Psychologist debunks 8 myths of mass scale | Todd Rose

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.

We've known about collective illusions for over 100 years, but here's the thing: our cultural and technological conditions have changed to make creating and sustaining collective illusions so easy that they've just proliferated at a scale we've never seen before in history. We have found them almost everywhere we look—from the kind of lives we want to live to the country we want to live in. Do we want to treat each other? And even what we expect out of our institutions?

Our job is to dismantle them so that when we see ourselves in public opinion, we are seeing ourselves for 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. [Music] I think tank populist studies Collective Illusions and uses what we call private opinion methods, which are just methods that help reveal people's private views free of social pressure and other distorting influences on public opinion. Every question we ever ask, we always ask what the individual thinks and what they believe most people would say to that question.

That combination of methods helps surface collective illusions all across society. We have found them almost everywhere we look—from the kind of lives we want to live to the country we want to live in. Do we want to treat each other? And even what we expect out of our institutions, from education to the workplace?

The most damaging consequence is that an illusion in one generation tends to become the private opinion of the next generation. [Music] One of the most important collective illusions we've ever discovered has to do with the way that people define a successful life. It turns out that the vast majority of the American public believes that most people in the country care about wealth, status, power—when in fact, the opposite is true.

The vast majority of the American public are focused on a more personal fulfillment orientation. But our kids are paying an incredible price because they do not understand that this is an illusion. [Music] They try to chase fame because they believe that's what other people will recognize as success.

So if we do nothing about collective illusions now, our silence will virtually guarantee that our children and our grandchildren will have this view as their private opinion. We've known about collective illusions for over 100 years, and up until the last, say, 20 years, you could have probably counted on two hands and two feet the number of serious societal and collective illusions that had existed. Since then, that number has exploded.

They affect society as a whole, but we are all part of creating and sustaining the illusions, even when we fundamentally end up disagreeing. A truthful disagreement is always better than a collective illusion.

Being aware that collective illusions exist is the starting point. The only way to discover those is the same way that you actually dismantle them: you've got to have conversations. You’ve got to 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. [Music] Given the profound lack of...