we need to treat one another with respect despite our differences like this is like an aspiration for people 00:41:01 right except for they thought it was in the bottom quarter of stuff for everybody else so what happens if i'm like i i would like to get back to treating other people's respect but i don't think 00:41:12 they care about that for me back to that ambiguous interactions that we have all the time i'm gonna read disrespect into most everything i see right and so i i think it's really critical like 00:41:25 like i talked about this as like congruence right this need for our private selves and our public selves to be as as closely aligned as possible we've known for a long time that that's that's a critical part of fulfillment 00:41:37 and self-actualization i mean how how do you get there you're the expert on that like how do you how do you get there if you have a divided self like my private self is different than my public self like so we know that at an individual 00:41:48 level but given the the fact of collective illusions i believe this idea of congruence may be the most important thing you can do for other people right because it doesn't help anyone when we misread each 00:42:00 other so profoundly

the thing is about humans is that this this stuff generalized the group stuff kind of generalizes from individual relational stuff like it's it's a you look at codependent relationships 00:24:00 one-on-one you start to see similar dynamics you know like you start to it's just have you thought about it the individual like the individual uh uh illusion level and how those basic first principles have reasoning for 00:24:13 first principles here you know yeah you're upset correct so so it's actually it's like fractal quality to it right so you see illusion in in in just between two people or small groups

what we find and what we have found and partly why i wrote the book is the trick with illusions is your brain is certain it knows what the group thinks so if just being told it with data that it's not true it the number of times people 00:19:45 say man i i wish it were true but i know it's not and you're like so what we found our strategy we felt like is when the more that people came to understand 00:19:57 the phenomenon of collective illusion the more likely it is that they were willing to take new data and say okay wait now that i know that this is possible and i know that like i can't really trust my brain to tell me what the group thinks they 00:20:10 were open to good data where otherwise it just seemed like the data itself like and if you think about it like how many other organizations have shown us like look how much common ground we have and yet it doesn't seem to move the need so our bet is to socialize the concept of 00:20:24 collective illusions get people to understand this and then hopefully we can now start to have the conversation with data about who we really are as a people i mean like to me it's it's it's incumbent on us to actually meet people 00:20:36 where they are and and i think this is an important concept so it's on me to try to communicate in a way that people understand and can relate to

so what 00:03:11 is a collective illusion then right so like what's the definition simply they simply stated right collective illusions are situations where the majority in a group ends up going along with something that they 00:03:23 don't privately agree with simply because they incorrectly think that most other people in the group agree with it and and as a result entire groups can end up doing things that almost nobody really wanted

i talked to todd rose about this notion of collective 00:00:51 illusions you know humans are a tribal species prone to conformity and in a lot of instances we act according to what our in-group wants rather than what we want as individuals ironically todd's research shows that we make poor 00:01:04 inferences about the majority consensus and that failing to recognize collective illusions can have negative consequences on our identities relationships values and society to avoid falling into conformity traps todd encourages us to 00:01:17 live congruent private and public lives that adhere to our personal convictions