Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the 222nd episode of the Atlas Society asks. My name is Jennifer Anju Grossman. My friends call me Jag. I'm the CEO of the Atlas Society. We are the leading nonprofit introducing young people to the ideas of Ayn Rand in fun, unconventional, creative ways, including graphic novels, AI, animated book trailers, and even music videos. Today, we are joined by Todd Rose. Before I even begin to introduce our rather remarkable guest, I want to remind all of you who are watching us on Instagram x, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube. You can use the comment section to type in your questions. We will get to as many of them as we can. Todd Rose is the CEO of the nonpartisan think tank populace and a former Harvard faculty member and director of the laboratory for the Science of Individuality at Harvard. His several best selling books include the end of average how we succeed in a world that values sameness, dark horse, achieving success through the pursuit of fulfillment, and most recently, collective illusions, conformity, complicity, and the science of why we make bad decisions, which draws on the cutting edge neuroscience and social psychology research to demonstrate how so much of our thinking is informed by the faulty assumptions making us dangerously mistrustful as a society and needlessly unhappy as individuals. Todd, thank you so much for joining us.
[00:01:34] Speaker B: Hey, thanks for having me.
[00:01:36] Speaker A: So, our audience is always curious about our guests backstories, and of all of the people I've interviewed, your personal journey is definitely among the most unexpected. You struggled in school, then worked a series of minimum wage jobs, uh, to provide for your young family.
Best job. Worst job.
[00:01:58] Speaker B: Best job. Well, I'll set aside what I do now because this is the best job. But, um, so if I had to go back to any one of them, the best job was I sold chain leak fence. And the reason I loved it is we had a superior product and I didn't have to cold call. People would ask for bids, and I'd go drive around and get to know people, and you provided value to them. And that was fantastic. The worst job it is, hands down, right before I decided to go back to college or go to college to try to improve my life and my family's life, I was. No kidding. I was a home health aide, nurse assistant. My job was to drive around and give people enemas. That was all I did. It was. I mean, listen, it's, somebody has to work, somebody has to do it. Just not me anymore. I put that hazard time in.
That was tough.
And nothing motivates you to go ahead and improve your life like making $7.25 an hour doing that kind of work.
[00:03:07] Speaker A: So the turning point for you will certainly be a great interest for our viewers. You happened upon the six pillars of self esteem by Nathaniel Brandon. Tell us about that experience.
[00:03:20] Speaker B: Yeah, it's so funny how, like, serendipitously so, I was amongst a bunch of jobs I had, as you pointed out, and I was taking new jobs and getting rid of them because I was bored and my father in law was frustrated with me, said I was lazy, which probably wasn't terrible as an interpretation back then, but I was selling computers at Circuit City in Riverdale, Utah, and I wandered over to the barnes and noble because I didn't have any money. And I just went and sit there, and I was just thumbing through stuff, and I knew that I didn't really like myself at the time, and I knew something was wrong, and I still remember exactly where it was on the shelf. And I happened to pull it down and I started reading, and the most profound insight, and I'll paraphrase it, but that just hooked me, was when you realize that self esteem is not something that you could just make happen. It is the balance between your behaviors and your beliefs. When those are out of line, of course, you're going to not respect yourself very much. But one of the most important things that was the aha moment for me was that I always had presumed that when there was a misalignment of what you thought you believed in your behaviors, that it was only your behaviors that could be wrong. And so I was spending, in my case, my religious upbringing.
I just took for granted as true for me. And I kept, why can't I live up to that? Why can't my behaviors? I kept falling out of line there, but I learned in this book that, no, it could mean that actually you don't believe what you think you believe.
That was so profound and sent me down a path of trying to really understand myself and understand what I believe.
And it might have been the single most empowering insight I had ever heard in my life to that point, because it taught me something about how much of my life at that point and in the future was actually within my control if I actually understood things. Right.
[00:05:31] Speaker A: So did you go on to read any more, Brandon, or any Ayn Rand and any takeaways from those works in terms of the focus of your work?
[00:05:43] Speaker B: Yeah. So, so for me, what. What ended up that took me down a path of understanding, individuality. Individualism, like, properly understood. Right. Because I think critics of this kind of perspective treat it as synonymous with selfishness in its worst form. But it's not obviously right. It is about the dignity and worth of individuals, that the individual is the unit of a society. And when you take seriously the idea of dignity in terms of self determination, rights and responsibilities, that it's only from that starting point that we can have a real conversation about how we live well together. And when you actually get to a place where we are free agent people, being able to cooperate together, we can achieve really remarkable things. And so it was off of that thinking about human autonomy and also human distinctiveness, which I think are the two sort of two sides of the same coin when you think about an individual. That actually took me in, basically everything I've done since then, professionally, personally, has all sort of stemmed from that core set of insights.
[00:07:00] Speaker A: That is such an amazing story. So I got my first introduction to your work at a talk you gave at a reason weekend in Boston. And it really was paradigm shifting for me in terms of thinking about how wide the gap often is, is between what people think in private and what they say in public. What? Well, I guess we know now what intrigued you to go down that line of research in the first place.
Let's turn to the book collective illusions.
Some researchers refer to this phenomenon as pluralistic ignorance, but you found that term inadequate, and instead you refer to these illusions as social lies. Can you elaborate on that?
[00:07:48] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. It's funny because. So let me give you the definition of a collective illusion, right? Which is when most people in a group end up going along with something that they don't privately believe, only because they incorrectly think that most other people in their group believe it. And so, as a result, entire groups can end up doing something that almost nobody really wanted. So it's funny, the term pluralistic ignorance.
It's hilarious in the field for decades.
You know, you've got a bad name for something when everybody has to do some throat clearing apology for what we call this thing. Every paper is like, okay, we call it this. It's obviously not that, because it's not pluralism, nor is it ignorance. Right? It's not that you're not. You're unaware of what your group thinks. You think, you know, you're just wrong. And so I felt like it needed a little more clarity so that everyday people could understand it. And I'll just. Let me step back just one sec, because I think just to tie back to personal stuff, in my earlier work at Harvard, I was focused on the science of individuality, which was like, we're using aggregate data to come up with insights about individuals. And what we found was that, in fact, like group level analysis can often apply to literally nobody in the group. It's really bad. So we're not really understanding human distinctiveness. And those new methodologies and insights are what have been fueling things like personalized medicine, personalized nutrition, personalized learning, where we put the individual front and center and start with that. This other stuff is now on the other side of the coin. Like we talked about, that autonomy aspect, the ability for me to really live a self determined life. Well, as human beings, we are social species. We care a lot about being with our groups, not against them. And most everybody watching or listening is well aware of the problem of group think, where you abandon your own judgment and just do what the group wants you to do. That's bad enough, but collective illusions takes it to another level, which is you just conformed to your group, and you were wrong. So the thing you're doing is actually destroying the very group you think you're conforming to. And historically, it has been so rare, these collective illusions, that we thought, well, it almost isn't even worth studying. And then with the rise of social media, I believe collective illusions have now become the largest invisible threat to free society that you could imagine.
[00:10:36] Speaker A: So what are some examples of collective illusions? For instance, with regard to values most people project as important to other people, and what actually most matters to their own lives?
[00:10:51] Speaker B: I wish we could only come up with a few, but we'll give you some examples. But if you name anything that matters in society right now in America, it is a coin toss whether it is under an illusion or not. So we can go to the more extreme things that we have. A brand new.
We do what's called private opinion research to get around not just what people say, but what they privately believe. And then what do they think everybody believes? And we just published, it's called the social pressure index. That quantifies the amount of pressure people are feeling in society today. And then digs into 64 of the most controversial issues in society and looks at what do people say publicly? What do they believe privately, and what do they think their group thinks? It's wild. And so just a little rev on that for a second, and then I'll give you some concrete examples. Right now, in America, 61% of adults admit to self silencing, withholding their own views.
And this is a huge problem, if you don't mind me, just revving, because how illusions happen is this, as I said before, like we all have a conformity bias. Human beings want to be with their groups. They don't want to be against it. But this is kind of crazy. But how? Your brain estimates what your group believes. So what you'd conform to.
No kidding. Your brain believes the loudest voices repeated the most are the majority.
It's kind of a buggy shortcut, but this is how your brain works. And maybe way back when, it wasn't too bad, but when you put it into a social media environment where if you take just something like what was Twitter and now X, which Pew research has found that 80% of all that content is generated by only 10% of the users.
And what's even worse is that 10%, they're not remotely representative of the american public. They are extreme on almost every social issue. So you can see the problem, right? Like, if only 10% of Americans hold of you, but you believe it's 80%, then unless you're willing to go against your group, you'll just say nothing. You'll self silence, or worse, you'll do what Tim McCurran calls preference falsification. You'll just outright lie to get the, hey, way to go. You're on our side, all the social value out of it. And so that's what we're seeing here. It has gotten so bad that with 61% of people admitting to self silencing, when you look even the more extreme version of outright lying about your views, every single demographic in the country right now is lying about their views in ways that create false consensus so that the majority in public says something that the majority in private does not actually believe. So let me give you a few examples, and then we can go from there a little earlier. Remember the defund the police movement?
If you just think on the face of it, it's absurd. We're going to have social workers like.
[00:14:02] Speaker A: So respond to crime scenes. Yeah, at the peak of this.
[00:14:06] Speaker B: Yeah. So at the peak of this, you had almost high 50% of Democrats publicly saying they were in favor of defunding the police because they believed that's what most Democrats believed.
Our private opinion data on this shows it is 3% of Democrats. 3%. So I don't think you'd see what happened in Seattle and San Francisco, some of these places if politicians knew it was 3%. And what's funny is I would go, like, one on one meeting with senators and congressmen and just say, like, trying to teach them about collective illusions, teach them about this. And they'd be like, oh, no, I get that. I mean, in this case, that's not true for me because I got, like, you know, 60 phone calls. Like, yeah, 60, 60, like, carnival barkers who are screaming at you is not your entire constituency, but it just feels like it because the loudest voices repeated the most are the majority. So, yeah, go ahead, please. Go ahead.
[00:15:10] Speaker A: So, I'm curious, how do you get around this? What kind of method do you use in your research to get around the effects of social pressure? To find out? I. Authentic private priorities.
[00:15:22] Speaker B: Okay. Since you asked, I get. I can nerd out then if everybody drops off. It was. I was asked. So all private opinion methods, and we didn't invent them. So I can all of them have something in common, which is they offer anonymity and plausible deniability. And in this case, this particular method we use is called a list experiment. And the shortest version I can tell you is, like, if we said something like, college athletes should have to compete on sports teams that align with their sex at birth. Right? Seems reasonable. Now, if you're on the left, there is definitely a right answer there, right.
That you're supposed to be okay with something else.
So we might give you that statement in public to say, do you agree or disagree? Okay, well, that has all the social pressure, because you know that. I know what you're responding to. How you get a private opinion on this is you have to build a pretty expensive set of control statements that aren't controversial. There's no social pressure. Like, recessions are a natural part of an economy. People can disagree, but no one thinks. I can't tell you the truth about what I think.
So. So we have these control statements and a control group, a large random sample of people get three of those, and you say, how many of these three do you agree with? And then the experimental group gets those three, plus that transgender statement. And it's like, how many of these four do you agree with? And you can actually compare those two, and you can get an aggregate understanding of the distribution of preference. But what's important is, I literally don't know how you personally responded. And the whole thing is structured such that you'll never say all four and you'll never say zero. We can go deep on that if you want. But. So if I burst in the room as you're pushing two, you could say, well, you don't know which two I agree with. So it gives you that the list experiment is very, very, very good, historically, getting at things that people want to tell you but don't think they can.
[00:17:36] Speaker A: So we talked about Nathaniel Brandon.
So what you had to say about how in groups use ostracism to enforce conformity really resonated, because that's precisely how the in group of objectivists around Ayn Rand treated Brandon and anyone who associated with him, continuing to this day, the orthodox objectivist establishment as ostracized, one intellectual after another, including the founder of the Atlas Society, David Kelly. And it's really a tragic travesty for a philosophy that's supposed to value independent thinking. And I've, you know, just been running the Atlas Society for eight years, so I'm still relatively new to this movement, and I still have a hard time wrapping my head around how, you know, we're all objectivists, after all. What does your research say about this kind of sectarianism within groups that largely share the same belief system?
[00:18:41] Speaker B: So what's so crazy about it? I think it's really important example. It's unfortunate, right? But we tend to think that only some groups can become so pure and start to use in group out group behaviors and ostracization. But it is so fundamental to how human beings organize that it doesn't matter what the basis of that group is. You are always susceptible to it unless you're on guard for it. And so if it can happen here, it can happen anywhere. And so what you find is the only solution. There's two ways that groups don't do that, right? One is that the group itself establishes norms that reinforce the plurality of ideas. But that's not actually, that's great if you can get it. It's sort of like having free speech norms and tolerance. Those things work until they don't. Right? As we've seen in country after country, the better example, and I kind of laid it out in my book, is that there are things that every individual can do to not be as sensitive to the threat of ostracization. Because usually the sort of canceling of people, the pushing them out, doesn't, doesn't hold up to scrutiny if you're willing to challenge it. Right. Because I guarantee you most people in your group probably didn't actually want that to go that direction. It's just when you're watching someone be essentially, like, drummed out of the circle, it's a lot easier to go along with that than it is to defend the person that's about to be ostracized.
[00:20:17] Speaker A: Yeah. So, any practical advice? I mean, I know you talked about trying to, as an organization, enshrine norms, and that's certainly what we do here at the Atlas Society with elevation of benevolence as a major virtue and tolerance. Of course, David Kelly's treatise in response to this behavior was his truth and toleration.
But how about on an individual level? How can individuals avoid falling into this kind of cult like dynamic?
[00:20:53] Speaker B: Yeah, well, the cult like dynamic is exactly right. So there's a little bit of a pretty cool thing that you can do as a hack at an individual level. And it seems simple, but it's really important.
The number of groups that you meaningfully belong to matters. And it's like this rule of three. So if you think about it, like, let's just go back to the cult thing. And I actually did write about cult stuff in collective illusions. Um, they try to winnow you away from any other group mattering, right? So. So your need to belong, which is a fundamental human need, is now tied to just one group that matters to you. If that happens, I don't care if it is a religious group or in this case, nowadays, like, political group. Um, if it's just one thing, then they have cult like power over you, because you are not going to give up belonging just to stand your ground, because, like, being isolated completely as an individual throughout, like, evolution meant death. And so we're really hardwired to not want that to happen to us. But it turns out that if you have three groups that matter to you and they don't have to be big, it could be literally like, political party, religion, and a bowling league. As long as it's meaningful to you, you can actually, if you're feeling pressure to go silent or to go along with something that you disagree with in one group, it turns out if all you do is no kidding, imagine yourself in one of those other groups.
The act of imagining that, like, placing your identity there for a moment, actually blunts what's called the error signal response in your brain to the threat of ostracization, it's kind of cool. So it allows you to stay in with your own agency and be more likely to speak up. The other thing I would say, and this is really important because you might be thinking, oh, shoot, it's too bad my group has abandoned its values. It's not what I thought. Or it could be that one guy, right? That one guy that's talking really loudly that makes it seem like he's speaking for the group because he could be in a leadership position. So you're thinking, I guess this is what we believe. But if you've learned anything from me at all today, it is that it is just as likely to be a collective illusion. And so one of the really powerful things that you can sniff out when people are starting to ask us to do things and you're seeing people kind of just fall in line is ask them why. Why are they doing it? And if it's principled, they can give you a very good reason. Because sometimes it's good to actually change norms, and sometimes groups have deviated from their north Star and they need to be brought back, but quite often. So if it's just that they're going along because they think this is what everybody does, they'll be like, well, because that's what we do. They literally have no justification for it. And that's a telltale sign for you as an individual that this is a collective illusion and that most people probably don't really agree with it. Which means if you actually introduce challenge to this, that will give them permission to also challenge. It. Sounds so simple, but these small things can go a really, really long way.
[00:24:11] Speaker A: So this is amazing. You also wrote in the book that this kind of identity complexity that's good for individuals is also good for groups. And going back to our founders excommunication from the orthodox objectivist in group, his cardinal sin was speaking to a group of libertarians. He was accused of somehow sanctioning views that differed from his own, when I think he, in fact, grasped the value of toleration, famously saying, if we are right, we have nothing to fear. If we are wrong, we have something to learn. What are the pitfalls of an organization that closes itself off from this kind of an exchange?
[00:25:03] Speaker B: It is such a wonderful thing to be talking about because we're also seeing that all over the place. Right, right now, it's coming from the fringes of both political parties that create the sort of guilt by association and just merely being in the presence of someone. Or now we'll call it like you're platforming them, as if this is some novel phenomenon, as if, oh, that just means that's going to make their view infect everything else. But in reality, that is not. Whatever happened, it doesn't happen that way. Right? The act of the exchange of ideas, like the free exchange of ideas in a marketplace of ideas, is unbelievably important to the health of any group and a society at large. So whatever we see when groups stop allowing for that, it is usually the beginning of the end of that group, because the only way they can uphold the group is increasingly through authoritarian means, because you increasingly, increasingly no longer have voluntary allegiance to it. You just don't want to get kicked out. Whatever. It's really bad. And so the other thing is, there's probably never been a group in the history of the world that got everything right. And one of the things, like, I happen to be someone who believes in what we might call some version of classical liberalism, whatever, but a lot of these ideologies that we're talking about should be differentiated by their evolutionary possibilities. They can change. They are open by definition to new ideas and insights. And so let's just pretend that the objectivists actually got it right at time one. You're telling me that, like, nothing's changed in the world, that even on the margins might warrant some, like, adjustments, not to the core principles, but how they manifest. We lose the ability, the vitality to change, and then we just get locked in. And it does become very cult like. And again, it's usually the best indicator that this is the beginning of the end of that group.
[00:27:09] Speaker A: Yeah, well, it's specifically, the distinction has a name, and it's called closed objectivism versus open objectivism. And the Atlas Society promotes open objectivism, which is apparently a very heretical thing to do precisely because we believe that we're talking about a science. And science is not a static thing. It's not a dogma. It's not a scripture. It's something that continues to evolve and can be debated as the body of knowledge and continues to expand.
[00:27:41] Speaker B: Well, can I lean to that for one sec? Because I'm a big Karl Popper fan as a scientist, and I got some things wrong. But the key point that was so profound for me about thinking about what it means to be a scientist was his view that there's an objective truth. But you wouldn't know it if you had it yet, right? Because just, like, his idea that, like, you know, just because you think that all sheep are white and you've seen 100 sheep, it might increase your confidence in that assertion.
All it takes is one black sheep, and you're wrong. And his point that we get to objective truth through the elimination of error, but that that is not something that is a solo exercise. I am so blind to my biases and the things that keep me from seeing things that you are going to be. If you and I can be in a trusted conversation, like, we'll reason together because you're going to more clearly see my blind spots, and I might more clearly see your blind spots. So it is through open conversation that we can eliminate error and get closer to that objective truth.
[00:28:56] Speaker A: I'm going to meme that I like it.
All right, so you wrote that we are, quote, currently living through a comparatively dire epidemic of self censorship. Previously, we had Emily Eakins of the Cato Institute on to talk about her research finding that, you know, as your research also backs up, that two thirds of Americans are reluctant to share their private opinions in public. But that reluctance was highest among Republicans at 77%. Why would they be comparatively the most reluctant among Democrats and independents, for example?
[00:29:34] Speaker B: So what's interesting is, you know, Democrats for a while had a clear sense of, like, ideological adherence. Like I say were they knew what they were against. I do think that particularly with Republicans, one of the biggest challenges, and we saw this, too, a couple of years ago.
As of right now, it's slightly different. But a couple of years ago, so many Republicans weren't Maga. And I don't mean like, I'm not be whatever you want to be, but, like, there are things there that are, that ultimately you could say, okay, I'm not going to be. I'm not that. But, like, for example, now I come over and I say, if you ask me about, say, immigration, and I say something where I'm like, I think we should protect our border. And you're like, oh, you're with Donald Trump then? And so many of my republican friends are like, listen, I'm just going to say nothing because I'm going to be misunderstood. And so whenever there's a very active fringe element of a group, a lot of the mainstream members of that group are far more likely to self silence so as not to be identified with that, for better or for worse.
[00:30:45] Speaker A: Got it. All right, well, we have got a lot of questions that are rolling in here.
Jackson Sinclair on YouTube asks, do media institutions play a significant role in perpetuating collective illusions, or are they also victims of the phenomenon?
[00:31:05] Speaker B: That's a great question, Jackson. So mainstream media are more victims of the collective illusions? This, because it's amazing, right? In the past, they could drive them when there were, like three channels and we just didn't have a way to hear Brent, they could literally command and say, hey, this is the reality. Like, I guess that's true. I think that it's just, it's, social media is by far the biggest perpetrator of this without, without even any malfeasance. Right. Just the democratizing nature of social media. Right? In theory, everyone has a voice. Well, then that means everyone has a voice. And the people who are the most passionate about their positions tend to be the ones that are not in the incumbent position.
It's like their fringe and they have to really, really push hard.
So that ends up driving a lot of these illusions. And what's funny nowadays is how often you see mainstream television be actually literally just following along on XDev. Let's report on what we're seeing on social media. The other thing that's really crazy, and we've been doing a lot of work on this, is the role of bots, because we're not used to this. And I will say just readers, this was a big problem. So I was fortunate enough to go. I was invited to Israel seven weeks after October 7 because the government, they were worried sick about the Harvard Harris poll that had come out, that found 60% of Gen Z publicly said Hamas was justified in killing those 1200 Israelis.
If that were true, that is so frightening.
Unbelievably terrifying. But they thought, we think this might be a collective illusion. And they showed me some evidence that there were other state actors that were intentionally using bots. Iran, China, and trying to, and Russia trying to drive that kind of anti semitic sentiment amongst our young people. And sure enough, we've dug in and did the private opinion research, and it turns out it's not 60% of Gen Z. It is 2% of Gen Z. It's just they think that's what their peers believe, because that's what they're hearing from on social media. It turns out these are iranian bots.
But you realize, if you wanted to destroy a country, a free society, I believe, and sorry I'm around here, but it's kind of important to me. There's a book, do you remember the book called Guns of August, about World War one, which Barbara took, but said, part of what made that so horrific is the technology for war had changed exponentially, but the mindset and strategy of war did not. And so they go in as if they're digging trenches, fighting over small amounts of land, but now they have machine guns and chemical weapons and things that so you could just slaughter at a scale that was just unfathomable. I believe we are in a guns of August moment right now with respect to the nature of propaganda, because our experts and I know this at the highest levels of our government and other governments, they're so obsessed with disinformation, as if that's what foreign actors are doing. It's just not true. That is not the game anymore. It is this ability to use bots to generate a false consensus, to manufacture the collective illusion and have our conformity bias drag us into behaviors that we would never otherwise have done. And so it's so easy to do. It's so easy to get our young Americans, who really are ignorant on a lot of these issues, to believe this is what their communities believe, and then get them into taking behaviors that are so counter to american values. It's almost breathtaking.
[00:35:06] Speaker A: So, yeah, you cover the use of these bots a lot in collective illusions. What are some examples of, like, say, how dictators might use the bots to act more popularity than, and, you know, group support than they actually have?
[00:35:25] Speaker B: Oh, this is. And like, I've been fortunate to be part of some new efforts that are building the technologies to detect these and annihilate them before they affect our young Americans minds. So we'll have some solutions for this. But it's funny. Virtually every dictator does this. Maduro had hundreds of thousands of bots, and they're so sophisticated. I have to tell you, like, having spent the last year digging into this with very smart tech people, the amount of investment is astounding. So there are, like, the bots, like, you might think of, like, dumb, like the ones that don't even bother to have a picture on the x accounts, like an egg for your head. You know, these are like the frontline infantry. They just throw them at things and they're just meant to amplify. And it. If you really look at it, you're like, okay, this is dumb. There are unbelievably sophisticated AI enabled avatar bots now, which is frightening. And what they do is they use generative AI. They will go in, and this is happening right now if you're online, arguably, upwards of 15% of all your interactions on social media are actually with bots. That's probably a conservative estimate. And by the way, it only takes about 6% to completely determine a collective illusion. So these AI avatar ones, which just blew my mind, they will go in. They're like sleeper bots. They interact amongst non political things. It could. It could be like a gun club on. On x. It could be anything. Sports leagues. And they actually learn the language of the people they're interacting with. So in political terms, they'll go into, like, maga circles and learn how they're talking about things. So then it starts to talk like that, and then when they want to be activated, they will suddenly, this guy I thought I'd been talking to for five years about football suddenly starts to talk about things like Putin or whatever, Xi or whatever, and then just amps up. And those small number of avatar bots can actually drive the consensus of that group if they're sophisticated enough.
[00:37:34] Speaker A: So you want to nerd out a little bit on the solutions, or can you talk about them yet, or these are.
[00:37:40] Speaker B: Yeah, I'll give you a high level and apologize that, I don't mean to be so cagey, but it's not public yet. So what you have to do to be able to deal with this is we realized we had no idea the conversations that were happening on social media. Right. If it was back in the day with television, you had Nielsen and you could know the trends. But what's important about social media is we can basically do n of one, put a rain cloud over you and you will think this is the conversation your community's having, but it's literally just you or whoever else we want to target. And so you have to see, you have to be able to detect trends.
One we just found, which was insane, was a Chinese created, anti capitalism, anti american dream video that was boosted using iranian bots through Pakistan. No kidding. And then forced through on TikTok to targeted like about 60 million young Americans. And the only thing they had in common is that they had liked some pro palestinian content in the past. And so our ability to detect that early enough to be able to counter that content. But more importantly, one of the things we discovered which was so wild is if they get you to look at it and like it, they have other bots that come in into the comments section for you. And it turns out the first three comments dictate how the entire comment thread goes. So imagine if you're impressionable young person, you see some piece of content, you like it or reshare it because you think that's what everyone believes. That small act then gets reinforced by other bots that tell you how smart you are and how right you are. And then that creates a dopamine reward response. And now you're down that rabbit hole, and they'll slowly move you to radicalization. So the technologies that are being built are the detection capabilities, the ability to actually immediately neutralize with other content and with beating the other bots to the comment section. But I'll be frank. The long game is actually stuff like sleeper being able to do double agent bots where you can infect the bots themselves. So they think they're anti american, but they're actually propagating pro american principles. But it's a little crazy. But the thing is, none of that really matters. I'll just say at the end of the day, you're playing whack a mole.
The absolute future of this is to realize that you can no longer trust your brain to tell you what your group thinks. And so we absolutely have to get back to a commitment to free expression, to self determination, and ensuring the norms of our society uphold that. Because when the norms of what it means to be part of our groups is that you think for yourself, then there's really no way for those illusions to stick around for very long. So I see this as a personal and cultural solution more than a technology one.
[00:40:51] Speaker A: Fascinating. All right. Speaking of young people, my modern Gault, who's a regular on this show, asks Todd, do you think educational institutions encourage people to discover their beliefs, or do you think schools impose belief systems on their students?
[00:41:10] Speaker B: Oh, I wish, I wish, I wish it were the former.
No, look, I actually think, here's what's, let me just give you the date, the evidence first for the claim I'm going to make. If you look at just self silencing and preference falsification. So I'll pull up my data right here because I've got too much of it that I tried to memorize, all of it.
The more that you are in school in America, the more that you self silence. So college graduates have a higher rate of self silencing than non college graduates. In fact, college graduates that are in professional jobs self silence significantly more than the poorest Americans there are. So it's really weird, right? You think, wouldn't it be like, poor people that can't afford or marginalized groups that just, they can't speak up? No.
It's the most educated people around, and you know as well as I do why that is right. This is about indoctrination. It is absolutely not about learning to think for yourself. Now, there are instances of pedagogical models that do support that, and we've got to get back to that. And what's really exciting for me is we tracked private opinion of the trade off priorities the american public has for k twelve education before the pandemic, every year through it and after. And something profound has changed about what Americans want out of education, not just for their kids, but for other kids. They really, they're done with college prep as the sole goal. They want kids to learn to think for themselves, and they want them prepared to do meaningful work rather than just, you know, whatever job is given to them. But this think for yourself thing I think is really important. And I think with the rise of AI, all those conversations sometimes are overblown about the existential threat. I think. I think we should be worried about some things, but I think we always get worried when these big technologies come into society.
I think the biggest threat about AI is that all of this manipulation we've been talking about, all this indoctrination we've been talking about, people are starting to see AI as the oracle, right? We're not even doing search anymore. It's just answer. And as you start to believe that it actually knows you and that it has some truth, it will feel like personalization, when in fact it's just pure manipulation.
There's some really cool things going on.
One of my friends, Brendan McCord, is just standing out up what I think will be the most important AI lab in the world. It's out of Oxford. It's called the Cosmos Institute, and its sole purpose is to ensure that the AI technologies that are developed are done so in service of human freedom, rather than authoritarianism. I think that is the most important thing going on.
And then. So, anyway, I think that this conversation about what our values are, about whether we still value the dignity and self determination of individuals, or we're okay with what's been going on for the last 100 years, America, which is just a soft kind of authoritarianism, that's the choice we have. And the AI is either going to enable an incredible amount of empowerment, or it's going to put us down a path of authoritarianism that's very, very hard to come back from.
[00:44:31] Speaker A: All right, you might have just answered this. Alan Turner asks, are there any collective illusions in the past in which there were particular events or individuals who broke from those illusions? So maybe the lockdowns and the school closures helped people break away.
[00:44:50] Speaker B: Yeah. And I'll tell you, let me go even further back, because it's one of my absolute favorite examples of what's possible. Because with collective illusions, what's really important is they're social lies, right? So while they're really dangerous, when they're enforced, they're fragile, because they are lies. And if you understand how to break them, you can actually unleash social change at a scale and pace that would seem unimaginable. And the trick is, it's through social proof, not persuasion. I need to see people like me speaking up. I need to, you know that the meaning makers of society have to take the lead as well. The best example of what's possible in my mind is the velvet revolution in Czechoslovakia, because this was one of those unbelievable occasions where communism was overthrown without a single shot being fired, without anybody losing their life. And for a really long time, historians had a hard time explaining why Czechoslovakia, why did it go that way there in places like Hungary and other things, just brutal suppression of it. And what I found the most interesting is not just that it happened, but who led it, right. Voslov Haveljdehe, who was a poet and a playwright, not a military person, not even not a politician.
And if you don't mind, I'll just give you the this, because it's very remarkable.
He wrote a play called the Garden Party, which was this really subtle satire of communism. It was so subtle, even the censors didn't know they were being made fun of.
And he puts it on, and it becomes the hamilton of its time. I get it sold out all the time. And Pavel said, he sat there and he watched the audience, and he said they laughed at all the right parts, that they laughed at things you would not find funny if you really believed in communism. So he realizes that the problem is not that people believe in communism, it's that they believe everybody else believes in communism. And he wrote about this, if you haven't read it, his manifesto, which is free online, it's called the power of the powerless.
It will read like he's writing to us today. And he discovers the illusion at the heart of communism. And he said, well, if that's true, then the solution isn't military force. It's not even political. He said, it is personal responsibility and authenticity, that people had gotten so comfortable living in the lie that they were upholding this system that nobody wanted. And if you could get them to start being comfortable living in truth, in objective truth, that this thing would fall. And people made fun of him. I mean, they mocked him. Nobody took him seriously for a long time. But he starts out by building these small works opportunities at a local level that gave people inroads into doing things like. Like literally, like poetry. Just start being honest about things in these small ways that didn't seem threatening. And he built that up and built that up. And here's the thing. Even Havel didn't see what was coming. Like, nobody saw the velvet revolution coming. The CIA missed it. The KGB missed it again, Havel, just a little while before the student protests that would then unleash the twelve days that overthrew communism. He was interviewed in international magazine, and he was talking about the need to stick with the fight at the revolution. And he said, these things take a really long time. I won't be around to see the end of this, but I will give it my all three months later, he's the first democratic elected president of a free Czechoslovakia. And I look at that example and I think, listen, if a poet can overthrow communism, like, just think what we can do as a free people right now, because we are in a moment in american society coming up on our 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, where we are so falsely polarized by these illusions. And I can tell you we have more private opinion data than any other organization in the country. It is shocking in private how similar we are as Americans. And it's one thing when the illusions are about things like fame and other stuff. I'm telling you, illusions right now around things like our commitment to individual rights, our commitment to meritocracy, our commitment to equality, not equity, those are things that 75% of Americans across all demographics privately agree on. But in a lot of cases, some of those demographics don't believe that. Their communities believe it. And so they're publicly behaving in ways that are contrary to it. So I look at that and say, that's the bad news. The good news is collective illusions are upheld by us so they can be shattered by us. And it really does start as simple as it sounds, and I know it sounds simple, but it is important.
We've got to find the moral courage to be respectfully honest with each other and the civic courage to make it safe for other people to do the same.
[00:49:58] Speaker A: Well, that is very optimistic. I'm glad to hear it, because otherwise you kind of go on Twitter or you look at some of these polls and you do think that we are in a moment of extraordinary polarization. So it's good to know that there's a lot more agreement in private. But let's try to make that public as well. We were talking about young people. Another previous guest on the show was Professor Jean Twenge. She's a leading expert on generational change. And one of her findings that most surprised me was how this youngest generation is so much more mistrustful and cynical than previous generations. You write, quote, today's incentive, today's America incentivizes incongruence, dishonesty and cynicism as a status quo. What is incongruism and how might it be contributing to this alarming deficit in social mistrust?
[00:50:58] Speaker B: Sure, at its core, it is simply going back to Nathaniel Brandon. It is when your public behaviors, what you say and what you do deviate from your private values and beliefs, because as human beings, we have a built in desire for that alignment.
It creates cognitive dissonance when we say things we don't believe, when we make choices we don't really prefer. So we want to be congruent. And anything that pulls us off of that, we resent. And so when you think about this youngest generation. So, our latest data on self silencing, Gen Z has the highest rate of self silencing of any demographic group in the country. Now, 72% of them admit to self silencing. Now, here's why this is really important. We also found that the rate of self silencing is related to your trust in strangers. The social trust that is so important in a free society.
The people in the adults in America that are self silencing is 61% of them.
Collectively, only 30% of them believe most people can be trusted.
That 30% would be one of the lowest levels ever recorded in America, ever. It's third world country levels of trust.
And free societies do not function when we stop trusting each other, because we have to start controlling each other instead. But here's the good news. If you look at the people who didn't self silence, which, by the way, they are not demographically different from self silencers on any dimension. So there's just something about I felt like I had to self silence, so I did. The folks that didn't have to self silence, 52% of them believe most people can be trusted. That 52% would put them at scandinavian level social trust. So the difference between a high trust society and everything that brings and a low trust one might come down to our willingness to create that space for people to be honest. And Gen Z is suffering under that incongruence the most of any group.
[00:53:12] Speaker A: So we're coming down to the end of this. I have so many more questions, and I know our audience has questions that I wasn't able to get to. Maybe just real briefly. I was thrilled to see that one of the Atlas Society's greatest benefactors, Chris Ruffer, founder of Morningstar, received recognition for the very singular company culture and management structure he pioneered at his company.
Maybe just a couple of minutes on why you think that kind of organizational culture holds the key to turning back from this paternalistic corporate tie.
[00:53:48] Speaker B: It is amazing. In fact, I double dipped. I wrote about this company in end of average, and I was so inspired by it that it made sense here, too, to talk about it, because it shouldn't work. Everything that we've been taught to believe since Frederick Taylor implemented scientific management and robbed of our autonomy and in the service of just efficiency, which I think is the beginning of the end for us if we don't turn that around.
The idea that there aren't managers, the idea that everything is negotiated with people for whom your behavior actually affects, and that you are going to build the technologies to enable those commitments to each other and hold each other accountable without some authoritarian thumb on the scale. You think, oh, sure, maybe in a high margin, maybe Silicon Valley somewhere where they're just printing money. No, he's in tomato paste. Like, this is the most industrial, like, thin margin kind of place you could possibly implement this. And yet, when you go meet these people and you see what they've done, this bet on human autonomy, self determination, and an appreciation for the distinctiveness of individuals and the contributions that they can make. When you take that seriously, and you implemented the incentive structures, and you build resources and supports around those base assumptions, it turns out you can dominate one of the most industrial fields imaginable. Like, it works. We've just been convinced that you can't do it otherwise. And the reason I think it is singularly important, what he's accomplished is right now, we are at the tail end of showing I, starting with Adam Smith, that if you stop trying to compel everyone and you actually enable self interest, properly understood, and create incentives the right way, you can generate economic abundance at a level that just, you can't even imagine. Our ancestors looking at us going really like, this is what you fight over now.
Too much food, too much stuff. But here's the thing. What was the point of economic abundance, if not psychological, if not the thriving, the joy, the spiritual, whatever you want to call it, right? The point of the materialism.
And with Frederick Taylor, we exchanged that right. We took away your autonomy and self determination to give you more stuff. And, look, there was some benefit. I'm not completely, like, I'm not naive on that, but people are sick of that. You're seeing this enormous shift back in the american public away from compliance culture. They want control of their lives back. They want more meaning and purpose. They don't just want to be cogs in a machine that is the state of play in the american public right now. In private, what Chris has done is show us that these institutions that we typically see as, at best, necessary evils. Right, the devil's bargain. I'll go do this thing, and then I'll go find fulfillment somewhere else.
You don't have to make that compromise, like work, can actually be a productive part of a meaningful life for you and in ways that create true mutual benefit for the company. And so I look at that and say, look, not everybody's going to do it that way, but the fact that he could accomplish this is the most important thing that's happened in the american workforce in my lifetime, in my opinion.
[00:57:16] Speaker A: Wow, that is quite an endorsement. And I've got an endorsement as well. Everybody in the audience. You know, I read a lot of books all year long.
If I had to recommend one book for 2024, it would be this book. Collective illusions by Todd Rose. Conformity, complicity, and the science of why we make bad decisions also has an excellent narration, and it's on audible, so you have no excuse. I really highly recommend it. And Todd, how is the best way for us to keep track of you and follow your work?
[00:57:56] Speaker B: So all of our research is available on populous.org dot. You can follow me online, toddrose.com, or anywhere on social media. If you just google me or reach out, my emails are available. I always am excited to talk to people who, whether it's you, agree or disagree, let's embody that spirit of open conversation and, and a respectful challenge and lead by example.
[00:58:19] Speaker A: So well, fantastic. Thank you so much, Todd, and thanks to all of you for joining us for asking great questions. Of course, if you enjoyed this video or any of our other programs and content, remember, we are a nonprofit, so please consider going over and making a tax deductible donation at atlas society.org. donate and join us next week when Alexandra Popoff will join us to talk about her new biography, Ayn Rand writing the Gospel of Success. We'll see you then.
