In almost everything that matters in our society,
there is a good chance
there's a 'collective illusion' at the heart of our values.
Why we're so afraid to deviate from our groups
is an evolutionary holdover where
it is in fact dangerous to be ostracized from the group.
For as important as conformity is to us as human beings,
it turns out we're actually not terribly good
at estimating group consensus.
Your brain assumes that the loudest voices
repeated the most often are the majority.
And so, we can get duped by a 'vocal fringe'
into believing that that is the majority.
And as soon as that happens,
our conformity bias can be weaponized into
leading us to adopt beliefs
that the majority never actually held.
And as a result, we get these collective illusions
that become reality.
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.
We're a pack 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 Bogotá mimes.
Bogotá 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 hardwired,
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 erring 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 believe 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?
- This series is brought to you by Stand Together,
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