right now we're not being honest with each other about our values and if that's happening then we cannot form norms you can't design norms they happen 00:47:46 out of human action not human design but they only emerge when there is a real consensus about our shared values and so we've got to get back to that i mean it seems almost like like self-evident and we'll duh but like 00:47:59 if if we're going to continue to self-silence or even lie about our beliefs like the result are going to be collective illusions at scale and whole societies can be taken down by those and listen it 00:48:11 would something like a free society living in a democracy like we take that for granted that is a blip in human history the idea that it can't disappear overnight is silly it can and it will 00:48:23 and it would be one thing if it disappeared because privately we collectively gave up on that experiment right but it's a tragedy if it disappears not because of 00:48:34 private change in values but because of collective illusions and that's that's what for me felt like the urgency to write the book right like that it just felt like things were spinning out of control 00:48:46 and yet we have more data on private opinion in america than probably anybody else i would argue um and i can tell you it's just not true right so i think that's both there's both a dangerous aspect to 00:48:58 illusions but also a hopeful one you know because history has shown us that if you recognize the illusion and you take an effort to dismantle it social change can happen at a scale and pace that would seem unimaginable 00:49:10 otherwise well i can't think of any other way to end in that message so thank you todd so much for this marathon you did with me and two parts thank you we obviously have so much shared values and we're not 00:49:22 as divided as people tell us we are [Laughter] but but now we know why right now we know why it feels that way and if we if we can recognize that we really can no longer trust our brain to accurately 00:49:36 read group consensus then we can get back to this it never really mattered right be who you are learn to be authentic um discover your real self and and work really hard to be congruent between your 00:49:48 private self and your public self the rest takes care of itself

it's essential and i just love the idea of setting an example for others you know 00:44:40 that's that's that's the way out of this trap is you start doing that and then other people in your group start doing it and then all of a sudden your group's the whole illusion breaks down the emperor has no clothes 00:44:53 or the emperor has clothes the effort does have clothes eventually eventually guess what i'm trying to say eventually yeah what's great about illusions is that they're powerful when they're enforced but they're fragile because 00:45:04 they're social lies right like like you don't want it to be true you wish it weren't true and so what you're really looking for is is wait a minute like so for some of us we just need one 00:45:15 other person to speak up to give us the the the strength to do the same other people need more but what you see is once you start getting the crack in the illusion it affects what we call like bandwagon 00:45:28 change right like it'll just swerve quickly and suddenly it looks like almost overnight the group has shifted its view so whenever you see stuff um it's funny in politics they call it momentum there's no such thing as momentum that's not what that is that is 00:45:41 that is that is an illusion where people's private behavior is like oh wait a minute this is like i can now say what i really think right i feel comfortable saying what i really think um so when you see like sort of exponential change 00:45:53 in public opinion like that's usually the that's usually that there's an illusion underneath there um because if people privately believe something it is very hard to change that and so you know doing that is like one off right i have 00:46:05 to change your mind or change someone else's mind and so you'll usually see slow linear growth or change in in public opinion when you see it change really quickly like it did with marriage equality marriage equality the public 00:46:17 approval for that i mean it's unreal since what since 2003 to today it's basically flipped in terms of its its acceptance like that doesn't happen if privately most people were against it it just doesn't 00:46:30 such a good point so much the reason why it's so hard is because like the oxytocin bonding mechanism is run so deep in our dna and our biology and and overriding that is not easy 00:46:42 because once we feel this social trust we we can lie you know we can we'll do anything well i cheat steal for our in group

congruence was a big notion from one of my favorite psychologist carl rogers the humanistic 00:43:52 psychologist i don't know if you made that link yeah i did and i i got a little bit of a reference to him and it was fun with the publisher because i was like i i feel like rogers doesn't get the credit i 00:44:04 agree in the same way i i think it's like he's one of the most uh under explored um sort of insights but yeah the congruence was central to roger's view of things and like when you like think 00:44:16 about and rogers then swerves right into all the areas that you're the leading expert in and so that's why for me i felt like you would like this which is this congruence part of uh our ability 00:44:28 to get to self-actualization it doesn't guarantee it but i don't know how you live a self-actualized life if you're incongruent

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