E198 - Dr. Todd Rose: Why Your Desires Aren't Actually Yours (Here's Who Planted Them)

**Todd Rose** (0:00)
About two-thirds of Americans are actually self-silencing and outright lying about things that matter to them. And when enough of us do that, all we hear from is the fringes and the results of collective illusion. Entire groups end up doing something that almost nobody really wanted. Imagine if only 10% of the people around you hold some fringe belief, but you think it's 80%, your life is just diminished because you're not living authentically.

**André Duqum** (0:21)
What was the biggest collective illusion being run on you that shaped who you thought you could become?

**Todd Rose** (0:26)
I was a Harvard professor for a dozen years, but I was also a high school dropout. The 0.9 GPA, it was really hard to do that poorly. I just assumed there was something wrong with me. If you're acting in ways that you don't believe, you will not respect yourself. Do I actually believe this? And I realized, I didn't.
Your group actually agrees with you, and you just don't know it. There is shared humanity that really is there. At that age of courage that's coming, it's necessary.
And you have a role to play. You have a habit of living in a lie.

**André Duqum** (0:57)
What does that look like on an individual level?

**Todd Rose** (0:59)
If the problem is an illusion, then the answer is.

**André Duqum** (1:07)
Hey everyone, welcome back to the Know Thyself Podcast. Our guest today is a Harvard-trained social scientist, co-founder of the Think Tank Populace, and one of the world's leading experts on the intersection of individual psychology and collective behavior, Dr. Todd Rose. Thank you so much for being here.

**Todd Rose** (1:25)
Thanks for having me.

**André Duqum** (1:27)
What are collective illusions, and why should anyone care to listen to this conversation?

**Todd Rose** (1:31)
So collective illusions, it's just a phenomenon where most people in a group end up going along with something they don't privately agree with, simply because they incorrectly think that most everybody else agrees with it. So as a result, entire groups end up doing something that almost nobody really wanted.
So you can think of it like this. It's like groupthink, but you're wrong about the group.

**André Duqum** (1:58)
And why is that such an important thing to reflect on? Like, what are the direct costs of an unexamined groupthink that is inaccurate to begin with?

**Todd Rose** (2:06)
Yeah, so this is the funny part. So we've known about collective illusions in research for about 100 years.
Up until the advent of social media, we didn't really think it was something that was such a big phenomenon that it warranted a lot of attention. Because think about it, most of the time you think, you tend to think your bias is that other people are just like you. I like this, so everybody likes this. So this is the opposite, right? You believe something, and you're just convinced everybody else doesn't. It's like, so it was like, how could we be that wrong about others? And so, but we'll talk about how this happens, and you'll see why this is a big problem today. But here's the cost and why people should care.
Group think alone is bad enough, right? So as soon as I just start going along with the crowd, just because that's what they expect, I lose my individuality, I lose my self-determination.
That's not controversial. But now imagine that you gave up your own judgment on things you believe in and care about, because you thought that's what your group wanted from you, but your group never did. And so now you conforming to that phantom is actually destroying the very group that you're conforming just to be a part of. And so collective illusions do double damage.
They harm the individual because as you start self-silencing, not expressing who you really believe you are, we know from research there are incredible cardiovascular consequences. There are psychological consequences. You become less trustful of others, more resentful. Your life is just diminished because you're not living authentically. But collectively, it starts to tear at the very fabric of what holds us together as a people, right? So this group that I was bound to, and now I'm literally actively working to undermine it, even though I think I'm trying to get closer to it. And so we're seeing that across the board. So we see at the collective level, plummeting levels of social trust, high levels of resentment, this sense of isolation from other. And we think it's because we just don't have anything in common anymore when the reality is just a social lie.

**André Duqum** (4:23)
I think this is one of the more exciting conversations that I have been looking forward to on this podcast for a while, because in the pursuit of knowing who you are, you first start to parse through all of these unconscious, previously held beliefs and paradigms that you were born into, for better or worse, that become the lens in which you look at reality through, and completely limit what you think is possible for your life, the levels of happiness and fulfillment, and all of it. I remember early in the days, like maybe 10 years ago, hearing a quote first from, I think Earl Nightingale. Most quotes on the internet are completely uninterpretable, you know?