Our Collective Illusions

What I watched: “Psychologist debunks 8 myths of mass scale” by Todd Rose for Big Think. Posted December 4, 2022.

I alerted my subscribers ahead of time that this post was likely going to be a long one. It is. The video I watched was compelling enough that I felt the need to write about the entirety of its message. I think it’s an important video and I hope you watch it.

Todd Rose is the co-founder and President of Populace, a think tank based in Boston. Rose is a former professor at Harvard University. There he was faculty director of the Mind, Brain, and Education program, and he led the Laboratory for the Science of Individuality.

Rose’s background is developmental psychology. He is the author of The End of Average: How We Succeed in a World That Values Sameness, Dark Horse: Achieving Success Through the Pursuit of Fulfillment, and Collective Illusions: Conformity, Complicity, and the Science of Why We Make Bad Decisions, the last of which serves as the foundation for the video’s topic.

Rose’s opener sums up the focus of the video (and I assume his book) nicely.

In a perfect world, our public selves, the way I behave, the way I speak, the things I do, are the same as our private selves. At its best, public opinion holds a mirror to us and it reflects exactly who we are. What collective illusions do to that relationship is turn it into a funhouse of mirrors, which is fatal to free society.

Collective illusions are situations where most people in a group go along with a view they don't agree with because they incorrectly believe that most people agree with it. It's not just that we're misreading a few people. It is that the majority thinks the majority believes something that they don't. We are all part of creating and sustaining the illusion.

Reflect on some of the things lots of people believe that aren’t true. Today we’re awash in bonkers conspiracy theories that a good chunk of people believe. That’s one of the dangerous examples of how collective illusions can indeed by fatal to a well-functioning society.

Rose explains that we’ve known about collective illusions for more than 100 years. However, as is obvious once we hear him say it, the changes in our culture and the technologies we use have created the conditions that encourage and facilitate creating and sustaining collective illusions. So, as we’ve seen quite often in recent years, those illusions are able to proliferate at an unprecedented rate.

Collective illusions are all around us. Every sector of life has them. But it’s incumbent upon all of us, to the best of our ability, to dismantle those illusions. Whether those illusions pertain to the kinds of lives we want to live, the country we want to live in, how we treat each other, or what we expect from our institutions, we must remain vigilant in bursting the illusion bubble to reveal the truth. We must create the environment in which when we see ourselves in public opinion, we’re seeing our true selves, who we really are.

If you create the enabling conditions that allow everyday people to reveal who they really are to each other, social change can happen at a scale and pace that would otherwise seem unimaginable. And here's how we do that.

Rose explains how his Populace think thank goes about studying collective illusions. They employ something they call private opinion methods. Those research methods help to expose people’s private views free of external social pressure and other influences that might distort their views. They ask research subjects what they think and also how they believe other people would answer the question. This is how they determine collective illusions across society.

Unfortunately, there is no facet of society free of collective illusions. But one of their greatest dangers is that the collective illusions of a generation tend to become the private opinions of the following generation.

This makes me think of the opinions I held about all sorts of things in my youth that upon reflection I realize were simply me parroting the opinions of my father’s generation. It can be a struggle to throw off the shackles of those generational opinions, even when presented with clear facts to the contrary.

The remainder of the video is Rose articulating various ways that we humans engage in collective illusions. Note that the research subjects are American. Results might be different elsewhere, but my guess is such illusions are a worldwide phenomenon.

The first illusion Rose points out is how people define a successful life. Most Americans believe that a preponderance of their fellow Americans care about wealth, status, and power. But that’s not true. Quite the opposite. Most Americans adopt a personal fulfillment orientation. With so many Americans holding onto the illusion, people growing up in our society pay a heavy price since they are chasing the fame and wealth the illusion mindset fosters.

Challenging such collective illusions is important because if we don’t it will essentially guarantee future generations continue to hold the illusion as their private opinion.

Collective illusions are nothing new. Scientists and researchers have known about them for more than 100 years, but it’s only during about the last 20 years or so that the number of collective illusions has skyrocketed. Hmm, that’s about when social media was introduced to the masses. Coincidence? I doubt it.

Why is all this talk about collective illusions so important? Because acknowledging and being aware of collective illusions is the starting point for blunting their impact on society. How do we do this? We talk to each other.

If you understand that fact, and you create the enabling conditions that allow everyday people to reveal who they really are to each other, these illusions can crumble in a hurry and social change can happen at a scale and pace that would otherwise seem unimaginable.

The video then presents eight specific myths (illusions) and breaks them down for the viewer. The first of these is trust.

Rose tells the story of Frederick Taylor who wrote a book more than 100 years ago called Scientific Management. The book presented Taylor’s ideas about how a productive economy is created. He championed the concept of efficiency. Taylor believed that to increase efficiency you have to stop trusting people.

To align with his belief in the value of distrust, he outlined a top down, systems approach for society. At the top of the hierarchy were managers (he invented the term) who manage the cogs (people) in the production mechanisms. The system itself was the most important element to ensuring efficiency.

When systems, as so many of them do today, remove choice from us as individuals and treat us as inherently untrustworthy, we end up seeing others through that twisted and potentially inhumane lens.

But those who study honesty and trustworthiness have found that people are overwhelmingly trustworthy.

This made me think of the in-office versus remote work discussion that’s taken place lately. I believe the heavy-handed, in-office requirements in industries for which it’s not required is often this collective illusion of untrustworthiness playing out in corporate management. CEOs and managers don’t trust their workforce, so they employ harsher restrictions on employee work life. Savvy corporate leaders who understand that most of their workers are quite trustworthy will make the smart decision to create a flexible work life that should often include more remote work opportunities.

Most of us are trustworthy. It’s important that we know that ourselves and it’s important that we are viewed that way by others. Yet, our society and its institutions continually try to remind us that we are not to be trusted. Given the choice between trusting others or controlling others, we should err on the side of trust.

Our American democratic institutions are supposed to serve the people. But since Frederick Taylor (now I hate the guy), the opposite happens.

As a free people in a free society, it is unacceptable that our public institutions treat the people as distrustful. Because now we know that whatever efficiency you get from that top-down control model, the consequences in terms of human dignity and social trust are so damaging that that trade-off is not worth it. What we need is to trust communities to make decisions for themselves, trust families to make decisions for themselves, trust people too.

If you want a trusting society, work to dislodge this top-down view of our institutions and give more power to people. Insist that our institutions treat the public with trust.

Next, Rose tackles the illusions regarding success. Populace looked at the private opinions of Americans across 76 different attributes that could be part of a successful life. Of those 76, most people believed that others rank fame as the number one component of a successful life. But when people reveal their private opinion, fame ranks 76th.

It should come as no surprise when seeing media portrayals of successful people, whether a news stories or social media posts, that we believe others worship at the altar of fame. It should therefore be no surprise that our institutions are built around these collective illusions about success. Commercials, movies, and television shows spew forth the collective illusion of what they think a successful life is, being famous.

Whether it’s a kid’s desire to be a famous sports figure or to have a million online followers, the notion that fame is what makes for a successful life is infecting everything that we do.

When queried, people don’t actually value fame that much, but they believe they should, that others value it. So, therefore they should too. The current fame-seeking generation is going to grow up making the adulation of fame the dominant attitude in society. That’s dangerous.

So, out of those 76 components of success, what did people privately value? It turns out no two people had the same priorities when it came to viewing success. There is no definition of a successful life that applies to everyone. We each have to discover that for ourselves. We should challenge ourselves and others by asking what does a successful life truly look like for each of us. Only then can we begin to counter the falsehoods and instead focus on respecting and honoring individuality and the unique set of factors that make for each person’s successful life.

Social media is the third of the collective illusion topics. It’s no secret I use social media often and it does have a democratizing effect on our society. Information and opinions are readily shared and accessible. We aren’t beholden to news outlets to tell us about ourselves or what’s happening around us. We can talk to each other and find things out directly from individual sources. But, there is a big flaw in this approach.

Our assumption when interacting online is that we’re dealing with a reasonable sample of the overall population. We’re not. About 80% of all social media content is generated by about 10% of the users. And, no surprise, that 10% tends to be extreme on most social issues. They are the loud minority that gives the impression they are the majority when in fact they are not. This results in many of us self-silencing or, even worse, going along with the opinion.

This is how wacky viewpoints like those generated by extremists can so easily take hold. Dangerous extremists throughout modern history have used these loud minority tactics to manipulate the masses. Dictators create the illusion of consensus to grab and hold onto power.

Look at what’s happening in the United States. As but one egregious example, the Big Lie of unfair elections promoted by Trump and Republicans going along with him has fostered a loud minority falsehood that’s taken hold among their followers. Social media manipulation has fed into this falsehood frenzy.

Online fake account bots easily post and share certain positive stories about a person or issue that gives us the false impression lots of people believe it. The same bots also aggressively attack any opposing viewpoints. If we could figure out how to better regulate and suppress such bots or the minority of social media accounts dedicated to proliferating lies and attacking those who challenge them, our society and democracy would be much better off.

Social media is a free-for-all in terms of who can shout the loudest and who can silence other people in the name of masquerading as a majority and manufacturing collective illusions. Your willingness to conform and your unwillingness to challenge what you think the group believes will actually contribute to leading the group astray.

The solution to our online life is to get offline once in a while. The most important thing you can do is continue to have conversations with your family, with your neighbors, with your community. Don't carry that distortion over into the way you treat people in real life.

Next, Rose talks about conformity, a topic near and dear to my heart. This reminds me of a quote from author Rita Mae Brown.

I think the reward for conformity is that everyone likes you except yourself.

Human beings are hardwired to conform, at least to some extent. We like to be with our group, whatever the group might be. We’re a pack species. When researchers studied what happens when people deviate from the group, it triggered what scientists call an error signal in the brain. That signal cascades throughout the brain doing its job of short-circuiting anything that runs counter to you going along with the group.

When we deviate from a group, we’re often punished. This is conformity bias. The results of conformity bias can be benign, but they can also be detrimental.

To illustrate the power of using conformity bias for good, Rose tells the remarkable story of a Bogota Mayor who once utilized mimes to control jaywalking violators. Using fines doled out by sometimes corrupt police who issued tickets to coerce bribes wasn’t working. The mimes placed at intersections would gently shame jaywalkers and that ended up drastically reducing traffic accidents and deaths. (Maybe we need mimes placed inside the halls of Congress?)

Just because there is group consensus doesn’t mean the consensus is a fact. It might just be the agreed upon consensus because no one has adequately challenged what is a collective illusion. If we don’t challenge such illusions, it can ultimately result in leading the group astray. History has an abundance of stories about groups erring in monumental ways at enormous cost.

In the 1960s, the majority of whites in the South no longer approved of segregation. But they were fully convinced that most white Southerners still favorite segregation. This collective illusion could thrive because no one was willing to risk not belonging to their white group. Thus, segregation continued far longer than it might have if the illusion wasn’t shared.

Then Rose says something that I feel we need to scream from the rooftops. I’ve seen people silenced, usually online, by a vocal minority within the general population but just as often within smaller communities. The vocal few are so aggressive and strident in their stances that the majority of reasonable people feel like they are unable to make their case for fear of being an outcast even though most people might feel exactly as they do.

We are now in an environment where free expression, the ability to disagree openly, is under such threat by a vocal fringe that recognizes that the only way that they can get their way is to convince you that the majority believes something they don't, and allow conformity bias to do the rest of the work.

The cost to you having given up your private values, in the name of conformity, is that you may actually come to believe the very thing that you don't agree with right now. We have to create the space that protects differences of opinion, that allows respectful disagreement in ways that are productive.

How many illusions get punctured almost overnight when we realize despite our differences we have common ground as well?

Rose then discusses collective illusions related to work. Anyone who navigates within work culture today is fully aware that the employment and work systems in place rely strongly on the fundamental distrust of the worker. This has been the case since the 1930s at which time American workers bought into the bargain of giving up autonomy, control over our work life, or the expectation that work should be fulfilling. Those systems that distrust the American worker are still solidly in place today.

What’s changed? Perhaps driven in large part by the self-reflection many engaged in during the pandemic, workers are no longer willing to simply be cogs in the corporate and business machinery. American worker priorities have changed.

Populace asked people to consider 60 different priorities for work and asked them the trade-offs they were willing to consider for their work life. Most people believed that what others wanted from work was a prestigious job, ranking it 5th out of 60. However, when people’s private opinions were assessed, prestige in a job ranked 55 out of 60.

Employers should take note that all those things we’re told, the collective illusions, that we should want in our work culture aren’t what people really want. Things like perks at work, personal connections, and strong leadership are among the least prioritized desires among American workers today.

Think about this for a moment. If leaders at companies also believe in these collective illusions, they’ll continue to create workplaces catering to the illusions rather than to what workers really want to be happy in their jobs.

What people want is work to be a positive part of the rest of their life. They want to be trusted to be able to make decisions about how they do their work. And they are expecting more meaning and purpose in their work.

The thing that will hold us back from a good life rather than just working to work are these illusions that keep pulling us back to conformity to something for which the group no longer actually values.

Employers need to listen to employees, give them more control, and trust them. Employees need to have conversations with their supervisors to make their needs known. And, if an employer refuses to meet an employee at least halfway, it’s probably time for the employee to find another employer.

Populace created the American Aspirations Index to understand the private trade-off priorities that the American public has for the future of our country. When participants were asked if we’re more divided or united as a country, 82% said we’re divided, and half of that 82% said we’re extremely divided. That syncs with the political narrative we’re fed daily from media outlets and social media interactions.

Then, when those same respondents were asked their actual private opinions, it painted a different story. When they took political leanings out of the equation and just looked at demographics, everyone shared eight of the top 10 priorities. Those eight priorities reflect the core American values most of us care about. In other words, despite the constant drone highlighting our divisions, more of us agree than disagree.

Things like individual rights, quality education, health care, and a non-biased criminal justice system are among the things most of us agree on. Turns out, the collective illusion of widespread disagreement and division is false. So, why does this feel incorrect?

We have extremely sharp divisions on only a handful of social issues. But the intensity of the debate and actions around those issues is so heavily weighted that it’s misinterpreted as widespread overall disagreement.

Disagreement on process is what democracy’s all about. If we pick those issues and stances on which we have common ground, even though the illusion makes us feel otherwise, we can make tremendous progress, even on social issues that seem intractable and impervious to consensus.

Unity for the sake of unity is false consensus. We don't want to paper over real differences. What we want is a culture where we treat each other with respect so we can adjudicate those differences in productive ways. The strategy really is bridge building. It really is using unlikely alliances to accomplish amazing things together.

So, a call for unity will fall on deaf ears. A call to treat one another with respect and dignity that every human being deserves will actually puncture the illusion of division and allow us to accomplish more together as a people than we could possibly imagine right now.

Education is Rose’s next topic. Out of the 66 possible things that higher education could deliver, what people think others want out of higher education are things like prestigious schools, great sports teams, and active social lives. But what people really want is for a school to help them get a good job that is meaningful and to do so with as little debt as possible.

Some higher education institutions are attempting to deliver what people really want. They’re creating modularized, individualized, and customized educations that use credentials rather than diplomas to better signal to hiring employers. Students don’t just want an undifferentiated diploma. They want things like hybrid learning, on-the-job training, and apprenticeships. It’s about equipping students to live the life they want to live. This might be done through colleges or trade schools.

Next, cultural norms. Rose points out that our brains are energy hogs and always looking at ways to reduce energy expenditures. One way we do that is through cultural norms. These are things we all agree to that help grease the wheels of social interactions. They make life more predictable.

However, cultural norms usually reflect the norms of the prior generation, not the current one. Since we’re born into these norms, the previous generation’s group consensus, we buy into them as representing something that is true and good. But lots of norms are entirely arbitrary. We should always remain skeptical of norms.  

Norms can exist for a very long time, not because they were ever true, but just because people don't question them. The areas of the brain that track cultural norms are the same areas of the brain that process social information in general, and a violation of a cultural norm will trigger the exact same error signal that your brain triggers when it is perceived that you are going against your group.

Often, it’s been society’s artists that challenge norms. They might seem a bit weird to us, but that’s because they’re supposed to be. The acknowledgement that artists are supposed to reside outside of cultural norms creates a permission structure that allows them to hold a mirror up to us and society and challenge our assumptions about ourselves.

This might spark offense among the non-artist public, but that’s part of the process. Other times that reflection is the first crack in the norm. When people are talking about the art and artist rather than the norm itself, it creates an opportunity for people to reveal to each other what they truly value and the norm can evaporate and a new norm put in its place.

Rose tells an interesting story about how mothers in Vietnam were privately bucking the cultural norm that feeding shrimp to their children was harmful. They needed to ensure their children were well nourished. So, they quietly fed their children shrimp. Once those “positive deviants” were found and those mothers told their stories to other mothers, only then was the cultural norm supplanted by the new norm that feeding a child shrimp under those circumstances was best for the child. A new and better norm emerged.

Rose concludes this way.

The fact that we're so hung up on top-down, expert-driven solutions to everything is the only reason why positive deviance seems strange to us. But in reality, it's the only way you can ever drive social change under collective illusions that are rooted in cultural norms. If you understand that fact, and you create the enabling conditions that allow everyday people to reveal who they really are to each other, these illusions can crumble in a hurry, and social change can happen at a scale and pace that would otherwise seem unimaginable.

Phew. I told you this post was long. But I felt it was important and so full of important insights into the human condition that it deserved a lengthy post.

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