The Dispatch Podcast - Todd Rose Talks Collective Illusions

Episode Date: February 11, 2022

On today’s podcast, Sarah and Steve talk with Todd Rose, author of Collective Illusions: Conformity, Complicity, and the Science of Why We Make Bad Decisions. How much of our thinking about each other is informed by false assumptions? What are the consequences of a society this mistrustful? And what are we to do about it?   Show Notes: -Collective Illusions by Todd Rose Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isger, joined by Steve Hayes. And today we are talking to Todd Rose. He is the co-founder of Populous, a think tank dedicated to building a world where all people have the chance to live fulfilling lives in a thriving society. But he is also the author of collective illusions, conformity, complicity, and the science of why we make bad decisions. As Adam Grant said, if you haven't read Adam Grant's books, I can't believe you're listening to this podcast, but he described it an illuminating analysis of why groups believe things their members don't and how we can fight groupthink. Let's dive right in. Well, first, Steve, you had a quick thing.

I have a disclosure. Yes, my brother, Dan Hayes, who helps run a company called Freethink Media, has done some recording of Todd's scholarship over the years, over the months. I don't actually know. But they've worked together. So I want everybody to know that before we have this discussion. Now, I like the book anyway. Steve will be good cop. I'll be bad cop, noted. Todd, thank you so much for joining us. I'm very excited to talk about this book. thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. I want to start with your chapter called Little Chameleons. And you use a study. It has three lines marked A, B, and C. There's a short line, a long line, and a medium line. And in this study, people were given a different card that had a

medium line on it. And it said, which line does this most closely match to in the three lines you're being shown. And it's very clear that it's the medium line. And yet, you could actually get people to give a different answer if you performed this study on unwitting college students. Will you describe a little about that study and what it meant in the context of group think? Yeah. It's one of the most famous studies in social psychology. It was done decades ago by a researcher named Solomon Ash. And like you said, like you said it up, the task is dropped, dead obvious. It's just a perceptual judgment task.

It's not even, there's really no way you can be wrong if you have even reasonable eyesight, right? And when you ask people just point blank to answer them, basically you get 100% accuracy. But what they did to show the way that groups affect our own decision making is they would bring in, let's say I was participating, it would turn out there might be, you know, eight or nine people in a room in sequence, and I'm the only one that's not in on the study. Like, I'm the only real subject. Everybody else is what they call Confederate, right? Like they are in on it.

And what they would do is systematically vary. I would be like the second to the last person to be able to give my opinion out loud. And they would have on a certain percentage of trials, have people in front of me give the blatantly wrong answer and then just see, like, what would I do if basically I know the right answer, but everybody else is saying something else. And the majority of people will, with the right pressure, say the opposite of what they really believe, right? And we know from that study that, like, basically, we care about being part of our groups.

It's hardwired into our brains, and we will go to great lengths to not be against our group. But I have to tell you, probably my favorite part about that study is that Ash, he interviewed everybody afterwards and it was like okay look here's the story and like and like a good chunk of people who lied about what they saw like fessed up right say listen i just didn't want to go against a group but there was like a like a quarter of them kept saying no no no i i really told the truth i saw that and he was like there's no way that you saw that right well you know not too long about a decade ago we had uh there's a neuroscientist uh named gregory burns who replicated a version of study using fMRI, right? Something Ash didn't have access to. FMRI is, can you explain what

that is? Yeah, it's just a brain scanning, right? Functional. So they're watching brain activity in real time as they do the. Yeah. And what was fascinating is Burns actually found that for a subset of people that conformed, it wasn't just an after the fact like error signal your brain, adjust your behavior. There were changes to the visual parts of your brain, which were indicative of actual, like, changing what you were seeing. And so it, for me, just signals, like, the enormous power that our groups can have over our individual behavior if we're not careful. That's the insight that I think explains so much of what we see collectively and culturally,

because it's one thing, oh, everyone's just lying. Well, no, a lot of them actually aren't. They really have come to believe the thing that they're saying. And so you have to treat them as such. But one of the things I find so interesting, I think we've all been a position where we're with our friends and they all say these Brussels sprouts are delicious. And you're like, yeah, they're pretty good. They're delicious. But in this case, you're talking about they don't know the other people in the room. And so the pressure to conform even among strangers. And we've seen this in like, you know, the sort of funny America's funniest home videos, but it's not that. It's like whatever jaywalking version where you walk in. to an elevator face toward the back of the elevator and some people will turn around and face the other way at the elevator. They don't know you. They don't need to be your friend. They're never going to see you again. And yet that power to conform is that strong for humans. It's crazy. There's some of my favorite neuroscience studies relate to this. Like one of my colleagues in the Netherlands

studied the effects of group conformity on who you think is good looking, right? Nothing's more subjective then do I find you attractive, right? It was pretty clever. They put people in a scanner, and they just said, we're just, we're just measuring attractiveness and would show faces and then ask you to rate on like one to eight, you know, scale. But then as soon as you gave your answer, they gave you a made-up number, so it wasn't even real, that corresponded to what they said the average was of people who had done the study. So you don't know any of these people, right?

What was so interesting is whenever you were told that your response was consistent with the group, your brain kicks off a reward signal from the same areas of the brain that are that hard drugs activate, which makes them so addictive. Like we want to be with our group and we're rewarded when we are. Conversely, when you were told you were against the group, it triggers this error signal that just says something is wrong, correct your behavior. And that error signal triggering would predict later on. You'd have people do the task again, and they would conform.

Their own personal judgments would shift toward the group. So give us real quick your thesis on collective allusions. Because according to what you just said, collective allusions clearly serve an evolutionary function that is positive in our lives and for human society. And your point is that it's not always positive. Yeah. So here's the thing. conformity, our hardwired instinct to conform has an evolutionary benefit, right?

Like, it's, so we often think of pure conformity as being bad all the time. But actually, if we were all mavericks, there'd be no cultural learning. You would all learn everything the hard way. So the conformity aspect has some value. What collective illusions are is a slightly different animal, like, and we're just not aware of it, which is to conform, you actually have to know what the group thinks. Otherwise, what are you conforming to, right? And what I'm arguing in the book is that for reasons we can talk about, we are

spectacularly bad at actually judging what our groups think. So you can see the problem, right? That if I misread the group consensus, then my instinct to conform is weaponized and I end up doing things that, in fact, I didn't want to do, but the group didn't want to do either. And so the whole idea of a collective illusion as being socialized, right? and what happens is you end up with a majority of people in a group going along with a view that they don't actually agree with just because they incorrectly think that most other people

in the group agree with it. Can you explain preference falsification? Yeah. So there's a number of ways in the book that I lay out like how do we fall into these conformity traps that are likely to be shrouded in these illusions? And one of the most like impactful ones is like this, it's from an economist named Timurran, who's done all the work in it. So he deserves all the credit there, which is, you know, sometimes when we feel like we're against our group, like sometimes we'll just say nothing, like self-silence, which is pretty common. But sometimes we so very much want the social reward for being with our group that we won't just go quiet. We'll actually lie about our own view. So this is what Timur Curran calls preference falsification. And it's pretty

pretty incredible. And the sad part there is when we are lying about our own views, just so we belong, those illusions are very hard to get rid of because the very people that are harmed by the belief are the ones enforcing it now. I want to ask, I want to bring this into sort of contemporary modern society and modern politics. I think there are examples of this. There are abundant examples of this, and some of them are very obvious to me anyway. But I happen to be reading your book. At the same time that we saw this fight among Republicans about January 6th and the January 6th committee. And one of the people who has come out most forcefully against the January 6th committee, against what it's doing, and even against his own

minority leader is Senator Ted Cruz from Texas. And this week, Senator Cruz responded forcefully when Mitch McConnell had said this was a violent insurrection at the Capitol, should not be permitted. And Senator Cruz said that's propaganda language. We shouldn't call it that. That's terrible. But if you look back over the course of this past year, Ted Cruz himself has repeatedly called what happened on January 6th, a terrorist attack and many, many other things like that, used the same forceful language that he is now denouncing. Now, I look at something like that, and I've got another couple examples I want to raise with you in a moment, but I look at something like that, and it strikes me as very obvious what's happening. Ted Cruz is pandering to the part of the Republican Party that he thinks will be important if he runs for president. It's a naked political calculation, and he's just sort of pandering. He's just just doing what the crowd wants. Is my assessment of that too simplistic? Are there bigger things going on here? I mean, is he getting this, this?

It's oxytocin rush that, or is it just that simple? Is it just bad pandering? Look, okay, so if I, could it be that he's actually succumbed to the illusion himself and actually believes it? Sure. My guess is that's not correct, right? Like the, that tends to be correct when you see people holding that view, towing the line and increasing their intensity of the statement over time.

But this feels just like a naked political. move. And here's the problem with that, right? Like, Senator Cruz may believe that it's relatively harmless, right? That, like, it will give him the best chance of, I don't know, being president or whatever visions he has. But if you understand collective illusions, someone that is in a position of power, right? So the American public, we've done a lot of research on this. They all recognize that they are susceptible to social influence and they're worried about self-silencing. But they don't believe powerful people are. They believe the rich, the powerful can say what they want. So when

those people in positions of authority make these kind of statements, they have an outsized impact on the perception of everybody else that this must be what we believe. Yeah, I mean, I want to get back to the broader Trump phenomenon because I think that it is, you know, it is a near perfect example of collective illusions going back the past five years. But before I do that, let me share a story. So I was invited to a dinner. This is a Washington, D.C., a dinner by a leader of a conservative think tank. And the dinner was to welcome a new conservative senator to Washington, small dinner, maybe eight or ten of us.

My wife and I went, we were invited. And it came at the time that gay marriage was dominating the news. It was everywhere in the news. was something that people had been talking about in this particular think tank leader had spent time denouncing gay marriage. Well, I was out of step with where most conservatives were on gay marriage at the time. And I had this dilemma. My wife and I talked about it the entire drive over to the house.

On the one hand, I'm not like, if it comes up, I'm going to say what I think. On the other hand, I don't want to ruin the dinner, you know, so I don't want to make it uncomfortable for this new senator who was against gay marriage, for the person who was hosting who was against gay marriage. So at the very beginning of the dinner, I quietly, we hinted our coats over, gave me a bottle wine, and said, could I have a word? Took this person to the side and said, listen, I just want you to know I'm really not where most conservatives are on this issue. I know you've been very critical of gay marriage. I know the work that your organization has done is also highlighted.

Problems with gay marriage. You know, I just want you to know, I'm not trying to blow up the dinner, but if it comes up, I'll probably just say what I said. And this person shocked me by saying, I'm where you are. I think it's a really hard issue. And I'm basically okay with gay marriage. And I thought, wait a second, this is like months and months and months of saying something on a hot political topic that you don't believe. And I think to your point, it helps shape others' perceptions. And my question to you is on this question of gay marriage and collective illusion, we saw a pretty rapid and dramatic collapse of opposition.

Is that what was happening there? Was it just that most people didn't care and that you had leaders who said, I really care? You have this fantastic example at the beginning of the book of this woman named Mrs. Salt. And we see Mrs. Salt pop up through the rest of the book. is she is this mrs salt yeah it is exactly right so so we know um from the marriage equality movement and the research that's done along that way that actually in private all the way back to 2003 there was a slim majority of americans who actually were okay with gay marriage right um and it was an interesting coalition of what i'd call the love is love group and libertarians right they're like

I may not like it, but I don't think the government should dictate, you know, what goes on in someone's bedroom. But what was found over and over again was they believed they were a very small minority, right? And so now imagine you're there. And this happens all the time when values are changing. Values change in private faster than they do in public, right? So I know I'm suddenly okay with this. But why would I, what indicator would tell me that my group has also changed their views, right?

And so what you'll see is the folks that are still hold the past view, the sort of misses salts of the world, as I wrote about, they tend to be just really vocal because they are so confident that their opinion is the majority, right? And so it's funny, our brains, this is the problem. Your brain in processing what it thinks the group believes mistakes noise for numbers. So the shortcut is the loudest voices repeated the most are probably the majority. right um and so this is where like someone in authority or someone who will yell the loudest will convince everybody else i guess this is what we believe and and in the book i lay out like there are plenty of examples including like racial integration in the south in the 60s and 70s where private opinion had already changed but because they were wrong about their group they were

under this illusion like progress was held back by about a decade Here's my issue, I think. There is no question that when you look at something like what you're talking about, racism, homophobia, any of sort of the progress that we think we've made as a culture, it has both been held back by self-censorship and pushed forward by a minority willing to speak up and say, hey, I don't actually think this is correct. at the same time, because self-censorship and collective illusions are incredibly important to cultural cohesiveness, I think I could actually argue that a lot of our current political extremism problems, undermining faith in our elections, is actually due to a lack of self-censorship and a breakdown of those collective illusions. So let me give you some examples from your book that I want to push back on, which is, you know,

mentioned that at Thanksgiving dinner, all it takes is speaking up when your uncle says that racist thing over dinner. And you even mention that, you know, you could do it anonymously if you are, you know, worried about speaking up or recruit like-minded others. That sounds like exactly the cocktail for online bullying that some people think it's bullying, some people think it's cancel culture, whatever you want to call it. I'm going to call it cancel culture just for the purposes of our conversation, just to have a shortcut, even though, again, I hate sort of terms like that that have meanings for different people, but hopefully I've defined it. Cancel culture is this problem that we have.

We're a vocal minority who thinks they're speaking up for truth and justice and thinks they're breaking that self-censorship and that collective illusion and then find that there are people out there who believe what they believe. And so they get people fired. And part of the problem to me with this is that, you know, in your book, for instance, you say if your uncle says something racist, well, that's sort of in the eye of the beholder. And we're now in a place where we're sort of like, well, see, it's racist and calling something racist when in fact what your uncle actually said was that he voted for Donald Trump. Now, you may think that he voted for Donald Trump because he holds beliefs about other groups that you find to be racist in their origin. Maybe he said he's He is in favor of voter ID, and do you think voter ID disproportionately affects one race over another? But then to speak up at dinner and say, that is racist, uncle, to me, the collective, the falling apart of collective illusions, the falling apart of self-censorship where people can find like-minded folks so easily online is exactly how we get undermining our elections. So I'm glad you brought this up.

So let me push back a little bit. on this, which is to say, number one, I actually do want those people to speak up, right? To me, cancel culture isn't about people with fringe ideas sharing them, right? It is about their willingness to go beyond discourse and, and threaten social, economic, sometimes even physical safety, right? Basically, I'm willing to destroy your life because you disagree with me. That's the problem, right? because here's the thing. What we don't want is for people to be like, well, I think my ideas

in the minority, so I'm not going to say anything. Because here's the problem. Just like there can be crazy ideas that come from the fringe, the truth is all progress comes from the fringe too. What I'm arguing for here is this. The example I used is more about our willingness to just go quiet because we don't want to like upset the conversation. But what I'm saying is, it's not necessary that you go and attack your uncle or you attack you online, but it is that the idea to say, if I disagree, I will share my opinion. And not just because I need to stand up for my own values, but because if you understand collective illusions, being honest about what you believe to each other may be the most important thing you can do as a good member of the group.

What about people who honestly believe that Donald Trump won the 2020 election and have now, due to Facebook and Twitter, found all of these other people who believe that, form a enough of a political cohesive unit within a single political party that they can affect the outcomes of primaries. And so then you have politicians catering to that now vocal minority. And I do, I really believe that if you go back 20 years pre-Twitter, pre-Facebook, they wouldn't have been able to find each other. And in that sense, the self-censorship would have been better for all of us. Yeah. So I'm a pretty, pretty rabid free speech person because I think that every example I can find like this where I'd be like, yeah,

and that concrete example, it sure seems like self-censorship would be the answer. I could probably give you 99 other examples where we sure thought it was true. And then we realized we were wrong. I still believe that the answer to fringe ideas that are incorrect is not self-silence. It is actually open discourse, right? And to me, let's use the election example, because we know for sure that most Republicans, don't think Donald Trump won the election, but they believe that most Republicans think that he won the election. So now there's a group of people who are going to conform to that

illusion because their identity is tied up in being a Republican, right? And this is where there are people with outsized influence, are elected officials, the people that actually have big followings who, by not being willing to tell the truth about what they believe, they are allowing these kind of illusions to fester. And I promise you, if you just took the elected officials that you and I both know, we've all talked to these people,

they know for sure Donald Trump lost, and they are playing a game where their reputation or their own political advancement, they think they can play with this fire and not get burned. But what we now know from collective illusions is you are threatening the entire American experiment with this nonsense.

And so, like, coming back to your challenge, which again, I think is a really a good challenge. I believe that this only works. Like, we deserve to understand each other. We deserve to understand. You cannot have a free society operate under massive collective illusions. You just can't. And so this commitment to finding the moral courage to be honest with each other about what we really believe and the civic courage to make it safe for other people to do the same, even and especially people you disagree with. But there's a big assumption in what you just said, which is one of the collective illusions that is being broken right now is the very concept of living in a free society, free speech. Within the legal conservative movement, there's this new thing called common good constitutionalism. And their whole point is like, nope, you know what was great? 15th century, you know, Catholicism, monarchical rule. And they very much want to get rid of a lot of the free speech. Supreme Court cases that we have. Blasphemy laws are constitutional, making kids swear an oath to

the Constitution, constitutional, saying the pledge, all things that we sort of are like really fundamental free speech concepts that we've built our free society on. They are finding each other and saying, me too. I also think that free speech has undermined our society that blasphemy laws are a problem. What happens if it turns out that by getting rid of that collective illusion of a self-governing republic that we've been experimenting with under a lot of collective illusions for 230 years, if we pull back all of that and it turns out that a lot of people don't like free speech so much or self-governing republic that we've tried to build, what happens then? Well, look, in my opinion, progress based on a lie rarely actually

sustains itself, right? And that the good news is that I can speak to this because at populace, we actually do private opinion research, getting around influence of social pressure, things like that, to look at what people really think. And we just did one of the largest studies ever on people's aspirations for the future of the country. And what I can tell you, for sure, is that across all demographics, people still, the majority of people still care deeply about liberal values. They do. The problem is, is that, the other way now, which is they are increasingly convinced that most people no longer care. So I would argue the illusion's working the other way, which is you've got an American populace

that still believes in fundamental American values, but the vocal fringe is increasingly convincing them that these values are eroding, right? And so what do we do when we get afraid under these illusions? You get other people saying, well, listen, if basically we're going to censor, then I'm going to censor too, because at least my ideas have a chance of winning, right? And your ideas may be gone, right? And what I would argue is a lot of this resorting to silencing other people and not allowing voices to be heard, I think smacks of just a deep distrust of people. And I, look, I don't think that that path of distrust in the American populace has a future. Like, the only future there is increasing authoritarianism, right? Because

if I can't trust people to make choices for themselves and we can't have conversations, then what else do I have? I can try to control you. And I think that's where we're at right now. But it seems to be growing in prevalence, doesn't it? I mean, you cite this famous Kato Institute study from 2020 that I think we've talked about here that shows exactly how much people are self-censoring. And as somebody who tries not to be an alarmist, that was alarming. And you look at the sort of the hordes on the new right and the super woke authoritarian left, it feels like they're growing. It feels like the arguments that they're making have more truck than they did 10 years ago than they did 20 years ago. Is that wrong? No. So look, there's some momentum there,

right? Because if you start with 2%, you get to 4%, you've doubled. So it can feel like there's more people. But look, here's the thing. We've actually replicated that Cato study and found almost identical numbers, right? So it's, with the exception of the far left, a majority of all people in political persuasions report self-silencing, right? But here's something else we learned that I think is interesting. We thought that the reason they would be self-souncing was because of cancel culture, that they would be afraid of getting canceled. Turns out, that's actually not the majority's reason for it. The overwhelming majority of people say they self-silence out of decency, that they don't want to create conflict and they don't want to offend someone, right? And what they're assuming is that we're all really fragile and super sensitive now.

But what's funny is, is the overwhelming majority, like 70% of Americans say, well, I'm not sensitive. I actually would like to hear other people, but I am super convinced that everybody else is just so sensitive these days. And I don't want to offend people. So we're actually self-silancing in large measure because we want to be decent people to each other. But if you recognize that there is a way to disagree without being disagreeable, right? And that your voice, even when you're wrong, is an important part of the conversation that keeps us truly understanding what our groups think and believe. So let me just, just to take up for Sarah a bit, what's the way to confront your racist uncle and suggest, that he's racist in an agreeable way.

Yeah, that's great. So listen, I don't think there are two things here, right? One is, if you want to go on the attack, right, and call him out and do all the stuff, that's up to you. What I was trying to maybe inartfully get out there was that we often think by saying nothing, I'm not doing any harm, right? but it's pretty quickly, like even around a table, the silence gives the impression of consent, right? And so even just, and in the book, I tried to lay out a few examples.

If you just feel like, I can't speak up, I can't lose my job, I can't, there are things that we know from research you can do that still help you fight against forming collective illusion. So self-silence doesn't have to be the only answer. So that's what I was trying to get at, which is like, we think nothing, we think there's very limited downside to saying nothing, when in fact, we can then become complicit in the construction of illusion. So at the very least, you're saying, flag it. Like, don't let it go unremarked upon, even if you don't want to. I mean, my instinct, personally, my instinct would be to say, hey, that's a pretty racist thing to say. That's awful. And have the confrontation.

That's not probably the way most people would handle it. And it might not be, I mean, I'm well aware that in many cases, it's probably not the right way to handle it. But letting it go, you're saying is most certainly not the right way to age. Yeah. So look, I'm there with you, right? There's a sense of like almost immorality about judging someone by their skin color that makes you want to your blood boil, right? So that's fine, right, if you want to take up that fight. But, but like, for example, we know from neuroscience and social psychological research that, for example, saying that giving two sides to it, say, listen, I hear you, but on the other hand, right? And just like, but maybe the racism was not a good example there, but like even in

voting and people like, who are you voting for? You can say, look, on the one hand, this, on the other hand, that you can, you can say, I haven't made up my mind. The group does not punish you for not having made of your mind or for giving two sides to a story, right? So it's only when you come out in direct opposition to the groups that they tend to actually ostracize you. So I think the point here for me is a free society in which two-thirds of Americans don't feel comfortable sharing their honest opinions with each other is a free society that may be on death's door. And the thing is, is it would be one thing if we had given up our commitment to core American values, these liberal values that have animated our country imperfectly, right, since its founding,

like we've not been perfect by any stretch. It would be one thing if this shift was rooted in private reality, but it is not. But the problem with the problem with illusions is once you believe they're true, they are real and their consequences. So I think that something that's missing maybe for me in the book is, so I feel like there's two books in here, by the way, and I want to get to book number two. There's the collective illusion, you know, by standard, all of that, which I think is so important. And as I said, like, I think, right, it giveth and it taketh away. And there's good things and bad things about breaking some of those collective illusions.

But there's a second part of the book that's on trust and that breakdown of trust. I wish there were a third part of the book on humility. So this idea that, like, for instance, when you confront racist uncle, which is now going to be just our example for this whole podcast, I suppose, having some humility about, like, well, you don't actually know what he meant. Maybe you're the one who's incorrect about something he said. Now, look, as you said, it's. pretty different if your uncle says, I think black people are inferior to white people.

That's hard to, you know, that's not the example I'm really thinking of in my head. I'm thinking of more that, you know, slates how to talk to your racist family at Thanksgiving that comes out every year, where, in fact, what they said was, again, something on voter ID, voting for Trump. And you label that racist, which I think is a, that labeling is a lack of humility. And when I see cancel culture, as I've described, it on Twitter, it comes oftentimes from a lack of humility, a lack of curiosity. And I wonder whether, and I want you to talk a lot about the trust problem that we have as one of the things that has happened with the rise of social media in particular, but even starting before that,

and perhaps maybe due to the rise of multiculturalism and the rise of people speaking up more, creating then more divisions, more, I'm in this group, you're in that group, is a falling in mutual societal level trust. And I was hoping you could talk about that trust issue. Well, so first of all, Sarah, I think I'll give full attribution to you. I think on the, on the next version of the book, and there's got to be a chapter on humility, I think I was just not humble enough to think about it. So, so good. My favorite part of Ben Franklin's autobiography, he has the 13 virtues that he tries to accomplish, and he gets 12 of them, and the last one is humility. And he's like, I finally achieved humility, but I was so proud of it that I decided

12 was enough. It's like, I use that all the time. Yeah, no, we'll come, let's get to trust. Let me just say something about the humility, which is so important, which is, you know, my favorite philosopher of science, Carl Popper, you know, who I think really helped us understand what makes science, and versus not science was falsifiability. he talked a lot about in an open society this idea that like any one person you'll you could never know for sure that you're actually right about the world there's just no way right and we're going to be wrong and we won't be able to root out our own distortions and that's why even something like reason is is actually a social thing right we will reason together because you will be able to expose my own

biases in ways i wouldn't right but together we could actually get closer to truth so this aspect of humility is profoundly important, right? Because your certainty has very little correlation with the accuracy of your views. Like, you can be really certain, and it feels right and be wrong. And what we're trying to strive for as a people is to be accurate about our world. But so I think the humility is really important. And when we come back together again in a year and the paperback version, hopefully there'll be a new chapter. And we'll call it the Sarah chapter, right? But so, but this trusting to your point, so look, think about the conditions that are required for a free society to actually flourish. Social trust is a really important cultural

thing, right? Because it's ultimately trust in strangers. Not, not here are my children. You can watch them and I don't know you, but it's literally like, do I trust you? And Sarah, we've never met, but do I trust you enough to make decisions in your own life? Because again, there's only two ways we can interact with each other, we can trust or we can control. And so part of these illusions, and this is where I feel like this is such a problem right now is when you look at the social trust literature, the moral foundation of all social trust is shared values. Right. So if you and I if I believe you and I share values, I am way more likely to trust you. That kind of makes sense, right? So what happens when we are under illusions about some of the most important shared values we have

as a society. Well, in practice, we might as well not have those values anymore because I believe that you and I no longer share values. So I am more likely to distrust you. And I believe we're caught in this sort of death spiral of distrust that the illusions are feeding right now. Wouldn't it be helpful then to have more, like basically go back to 1920 and we have, well, let me pick 1890. 1890 and we have a collective illusion that we all shared, not us, right, but, you know, other people who lived here, I didn't have any family here, but that they all shared these values.

So there was high social trust. And then because those collective illusions have fallen, and people are like, well, actually, I don't think Jim Crow is great. I think women should have the right to vote. And before they, I mean, how many men, if you pulled them in 1890, thought that their wives didn't want the right to vote?

And so that collective illusion was driving that social trust. And so once we got rid of that collective illusion, social trust is following, and your solution to then get rid of more collective illusions, I'm finding actually pretty persuasive on this podcast. But then I get pulled back into like, yeah, but as you said, the collective illusion of a shared value is really helpful. And part of, I think, what's driving down trust is the realization due to social media in large part, but other things as well that like, oh, actually that group over there doesn't share that value. That group over there doesn't share that value. Within the Democratic Party, the progressives don't

share the values of Kristen Cinema. And within the Republican Party, the MAGA folks don't share the values of Mike Pence. And Mike Pence doesn't share the values of Liz Cheney. And so we're fracturing because those illusions are following. So I would argue what's even more powerful than the illusion of shared values are actual shared values. What if we don't have those? We do, though. We do, though. Great. Good. Yes. Todd. Yes. Populus has more private opinion data than just about anybody on Americans, everything from the lives they want to live, to the country they want to live in, to their views of fairness, to what they want out of education, criminal justice. And I'm telling you, look, if we don't have shared values, it's important to say so, right?

Like, I just believe you don't get very far with social lies. You might paper over some things for a while, but it's a dangerous road to take in a free society where we are resting our salvation on like basically Plato's lie. As long as everyone believes it, it's going to be fine, right? I believe that open, honest discourse is the way forward. And we do know, like, what I am shocked at, like, wherever we look is just how common our values are in private and how wrong we are about each other in public. So this is the way to build trust. Yes, because here's the thing. Think about like not all values are created equally. And so here's where I'm going to leave the realm of like just having shared values matters.

And I would say having a commitment to traditional liberal values, right, tolerance and if not openly embracing difference, right, like free expression, right, free association, those things. Those are fundamentally inclusive values, right? So by sharing them together, we actually make space for dissent and we allow the group to actually progress as well. So look, at the end of the day, like, if we don't share those values, if I am wrong, if our research is wrong, then I still believe the way forward is to persuade. It is to show people the value of these values, right? Rather than resorting to manufacturing illusions that get them to go along with something

that they don't privately agree with, because it's, while illusions are powerful when they're enforced, they're also fragile because they are based on lies. And so sometimes those lies when they shatter unleash social progress, and sometimes they unleash a lot of destruction. And I still think at the end of the day, there's no real sustainable way out of this that does not involve a commitment to these sort of liberal values. So one of the examples you use is the wallet study, where you leave wallets around town. And as it turned out, the more money you left in the wallet, the more likely the person was to return the wallet, the more valuable the wallet seemed to the person, the more it had the

photos of their kids or their license, something that you would know would be a real pain or a real loss, the more work you were going to put into trying to return that wallet. I love that. And it rang very true to me. But I also, so I'm a Scorpio. And back in like junior high when it was like super cool, do y'all remember this? You could like dial a number on your phone, like star 4-4 or something. It would read you your horoscope for the day and lacking any other ability to communicate with humans as an only child after bedtime. I would just call that number a lot. And one of the things that Scorpios are known for,

talk about like wanting to be part of a group, right? You're longing for any belonging. So my belonging at that point was like, I'll be a Scorpio, right? Vengeful, mistrustful, and it was seen as chic. This idea of not trusting people means that you are sophisticated. and it's been really interesting in adulthood, I realized how insane that cultural conception we have of mistrust equals sophistication, when in fact trust is what's sophisticated because you have to be sophisticated enough to understand how far to trust a stranger.

And you mentioned that actually in a study of the people who were trusting that they were actually better at at knowing who not to trust than the people who mistrusted everyone. Yeah, you're exactly right. So you imagine being distrustful makes you discerning and that research was the exact opposite because if my default position is not to trust anyone, I don't learn the patterns, right, that give me the early cues to who is actually trustworthy and who's not. And so high trust people are actually taking advantage of less, like ironically. One thing you brought up though the horoscope, I think is interesting, is this is the problem when, and I talk about this in the book around, like, needing to belong and these groups, we have, we have basically

narrowed our group affiliation so precisely, right? So it's like identity politics, right? As soon as you are, or in this case, let's pretend your horoscope was everything to you, right? At least that's my group, right? And it might be. And it might be. Yeah, like, look, she's the bad cop today, which is awesome, right? But I'm also a Scorpio. So, yeah, but you didn't, you didn't dial in, but you didn't call the hotline before. So, but the great thing, here's the thing, think about once you say that's my group. So it's a predefined category, not something you've just said, like, and I'm going to choose into this. It's like, because of when you were born, this is the group you belong to. When I feel like I need to belong, what do you do? Well, they told you what the stereotypical

behaviors are of someone in your group. And so you will behave that way, and that will give your brain the oxytocin, the dopamine, like, I am one of my group, right? So this is the danger when we allow any one category or group to define us is they end up having almost cult-like power over us to get us to behave in ways that are contrary to our own private values. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security

brings real peace of mind. The truth is the consequences of not having life insurance can be serious. That kind of financial strain, on top of everything else, is why life insurance indeed matters. Ethos is an online platform that makes getting life insurance fast and easy to protect your family's future in minutes, not months.

Ethos keeps it simple. It's 100% online, no medical exam, just a few health questions. You can get a quote in as little as 10 minutes, same-day coverage, and policies starting at about two bucks a day, build monthly, with options up to $3 million in coverage. With a 4.8 out of five-star rating on trust pilot and thousands of families already applying through Ethos, it builds trust. Protect your family with life insurance from ethos. Get your free quote at ethos.com slash dispatch. That's eth-h-o-s-com slash dispatch. Application times may vary, rates may vary. Maybe we've spent the last few minutes talking about this application.

I mean, I think there's been this very obvious collective illusion. Certainly it's been something that I've witnessed up close, I think, over the past six or seven years. And it's been this Republican support for Donald Trump. Now, let me start out by saying there are, Donald Trump has millions and millions of very passionate supporters who do believe in everything he says and does, who do agree with them on everything, who think he's been this. as positive, disruptive force in our politics. But it is also the case. And we've talked about this with several of our guests, including several elected officials who've been on this podcast,

that many, I would say most, Republicans in Congress, both in the Senate and the House, and many elected Republicans in state houses do not support Donald Trump. They don't think he's good. They don't agree with his policies by and large. They are frustrated or disgusted by his behavior. And every once in a while you see them say it, but for the most part, they don't. And there have been times too many for me to count that I've had a conversation with, say, a member of the House of Representatives who has, in the strongest possible terms, condemned Donald Trump in general, condemned his specific.

actions said lamented his effect on our coarsening of our culture and then gone out in public and said he is so great thank God he's here and I've had lots of conversations about this with them you know some of them are just very clear 86% of the people in my district love Donald Trump and the argument I've had and this is a circular argument this is where I'm really eager to get your thoughts. The argument I've had is by you not saying what you believe, you are contributing to his strength. If it were the case that everybody that I, just set aside the people I haven't talked to, I've talked to a lot of freaking elected Republicans about this. If every Republican that I had talked to over the years had gone on Fox News and said what they said to me in public,

nobody would believe that Donald Trump was this invincible, massive figure, but they didn't. And so they followed the masses. But I guess the question to put it to you is a lot of us, I think, as we thought through this, think of that as sort of almost a linear relationship. They have been following where the people are, and the people are leading the leaders. And the leaders are, in fact, the followers. But I think it's more accurate to describe it as a circular. phenomena where the leaders are actually buttressing the misconceptions of the followers by not

being leaders and saying what they said. It's a feedback loop this way. And I've spoken to so many Republican elected officials too. We're having the same conversations, right? And if we give them the benefit of doubt, right, rather than just a crass political power grab there and say, listen, a lot of them are like, look, I privately feel this way, but I, my constituents, you know, 80% of them believe this. So first of all, you are actually falling for an illusion because I can tell you right now in private, that is not true, right? So if the populace is under an illusion, then our elected officials are not only just as likely to be an illusion, we know from research that politicians as a group are more susceptible to collective illusions than any other group that you can categorize

in part because you kind of want them listening to their constituents, right? They want to, especially in the House. You want to get reelected every time. You better stay really close. So you are exquisitely sensitive to public opinion. But what we are not recognizing because we don't understand even the phenomenon of collective illusions, right, that is that your brain could be wrong. Like what you think you're hearing is just noise instead of numbers.

And so you follow that illusion. you either say nothing or you actually falsify your preference. And in doing so, you have crystallized that illusion and you have brought more people in your group to conform to a view they don't agree with that you never agreed with. And so we're back to this and just say, look, like, this is why when I say the moral courage, moral courage matters the most for people with power, right? And it's like what's so ironic about all this is if you just look at the right in general, by not saying the emperor has no clothes,

you are actually upholding something that the majority of people in your own party actually do not want. And you think you're smarter than everybody else. You can play this game and you won't get burned, maybe, but we're all going to get torched, right? And I think you're starting to see a little bit of a crack here, right? You're seeing people strategically start to speak up.

And listen, I'm telling you to my friends, that voted for Trump, we can set aside whether you like policies and whether you preferred them to the alternative. And we can still be honest about the limitations of the person and where we want the party to go. Right. And if we're not willing to do that, then we have no one to blame but ourselves for what happens in this American experiment. All right. One quick question. There's a replication crisis going on in a lot of sciences now with these studies. As you're writing a book like this. I just wanted your quick thoughts on how you thought about which studies to include. So when I think about studies, I try to, for me, the gold standard is I want to see studies that have

been replicated by a different lab. Right. So when it's just a single study, now sometimes an insight is still worthy to talk about and you try to be clear and I'll try to name this study by this person, right, rather than science says, right? Like, because I think that's dishonest if we're this. But I will say, while there is a replication crisis, I actually also believe it's overblown because we are making some assumptions about distributions of studies and effect sizes that may or may not be true. What I still believe, even in science, the way forward isn't to not talk about single studies, but to include them in a conversation with other facts and other insights, and to borrow a phrase from Sarah, have a little humility that any given study may not turn out to be

true. And like all science, science is not fact. It is provisional knowledge. And as long as we recognize it as such, we're on solid ground. I think that's a very on-brand explanation from you. Okay, last question. There's this moment. You're two-thirds of the way through the book, at least. And all of a sudden, it's like I had dropped out of high school, I'm 21, I'm living in my car with my wife and two kids, and my whole schick is the like, cool kid, I don't care mode. I'm summarizing here a little. And it's like, wait, what? I've been reading a book by a guy who dropped out of college and is living in his car right now? No, is the answer.

You took that car. well presumably you took the car back to high school then went to college with the car the car by the way at one point you talked about the car having a hole in the bottom such that you had to warn people to make sure to keep their feet up so they wouldn't have their feet go through the bottom and you wind up getting your PhD

from Harvard teaching there honestly like why am I reading this book instead of a memoir well because I don't think I'd even read my own story But that'll be the next one. How's that? Well, for me, it's like this, which is I feel very passionate about, I want the American public to understand the phenomenon of collective illusion, right? Because I believe it has something to tell us about the world we're living in right now.

And it gives us something actionable to do that is different than what we think we have to do. So for me, I believe the insights speak for themselves, the science speaks for itself. And I always worry, maybe unfairly, that injecting my own personal story makes it like, trust me, I screwed up, but now I'm not a screw up, right? But I will say, just since we're talking about it, I actually fell out of high school with a 0.9 GPA. It's impressive. You got to work for that.

You do. Like, I can teach a master class on how to not get socially promoted. I just need to interrupt for a second. Hayes kids, if you're listening, this is very unlikely story. this is not the model necessarily. All credit to you for doing it, but we're going to choose a different path. That's right. That's right. Blind conformity,

Hayes, kids. This is what matters. Yes, thank you. Thank you. No, absolutely. No, I think that it's, yeah, I would not suggest anyone follow my exact story. But it did teach me a lot, right? Like, I grew up in one of the most conservative states in the country in rural America, and then I spent 20 years in one of the most liberal towns, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0-2-138. Right, exactly, right. Represent, right? Like, it's, um, and what you realize is, first of all, how phenomenally talented Americans are across the board and how, like, it's given me a greater respect and trust in people. You see all of the sides, right? It's not always great. But it's like, man, there is so much latent potential here.

And if we can just get back to our core values and, and continue the, experiment of expanding the we and living up to those values instead of abanding them under an illusion, I think the future is pretty bright for us. Oh, that's a great place to end. Todd Rose, author of Collective Allusions, Conformity, complicity, and the science of why we make bad decisions. This will be rattling around in my head for quite some time, as well this conversation. So thank you so much. Thank you. With Amnx Platinum, Exclusive Amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot trackside.

So being a fan for life turns into the trip of a lifetime. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Presale tickets for future events subject to availability and varied by race. Terms and conditions apply. Learn more at amex.ca.ca. slash Yanex.