Collective Illusions Quotes

“In other words, groups use ostracism as a tool to discipline and minimize deviance. Not surprisingly, being at odds with their in-group is something most people would rather avoid altogether.”
― Todd Rose, Collective Illusions: Conformity, Complicity, and the Science of Why We Make Bad Decisions

“We live in challenging times: there is enormous pressure to go along to get along, to stay silent, or to lie about our private beliefs in order to belong. But blind conformity is never good for anyone—it robs us of happiness and keeps us from fulfilling our potential, individually and collectively.”
― Todd Rose, Collective Illusions: Conformity, Complicity, and the Science of Why We Make Bad Decisions

“In addition to the psychological costs, there is another reason to fear ostracism. Groups will use it without compunction to assert their will and achieve their ends.”
― Todd Rose, Collective Illusions: Conformity, Complicity, and the Science of Why We Make Bad Decisions

“We frequently fall in line behind people who we assume know more than we do.”
― Todd Rose, Collective Illusions: Conformity, Complicity, and the Science of Why We Make Bad Decisions

“We now speak, instead, of being “authentic,” a less moralistic term that refers to being real as opposed to false. Authenticity sounds good, but it isn’t necessarily a call to ethical action. An authentic leader—a creature much praised in business literature—is meant to be genuine, self-disciplined, self-aware, and values driven.53 Yet authenticity has nothing to do with virtue; one can be authentic and have good or bad values, just as one can be authentically good or bad. Until his conversion following the visitation of the three spirits, Scrooge was true to his own vision of himself as a “tight-fisted hand at the grindstone… hard and sharp as flint.” As Charles Dickens made clear, this total and utterly unapologetic allegiance to money was authentic, because it reflected his reality.54 But it didn’t make him a good person.”
― Todd Rose, Collective Illusions: Conformity, Complicity, and the Science of Why We Make Bad Decisions

“your brain eats an enormous amount of energy. For example, although it’s capable of capturing the equivalent of eleven megabytes of information per second from your eyes, you can only “upload” about sixty bits per second into the picture you consciously “see.” This is the equivalent of facing the entire population of Paris, France, but actually seeing only eight people.1”
― Todd Rose, Collective Illusions: Conformity, Complicity, and the Science of Why We Make Bad Decisions

“-THIS MANY PEOPLE CAN’T BE WRONG
If people can see one another’s choices, and if they are merely copying each other, wisdom becomes stupidity in a hurry. In doubting our own judgment and defaulting to conformity, we transform ourselves from individuals into members of the herd. And before we know it, this seed of error can become a copying cascade that devours all other knowledge and leaves a collective illusion in its wake.
It’s terrifyingly easy to start a copying cascade. ... And make no mistake, no one is immune to this trap— even people who should know better.”
― Todd Rose, Collective Illusions: Conformity, Complicity, and the Science of Why We Make Bad Decisions

“A better system will not automatically ensure a better life,' Havel wrote. 'In fact, the opposite is true: only by creating a better life can a better system be developed.' The smallest choices you and I make, every single day, can change the world for better or worse. The simple act of refusing to live a lie has the power to transform who we are and what we are capable of, both as individuals and as a society. In other words, trying our best to live a congruent life is one of the most important things we can do for ourselves and each other.”
― Todd Rose, Collective Illusions: Conformity, Complicity, and the Science of Why We Make Bad Decisions

“The real question is whether the brighter future is really always so distant. What if, on the contrary, it has been here for a long time already, and only our own blindness and weakness has prevented us from seeing it around us and within us, and kept us from developing it? —VÁCLAV HAVEL”
― Todd Rose, Collective Illusions: Conformity, Complicity, and the Science of Why We Make Bad Decisions

“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any. —ALICE WALKER”
― Todd Rose, Collective Illusions: Conformity, Complicity, and the Science of Why We Make Bad Decisions

“One of their most insidious skills was to pile support behind a few human outliers. This way the extreme sentiment comes from a real American, while the bots are agreeable but just polarizing enough to tip the scales.”
― Todd Rose, Collective Illusions: Conformity, Complicity, and the Science of Why We Make Bad Decisions

“Freed from the limitations of time and space, vocal minorities thus create the false impression that they are speaking for the majority. And this strategy works. Since most of us tend to mistake repetition, confidence, and volume for generally accepted truth, loud minority statements become accepted reflections of reality, regardless of their veracity.”
― Todd Rose, Collective Illusions: Conformity, Complicity, and the Science of Why We Make Bad Decisions

“Like a glitch in our biological software, repetition has no logical connection to truth. Yet it has somehow become a trap door to our beliefs. Sadly, governments, bullies, and leaders have used this trap for generations.”
― Todd Rose, Collective Illusions: Conformity, Complicity, and the Science of Why We Make Bad Decisions

“Consider, for example, the current phenomenon of fake news. In 2018, a team of Yale researchers found that simply exposing someone on Facebook to the same piece of false information repeatedly, regardless of its credibility, increased its perceived accuracy.”
― Todd Rose, Collective Illusions: Conformity, Complicity, and the Science of Why We Make Bad Decisions

“While refusing to speak out might work to keep the peace at Thanksgiving, on a broader level it actually fosters polarization because nobody ever hears opinions that differ from their own.8 And if enough people fail to say what they really think, the behavior soon becomes a self-reinforcing, self-fulfilling modus operandi.”
― Todd Rose, Collective Illusions: Conformity, Complicity, and the Science of Why We Make Bad Decisions

“In one study of eight villages in rural Uganda, researchers found that willingness to use a net related closely to perceptions of the group consensus. Subjects who believed most people slept under a mosquito net were almost three times more likely to do so themselves than those who did not believe most people used a net. Moreover, 23 percent of subjects believed, incorrectly, that most adults in their community were not using mosquito nets each night. In all, a third of the participants in the study either misinterpreted or were unsure about the norm for mosquito net use in their community.”
― Todd Rose, Collective Illusions: Conformity, Complicity, and the Science of Why We Make Bad Decisions

“Of the 123 study subjects who were shown a succession of card pairings under the same conditions, a full two-thirds went along with the misleading majority at least once. While some people repeatedly stood by what they saw, despite pressure from the majority, the subjects knowingly gave an incorrect answer roughly 37 percent of the time.”
― Todd Rose, Collective Illusions: Conformity, Complicity, and the Science of Why We Make Bad Decisions

“In the 1960s and 1970s, a professor of sociology at Wesleyan named Hubert O’Gorman found that those who advocated for segregation were the most likely to believe that those around them also supported segregation. On the other hand, those advocating change from the status quo were much more likely to think that they were alone, even though they were not. “The closer whites came to endorsing the value of strict racial segregation,” O’Gorman observed, “the more apt they were to assume that the majority of whites in their areas agreed with them.”53 By misreading others and keeping quiet about their true views, people thus damaged their own integrity and the greater cause they privately hoped would advance.54”
― Todd Rose, Collective Illusions: Conformity, Complicity, and the Science of Why We Make Bad Decisions

“Compromising your personal integrity for the sake of belonging quietly wears away at your self-esteem and has been shown to negatively affect personal health in both the short and the long”
― Todd Rose, Collective Illusions: Conformity, Complicity, and the Science of Why We Make Bad Decisions

“This is the first risk that comes with lying about our private beliefs: if we aren’t careful, we can come to believe our own lies.”
― Todd Rose, Collective Illusions: Conformity, Complicity, and the Science of Why We Make Bad Decisions

“In 1841, the Scottish journalist Charles Mackay published a book about copying cascades titled Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. His thesis was that “men think in herds” and “go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”
― Todd Rose, Collective Illusions: Conformity, Complicity, and the Science of Why We Make Bad Decisions