedly is assumed to speak for the majority.
That's just crazy.
Yeah, so again, this is the problem is that through evolution, we've got a shortcut for estimating group consensus, which is the loudest voices.
And loud voices repeated, even when you intellectually know it's the same person or a small number of people.
That's not how your brain is treating it.
Your brain is mistaking essentially noise for numbers and it will just assume this is what the group thinks.
And again, while this is a fundamental thing about being human, we've never lived with this kind of social technology before, which makes it drop dead easy for anyone in their parents' basement to be able to drive an illusion.
Right.
And what's worse is state actors have figured this out.
So like both Russia and China do this all the time on social media in the United States.
They have these bots that are programmed to swarm.
And what they do is, rather than spread lies, they actually go into say, conservative Twitter and liberal Twitter and And they actually tease out fringe ideas right.
So they're real Americans saying something, but they're not very popular.
And then they retweet the heck out of them until it starts to feel like that's actually the dominant view.
And so by doing that, if they do it on both sides politically, they can drive each of them to the extremes.
And it gives this perception of deep polarization in society when it's actually just an illusion.
I want to get a specific example of how those bots are used to retweet out things.
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Todd Rose is my guest, and he is author of the book Collective Illusions.
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So Todd, give me a specific example of how those bots retweet things out and do what you were talking about.
On the left, one of the things that got a big boost on this was the push to defund the police.
And if you remember that movement, there's a real moral imperative for wanting people to be safe and not having police overreach and that kind of thing.
That's fair.
But suddenly this idea that the answer is defund the police gained steam.
It was always by a fringe group, but it got amplified on social media, including with some help from some bots.
And enough Democrats thought this is – like we have private opinion data on this.
The overwhelming majority never believed it, but they thought the majority of Democrats did.
So when they get called for polling, do you support this?
You know what the right answer is.
But then, of course, that illusion already burst because –
In Minneapolis.
They put it to a vote and it turns out supermajority.
People did not want that right.
But you look on the right.
We actually have private opinion data with respect to the 2020 election amongst Republicans.
So I can tell you point blank that if you ask Republicans in public you'll get close to 60 say that the election was rigged.
But in private, it's about 14%.
So the problem is that we're all self-silencing or we're lying about our views to belong to our group and thinking that we're not causing any problems.
But in fact, once you understand the concept of a collective illusion and how it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, our silence and our complicity really does great harm for ourselves and for society.
But does speaking up often result in getting canceled or being shunned or being called names and risk ruining you because you spoke up against the quote majority, even though it isn't a majority?
For sure.
And that's the power that fringe groups wield.
Right is the threat of social sanctioning or economic ruin for having the wrong opinion.
And that should be unacceptable.
Look, the only way out of collective illusions in a principled way is you've got to have the moral courage to be honest about what you believe, but also the civic courage to make it safe for other people to do so.
But to your point.
There are times, you know.
Sometimes we just imagine the fear of social sanctioning, but for sometimes it is real right.
And so in the book I laid out a handful of things you can do instead of self-silencing.
That we know from research shows It doesn't expose you to that kind of canceling right.
But it can still help to tease out the presence of illusions and shatter them when they're in place.
Things like what?
So it's interesting, right?
So it turns out groups don't punish people who haven't made up their mind yet.
So if you're unsure about speaking up and you think it might be an illusion and you don't want to be on the wrong side of the group, the easiest thing you could do is actually insert uncertainty, saying I'm not sure yet.
And you can do that on the one hand, on the other hand.
And it turns out that if it really is the group's true opinion, they will try to persuade you.
Groups will actually try to change your mind and convince you.
If it's an illusion, what you'll see is lots of other people will grab that escape hatch you just offered and end up adopting the sort of uncertain position.
And at no point are you at risk for being canceled if all you're doing is expressing uncertainty.
Brilliant.
Give me another one.
So some of these, the most important thing you can do, especially when it's about belonging to your tribe right.
Because under belonging, it's not just that you'll stay silent.
You'll often lie about what you believe to show that you're part of the group.
And in the book, I...
I lay out some pretty horrific examples, including people in cults and the extent that they'd go to to be part of that.
But when it comes to that, where it's just intense identity-related stuff, the most important thing you can do happens well before you get to that situation, which is, it turns out from neuroscience research.
We know that If you have at least three groups that matter to you, none of those groups can have cult-like power of you.
And literally, just if one group is challenging your view and you're too afraid to speak up, all you have to do is, in your own mind, imagine one other group that matters to you.
And it turns out it will bluntly the fear response that your brain triggers about being ostracized from any particular group.
So it's funny, again, it's what cults do.
They isolate you from every other group, so they're the only group that matters.
This is so interesting because it's happening everywhere all the time, and unless you really pay attention, you just fall victim to it.
It's amazing, and it happens in so many situations.
It does, and the thing is.
The one takeaway I would tell people is You have to get comfortable with the idea that you can no longer trust your brain to tell you what your group believes.
You just can't.
It'll feel like you know and you're going to be wrong half the time.
We just have to get beyond that and realize because of our technologies we can no longer trust our brains.
Read on the group.
And I believe the way forward is a recommitment to some fundamental values that we've held as a society to free expression and protecting people's ability to share controversial ideas even when we really disagree with them.
There's a reason for that.
And if we don't, Self silence harms everyone, right?
And for me, and the reason I wanted to write the book, is when we started this.
We've been tracking the American public's understanding of this phenomenon of collective illusions.
And right now, it's only about 3% of people know that this even exists.
So now that you know, suddenly you recognize there's an incredible value and importance to being what I would call congruent, like working hard to ensure your public self is the same as your private self.
We know that it's a critical thing for your own happiness, but now you also know it might be the most important thing you could ever do for the groups that matter to you.
So again, going back to your point that it's people on the fringe who speak the loudest and say it often, convince the rest of us that they speak for the majority.
Are those people doing that deliberately?
Like, do they know what they're doing or not?
Well, so here's what's funny.
You could imagine that the fringe is this nefarious.
They know that they're in the minority and their only way to power is to convince you that you're in the minority.
And there's certainly going to be some of that, right?
But what we have found in our research is that there's a simpler explanation, which is People with fringe opinions are under the same illusions as everybody else, right?
So they're hearing the same amplified, retweeted views and they're like listen, a lot of people agree with me.
And so they get emboldened and say, of course I'm going to speak out.
We know that if you believe you're in the majority, you are way more likely to share your opinion, because there's no risk.
And so a simple explanation is we're all under the same illusions, and those illusions are making they're emboldening people with fringe views to be even more vocal, and they're leading a lot of the majority to actually self-silence.
And then it basically makes those fringe people look like the dominant view.
Now I will say one thing Mike, I think is important, which is I'm not saying that the fringe can't be right, sometimes right.
The truth is, is almost all progress comes from fringe ideas to begin with.
So I'm not saying that those people shouldn't have a voice.
They should.
What I'm saying is is that voice has to be put in the broader context of the broader range of opinions that exist in this society, because if we don't do that, then we get these collective illusions and nobody wins.
One example of collective illusions you talk about is about kidney transplants, and I think this is so interesting.
Can you explain what that's all about?
So it's the same example in terms of this.
One of the traps we fall into that can lead us to illusions is this copycat kind of behavior where we think other people must know something we don't.
Right.
As you know, the kidney.
There are so many more people who need kidneys than we ever have healthy kidneys every year, right?
A lot of people die from this.
What was shocking to me is to find out that a very decent percentage I think close to like 20 of healthy kidneys are discarded.
And here's why that was happening.
And then we did solve for it, which is, It was the way the kidney list was structured.
So basically you get on the list and it's based on fit, like your type, if it doesn't work for you.
But then a kidney becomes available and you get it 48 hours before it's no longer good.
And they just go down that list, right?
So they start with the first person and you get a very small amount of time for you and your doctor to make a decision.
Do I take the kidney or not?
Well, first of all, if I'm number one on the list, I can be a little patient, right?
I can wait for a really great kidney because I'll get another bite of that apple.
But what happened was the way that the list was structured, is if I'm number 10 on the list And that kidney comes to me.
All I know is that the previous nine people rejected it.
So what happens is, as it starts to tumble, once it gets past like the 10th list, people just say no to a healthy kidney because they're like why did everybody else reject it?
It turns out that the reason people reject them often is like, I'm not in town.
I couldn't get there in time. a whole bunch of other practical reasons.
So the solution was so simple.
All they did and this was an MIT professor that figured it out all they did was actually have people say why they rejected the kidney.
So now if I'm 10 on the list, I get nine rejections, but I know why they did.
That's it.
How simple is that?
I mean, and think about the lives that are saved just by asking and answering the question why.
This is one of those conversations that is so eye-opening.
I find this fascinating.
Todd Rose has been my guest and he is a social scientist, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
And the book is called Collective Illusions Conformity, Complicity and the Science of Why We Make Bad Decisions.
And there's a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes.
This has been great, Todd.
Thanks.
Thanks, Mike.
It's been a pleasure.
And that concludes this SYSK Trending episode.
I'm Mike Carruthers.
Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.
