- Right now, we're living in a society in which 'Collective Illusions'
may be the defining feature.
Simply put, Collective Illusions are situations
where most people in a group go along with a view
they don't agree with because they incorrectly believe
that most people agree with it.
It's not just that we're misreading a few people,
it is that the majority thinks the majority
believes something that they don't.
What's most interesting is that in all of our research,
one of the largest illusions of all is actually about trust itself.
No matter how we've asked it, the vast majority of Americans
see themselves as trustworthy and value being trustworthy.
However, they believe most everybody else in society today
does not care about being trustworthy, and is not trustworthy.
There is no bigger illusion in society today
than the illusion of distrust itself.
The biggest consequence of that is that we've
stopped trusting each other,
which is fatal to free society.
Given the profound lack of trust in society today,
we often look for the cause of that in each other.
I don't believe that's true.
Frederick Taylor is probably the most important person
that most people have never heard of.
Over 100 years ago,
he wrote a book called "Scientific Management,"
which- they were about his ideas about how you create
a productive economy.
And he felt like the biggest problem in society
was that we weren't very efficient.
And so, "Scientific Management" literally said, 'Wait.
The first thing you got to stop doing is trusting people.'
He went about implementing a systems-first approach
to a top-down society governed by managers.
In fact, he invented the term manager,
and he made us all cogs, where the system matters most.
Because of the way our institutions treat us,
by removing choice from us
and fundamentally treating us as untrustworthy,
we have come to see each other through that lens.
But here's the thing—
when you actually study honesty and trustworthiness,
what you find over and over again
is that the vast majority of people
are in fact trustworthy.
One of my favorite studies—
it's a pretty famous German study. Here's what they did:
They literally just randomly called people
and said that there was a contest going on,
and all they needed to do
was flip a coin themselves.
And if it landed on tails,
they got a gift certificate.
If it landed on heads, they got nothing.
Now, what's important is
nobody knows how the coin lands
except for the person on the phone.
So you would have expected
everybody says tails, takes the gift certificate,
and the aggregate results are like, well, it's 100% tails—
who would have thought, right?
That's not what happened.
It was almost 50/50 heads or tails.
And in fact, it was slightly more in favor of heads,
which tells me most people,
if not all people, were telling the truth
about how the coin landed
when no one else could possibly have known.
So it matters to us
not just that we are trustworthy,
but that we are viewed that way.
And yet we live in a society where our institutions
continue to remind us that this is not true,
that we are in some way untrustworthy.
We can only interact with each other in one of two ways.
We can trust people to make choices for themselves,
or we can control those choices for them.
It is a fundamental tenet of democracy
that institutions serve people.
But ever since Frederick Taylor,
we have flipped that relationship.
As a free people in a free society,
it is unacceptable
that our public institutions
treat the people as distrustful
because now we know that whatever efficiency
you get from that top-down control model,
the consequences in terms of human dignity
and social trust are so damaging
that that trade-off is not worth it.
What we need is to trust communities
to make decisions for themselves,
trust families to make decisions for themselves,
trust people to.
If you want a trusting society,
work to dislodge this top-down view of our institutions
and give more power to people.
Insist that our institutions
treat the public with trust.
- This series is brought to you by Stand Together,
a community of changemakers tackling our biggest challenges.