Todd Rose, cofounder of think tank Populace, has written a bestselling book, Collective Illusions, that asks a key question – “Why do we keep falling for illusions and believing the lies that hurt ourselves and others?” Rose defines collective illusions as “social lies that occur where a majority of individuals in a group privately reject a particular opinion, but they go along with it because they (incorrectly) assume that most other people accept it”. This question is extremely relevant, given the complex and turbulent times in which we live.
The second part of Rose’s book, Our Social Dilemma, tries to explain how these collective illusions form based on “the biological limits of our brains”. To explain our society’s social dilemma, Rose writes about three overall concepts.
- Little Chameleons
The author writes, “At a biological level, we are actually programmed to compare ourselves to others and behave as they do, even if we don’t want to. This is one of the reasons why we are so highly susceptible to collective illusions”. We instinctively tend to mimic others, a phenomenon called “the chameleon effect”. “Just as chameleons automatically change their colors depending on their surroundings, observing someone else makes us more likely to behave the same way they do…We are constantly and automatically changing our behavioral “coloring” depending on our social and physical environment”. In fact, “from birth to death, our social nature drives us to imitate and bond with others even as we compare ourselves to them. In the process, we find ourselves motivated to alter ourselves based not only on our own beliefs or ideas but also on what we see in others”.
Rose states, “The social influence of our groups is so powerful that it can even outweigh common sense and empirical fact…When we compare ourselves against our group and find ourselves aligned, we get a reward response; when we are out of step, the error signal tells us something is wrong and so we make a shift”. What makes collective illusions possible? “When we compare ourselves to groups, we can never be sure what most other people really want or believe. Yet our projected notions about these beliefs, however mistaken, can quickly turn into reality”.
- Chasing Ghosts
Rose quotes Henrik Ibsen to explain his concept of ‘chasing ghosts’ – “I think we’re all of us Ghosts…It’s not only what we have invited from our father and our mother that walks in us. It’s all sorts of dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so forth. They have no vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we can’t get rid of them”. Society’s social norms contribute to our ghostlike behavior. “We don’t think about social norms – the unwritten rules of group consensus that determine how we should behave when we’re with others – because they feel natural and predetermined, like the air we breathe. We almost never question these rules. But we really should because social norms are a primary source of collective illusions”…Though their origins are misty and their purposes often murkier than the water in a dirty fishbowl, we usually treat social norms as gospel truth. But in reality, norms are almost always arbitrary, having emerged simply because long ago someone in a powerful position once declared, “Make it so”.
Social norms are important to the human brain. “We just don’t care about social norms when we’re in groups. It turns out that our brains absolutely crave them, to the point that we literally fabricate them out of thin air”. So why do we depend so much on them? “The simple answer is that our brains are lazy…By providing a basic level of predictability, norms are like trusty autopilots, sparing us additional work that could otherwise cause our neurological hard drives to overheat”.
- The Reign of Error
As we now know, our brains don’t always work in our best interests. Todd Rose explores this reality by referring to neuroscience research that gives us insights into the fallible brain. Rose writes, “Your brain skips over unimportant details and stick to those you really need, so that you can make sense of what’s going on in the world, anticipate changes and react as warranted”. Your brain is nothing more than a prediction machine, assimilating information from your past life experiences to direct you how to behave. The problem is that these predictions are based on biased and often negative life experiences, often causing you to act in self-defeating ways. Furthermore, “your brain relies heavily on anticipating what might happen, so it has a tendency to misinterpret reality as it happens…Though we like to believe we can discern “objective reality”, that’s actually impossible. Our brains function as both filters and projectors”.
To further complicate the “reign of error”, we think we know what others around us are thinking but “we are likely to be wrong for the simple reason that we dramatically underestimate the impact of social influence on other people”. As we’ve seen, social norms have a huge impact on others’ beliefs, causing them to act in ways that are inconsistent with their beliefs and values. So we try to predict what others are thinking and “simply make a guess (often in error) based on the incomplete information we have”. Additionally, the internet restricts the information we are exposed to and, as result, “we have now become a world where most of the information directed at us has been tailored, personalized by us or by algorithms. In other words, we now only see the information we want to see”. Seeking relief, “we rely on cognitive shortcuts. We narrow our sources of information to our tribes. We draw comfort from belonging to groups whose members we believe agree with us, regardless of whether our inferences about them are correct or not”. Rose concludes, “The giant storm of information, magnified minority voices and our own cognitive shortcuts prevents us from seeing and celebrating everything we share”.
In conclusion, “We have to recognize that we can’t trust our brains to give us an accurate read on social reality anymore. When you combine the fact that we are so bad at reading other people with the fact that technology has made us so dependent on second-hand information, you see how easy it is to be wrong about each other. And, in being wrong, we end up hurting ourselves and one another”. The only way out of this dilemma is that “each of us has to take responsibility for our part in creating and sustaining illusions”.