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 fun house 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 and 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 and every question we ever ask we always ask what the individual thinks and what they believe most people would say to that question and 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 collected 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 got to have conversations you 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 trust in society today we often look for the cause of that in each other I don't believe that's true Frederick Taylor is probably the most important person that most people have never heard of over a hundred years ago he wrote a book called Scientific Management which they were about his ideas about how you create a productive economy and he felt like the biggest problem in society was that we weren't very efficient and so Scientific Management literally said wait the first thing you got to

stop doing is trusting people he went about implementing A System's first approach to a top-down Society governed by managers in fact he invented the term manager and he made us all cogs where the system Matters Most because of the way our institutions treat us by removing Choice from us and fundamentally treating us as untrustworthy we have come to see each other through that lens [Music] but here's the thing when you actually study honesty and trustworthiness what you find over and over again is that the vast majority of people are in fact trustworthy one of my

favorite studies it's a pretty famous German study here's what they did they just randomly called people and said that there was a contest going on and all they needed to do was flip a coin themselves and if it landed on Tails they got a gift certificate if it landed on heads they got nothing now what's important is nobody knows how the coin lands except for the person on the phone so you would have expected everybody says tells takes the gift certificate and the accurate results are like well it's 100 tells who would have thought right

it's not what happened it was almost 50 50 heads or tails and in fact it was slightly more in favor of heads which tells me most people if not all people were telling the truth about how the coin landed when no one else could possibly have known [Music] so it matters to us not just that we are trustworthy but that we are viewed that way and yet we live in a society where our institutions continue to remind us that this is not true that we are in some way untrustworthy we can only interact with each

other in one of two ways we can trust people to make choices for themselves or we can control those choices for them it is a fundamental tenet of democracy that institutions serve people but ever since Frederick Taylor we have flipped that relationship 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 insists that our institutions treat the public with trust foreign [Music] Collective illusions that we've ever discovered has to do with the way that people Define a successful life we looked at the private opinions of the American public across 76 different attributes that could go into a successful life out of those 76 the vast majority of the

American public believes that most people would rank Fame as number one there's just one problem in private it's actually dead last it is 76 out of 76 possible attributes we don't care about Fame but we believe that most everybody else cares about Fame more than anything else our public institutions are actually being built around a false view of what people want out of life in our media in our businesses those people are also under the same exact Illusions we have commercials we have movies and television shows all telling us that a successful life is about

being famous now the dominant thing that kids talk about is wanting to be famous one kid I remember saying I want a million followers he couldn't tell you for what he just wanted a million followers we know that most people even in the younger generation do not privately value Fame but they are even more convinced than the older Generations that most people do they are internalizing the illusion as their own values and that will become the dominant view in society in the future if we don't do something about it being aware that Collective Illusions exist

is the starting point and it comes down to us being honest about ourselves to each other populists ask what does a fulfilling life mean to you what we found was really astonishing out of those 76 trade-off priorities in the thousands and thousands of people that we have studied no two people were identical nobody can tell you what a successful life is you have to discover that for yourself it's about knowing who you are if you want to understand whether the people you care about are pursuing A Life That's not their own ask them why they

care about what they're doing why do you want to be famous by having your ideas challenged that gives you a better sense for who your true self is if we recognize our true shared values it fundamentally changes how we see one another we now recognize that investing in each other and enabling you to pursue the life you want to live is actually better for you and for me foreign [Music] the greatest strength of social media is its democratizing tendency we don't have to just look to Elites and a few news outlets to tell us about

us we can actually communicate with each other but when we engage online we tend to think that we're interacting with a reasonable sample of the actual population but it's not true close to 80 percent of all content on social media is generated by about 10 of the users that 10 tends to be extreme on most social issues they are the vocal Fringe when you have a vocal minority that is perceived as the majority critical mass of us will actually either self-silence or we will actually go along to get along and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy

this is how Collective Illusions form it's not terribly surprising that some of the first people to start to use these tools to manipulate were leaders who need consensus to conserve power Venezuela an example of this is Nicholas Maduro the leader of Venezuela for a long time it looked like on social media that he had a pretty good beat on the consensus of the people that he led so almost everything that he would say stories that were written about him that were positive would be retweeted and shared and it looked like this represented some kind of

consensus but it turned out a significant percentage of his so-called followers were actually what we call social Bots these are fake accounts that only exist to retweet anything positive about him or that he said and importantly to attack the opposition when Twitter banned them the real consensus was with the opposite position and that started to emerge and be retweeted as more and more people recognized that it was okay to say what they actually thought 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 [Music] so this idea of conformity it isn't just a choice every one of us as human beings is

hardwired to prefer to be with our group human beings are not lone wolves who are a packed species on Trials when we deviated from the group it triggered what scientists call an error signal this cascading signal across your brain that is literally meant to short-circuit everything else to tell you something is fundamentally wrong and you should pay attention if you deviate from your group you are actually punished this Conformity bias sometimes it's been used for benevolent ends right one of my favorite examples of that comes from the story of the Bogota mimes Bogota historically has

had a lot of disobeying like traffic rules everybody jaywalks nobody stops at lights several years ago they got a new mayor who realized there was a problem and realized that you couldn't just continue to punish them with corrupt cops issuing tickets and getting bribes he hired a bunch of out of work mimes like clowns you know the and he put them at intersections all over the city they have no power to like imprison you no power to write a ticket all they did was every time they saw someone jaywalk they would just point it out

they would publicly shame them as mimes and it turned out that this public shaming had a massive effect it had a significant reduction of traffic accidents and even deaths I think it's a funny story what I don't like about it is I'm not a huge fan of public shaming for any reason but it does speak to the fact that this is such a hard-wired powerful force for human beings but sometimes the group isn't correct there's nothing magical about group consensus that guarantees that it is a fact it can just literally be consensus because no one's

ever challenged it it may be a collective illusion the group may not actually believe this but because you think the group does your willingness to conform and your unwillingness to challenge what you think the group believes will actually contribute to leading the group astray in fact history is littered with examples of groups airing in massive ways and there's an enormous cost socially in the 60s a majority of whites in the South no longer approved of segregation they wanted desegregation and integration however they were fully convinced that most white Southerners still favored segregation in other words

they were under this Collective illusion right and because nobody was willing to challenge the belonging to their group we allowed segregation to continue for many years because we were behaving in ways that were no longer consistent with our values 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 of giving 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 [Music] ever since the 1930s the bargain has been give up autonomy give up any kind of control give up the expectation that work would be fulfilling and just do what

we tell you to do that system fundamentally distrusts people and we're living with those systems today but what's changed is people are no longer willing to be cogs they're just not our priorities for work as an American public have changed work doesn't have to be a devil's bargain our most recent work is the American Workforce index we didn't just ask people what they wanted we asked them to make difficult choices trade-offs across 60 different possible priorities for work and not surprisingly when we asked people what most people would say they ranked a prestigious job as

being the fifth most important priority for everybody else to have your job be viewed as prestigious that sounds like something people want right it's what we Chase but in private it actually ranks number 55 out of 60. people want to work at places that give them free food and swag and it's a prestigious organization where I have a prestigious title where I can make a best friend at work the things that we are told over and over again go into making a good work culture in reality those are some of the least prioritized things for

the majority of workers in America today to the extent that leadership of companies are under these Illusions they will continue to incentivize and design environments that are no longer a very good fit to the true trade-off priorities of the workforce 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 we all don't have to quit our job and go somewhere else to find fulfillment that it is closer than we think and a lot of it is just subtle changes particularly around giving more control to employees trusting them more listening to the things they care about from an individual standpoint it means having a conversation with your supervisor talk about what matters to you your silence will only diminish the willingness of the employer to

actually make the changes that most people actually want to see it's okay to have the conversation work absolutely can be a part of a fulfilling life most companies need to see that it is not risky that you can trust employees that you can work hard to create a good fit for more people and that the result is not chaos and it does not come at the cost of productivity and Profit just the opposite so what do we prioritize moving forward as an American people the American aspirations index was populist's effort to understand the private trade-off

priorities that the public has for the future of the country we simply asked participants whether they thought we were more divided or United as a country not surprisingly 82 percent of respondents said we were more divided and half of those people said we were extremely divided as the country And yet when we put those same exact people into this private opinion instrument it tells a different story if we take politics out of it and just look at demographics regardless of your gender race geography income education level we share eight of the 10 top priors we

have in common and they are nothing short of core American values people care about individual rights a quality education good health care and a criminal justice system that operates without bias they want to be treated equally regardless of their background and they want to be able to go as far in life as their ability and aspirations will take them but it almost feels like it can't be true because we're all operating under this Collective illusion of widespread disagreement and Division in society the biggest illusion of all is the illusion of division we have very sharp

divisions on just a small handful of issues but because they are so intense it is misinterpreted as widespread disagreement across the board but disagreement on process is the heart of democracy let's pick the places where we actually have common ground but the illusion is convincing us it's not true you think about something like the first step act one of the biggest criminal justice reforms in my lifetime was accomplished in part because you brought together people who you didn't even think would talk to each other and made Common Ground around a common cause right more of

that is needed and it absolutely serves the need of American people 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 and 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 what we're witnessing right now across the country is a pretty dramatic shift in the way people think about their relationship between people and our institutions and nowhere is that more prevalent than in education out of the 66 possibilities that an institution of higher education could deliver what we wanted to understand is what do you prioritize what you're given is a task that says school a school B six of those 66 attributes are randomly grabbed for school a another

six are grabbed for school B which one of these do you choose do it again with six others and that allows us to build a profile for you of your trade-off priorities for higher education what people think people want out of higher education is the prestigious school with a great sports team and an active social life what people actually want out of higher ed is to get a good job that is Meaningful to them and to do that with as little debt as possible foreign there are incredible institutions of higher education who are giving us

a vision of what the future of higher education will be they are doing things that are modularized individualized customized using credentials instead of diplomas to create better signals for employers people are really interested not just in having an undifferentiated diploma but also a hybrid on-the-job training apprenticeships it's not simply book smarts that gets you the job that you want success is not just going to college it is actually are we equipping you to live the life that you want to live parents know their kids better than bureaucrats know their kids communities know their values better

than the federal government knows a community's values where there's a lot of common ground is in this commitment to a far more individualized educational experience education is and always will be the great equalizer the best vehicle for enabling people to actually live the kind of lives they want to live that might be college for some people it might be trades for others but social entrepreneurs need to do is build the solutions and dismantle the Illusions if we get it right and we acknowledge the collective illusion recognize our common desires for the purpose of Education moving

forward there's an opportunity to drive pretty substantial change and we can actually have the education system that we want and deserve [Music] as human beings our brains are Absolute Energy Hogs your brain's always looking for ways to reduce energy expenditure well one of the best ways to do that is through the use of cultural norms there are things we agree to as a society that help us Grease the wheels of social interaction and they make life predictable for us [Music] cultural norms usually reflect the prior Generations group consensus not our own [Music] born into them

by and large we just assume that this group consensus reflects something that is true and good that people really want but it's not correct a lot of norms are just entirely arbitrary and we need to be skeptical about Norms because Norms can exist for a very long time not because they were ever true but just because people don't question them there is 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 artists throughout history have played a role in purposely challenging Norms we see them as a little weird and a little disconnected from society because they're supposed to be and that creates a permission structure that allows them to pull the mirror up to us and say is this really you is this what you believe sometimes you come back and say absolutely it is and you're offended that they even asked but a lot of times it's the first crack in the norm that eventually breaks

and as people start to talk about the artist and about the art rather than the norm itself it reveals the opportunity for people to reveal to each other what they actually value and the norm can disintegrate and a new Norm can emerge [Music] Vietnam faced an incredible challenge with child malnutrition that had basically been impossible to solve through traditional top-down means they finally addressed the problem and solved it through a completely different approach called positive deviants start by actually going into communities and saying let's find the examples of people in these communities that are positive

deviants meaning whatever problem you're facing like malnutrition there's some family whose kids are not malnourished even though they're under the same constraints as everybody else they discovered that these mothers were supplementing the meager amounts of food the kids had with shrimp well those were freely available and widely available sources of nutrition but what they found out was at some point a norm had emerged in that community that said shrimp were harmful to kids the mothers that were doing that were doing it in private they didn't want anybody else to know they were because they knew

they were violating a cultural norm it wasn't enough to tell people to feed their kids shrimp they had to find these mothers and Elevate their voices and allow them to communicate to other parents and break that cultural norm but once they did they made dramatic gains in Child Nutrition for decades the fact that we're so hung up on top-down expert driven solution 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 this series is brought to you by stand together a community of change makers tackling our biggest challenges and to learn more about how you can partner with stand together visit stand together.org [Music] foreign [Music]