Dr. Todd Rose

And our data on this is, we have more private opinion data on the American public than any organization I'm quite certain of.

Almost two-thirds of people are admitting that they are self-silencing right now.

That means withholding things that matter to them because they think other people disagree.

Like this is a very dangerous place to be when we can't even be honest with each other.

And so the problem with that is as these illusions form, okay?

So now I'm thinking, wow, most people, like what happened?

What happened to society?

Like, am I crazy or did everybody else seem to go crazy?

And it's like you start feeling alienated from your group, isolated, a little bit resentful that you're having to self-silence.

And we see this in the data.

You start losing trust in other people.

And life gets much worse for you, but it also gets much worse for the rest of us.

Because as a result, we end up with this false polarization, right?

We feel like we're completely divided and it becomes self-fulfilling.

We lose trust in each other and we become resentful.

Yeah.

We're the first generation now as a society that has to deal with collective illusions at scale because of social media.

Like it just, you cannot trust your brain to tell you what your group thinks anymore.

You can't.

And that's a hard thing to overcome.