Dr. Todd Rose

This idea of collective illusion goes back 100 years in research and hundreds of years just in general understanding, but they were rare.

because it just was hard to get a lot of people to self-silence and get that kind of misread of the group.

But because of social media today, they're just rampant.

I mean, they are all over the place.

And let me give you more specifics about that, which is if you take just Twitter, so we know that about 80% of all content on Twitter is generated by 10% of the users.

And it turns out that 10% isn't remotely representative of the rest of the country.

They tend to be more extreme on almost every social issue.

But you can see the problem there, right?

Like if only 10% of people hold an opinion, but you think it's 80%, then your brain will treat that as the majority.

And if you're not willing to go against that group, you'll just say nothing.

You'll self-silence, right?

And if enough of us do that, then the result's a collective illusion.

And right now in America, that's exactly what's happening.

Our research and other people's research have shown

that about two-thirds of Americans admit to self-silencing right now.

Two-thirds.

So, no wonder we have collective illusions all over the place.

Like, our self-silencing guarantees it.

Yeah, and here's what's interesting.

You know, some of them report that it's due to, like, cancel culture that gets all the attention, but it's actually a small percentage.