Dr. Todd Rose

You end up self-silencing.

You say nothing.

Or worse, you start saying what you think people want to hear so you can be part of the group.

And when enough people self-silence,

The only people left are the people on the fringes.

In fact, they almost never do.

They wouldn't have to be so loud, right?

If you knew everybody agreed with you, you don't have to say much.

But you can see how this is where then you get these societal level collective illusions because we're self-silencing.

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.