Most Americans report no real difference in how likely they’d be to support a female candidate over a similar male one. The difference is that more Americans think that other Americans would be less likely to support a female candidate. They believe others believe something.
That’s an example of what some researchers call “pluralistic ignorance,” and comes from Collective Illusions: Conformity, Complicity, and the Science of Why We Make Bad Decisions, a February 2022 book by Todd Rose, who leads a nonprofit polling and think tank. As the title implies he calls these examples “collective illusions,” and there are many.
Most Americans still identify as patriot; bad actors really do use bots to amplify otherwise unpopular extremist political views and we really did create a toilet paper shortage during the covid-19 pandemic. As Rose puts it: “When individuals conform to what they think the group wants, they can end up doing what nobody wants.”
This is especially true about bad, or simply incorrect, ideas we hear again and again: “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.”
Rose’s book is sharp, thoughtful and interesting. I recommend it.
Below I share my notes for future reference.
My notes:
- Richard Schanack’s PhD study of tiny New York town: most residents saw no problem playing cards at home but they believed most residents were opposed so they publicly said they were opposed too — public and private opinion gaps — when a strict old woman died, the minister played bridge publicly and everyone followed
- Author calls these collective illusions though also called “pluralistic ignorance”
- “When individuals conform to what they think the group wants, they can end up doing what nobody wants.”
- Hans Christian Anderson’s Emperor’s New Clothes (1837)
- Populace research: Most Americans would vote for a woman for president but more Americans believe she’s not electable — they believe others believe something
- fMRI research shows that when people are told more people like a certain candy they are more likely to rank it higher (2016 research)
- Thomas theorem: if people define a situation as real, it can have real circumstances (like the covid toilet paper scare)
- Copycat trap: social learning and avoidance of social embarrassment mean we will follow others mistakes or oversight
- Darley Columbia smoke experiment: 75% reported smoke when alone but only 38% when others (actors) didn’t notice
- Traffic Mimes reduced traffic fatalities in Colombia
- Wisdom of the crowds: difference between emergence when people don’t know what others say (eg Who wants to be a Millionaire ‘poll the audience’) versus when we see what others are doing (social influence)
- Bottled water got its start in 1994 when EPA issued a warning about well water
- “A single cup of bottled water takes 2,000 times as much energy to make is the same amount of tap water,” setting aside the impact on landfills.
- Jean Daurat, a 16th-century French poet, is credited with developing the modern practice of hiring “claquers,” or those paid to attend a performance and applaud
- Prestige bias is the tendency to selectively copy cultural traits (e.g. behaviours and beliefs) possessed by individuals who are highly respected and admired. Henrich and Gil-White (2001) developed the theory of prestige from evolutionary views.
- 1984 study: more people listened to fireman over businessman over homeless man about instructions to give money to a student
- The Sokal affair, also known as the Sokal hoax, was a demonstrative scholarly hoax performed by Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University and University College London. In 1996, Sokal submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal of cultural studies.
- Juanjuan Zhang MIT solution to kidney donation problem: ask people to clarify why they pass on donated kidney and that bit of info helps next in line make informed decisions
- Cyberball ostracism experiments utilize a computer game where participants are excluded from a virtual ball-tossing game to study the effects of social exclusion
- Timur Kuran: preference falsification (When disagree with your tribe, you must challenge, quit or lie)
- Thomas Gilovich: The “illusion of transparency” is a psychological phenomenon where people overestimate how much their internal states, like emotions or thoughts, are apparent to others. They tend to believe their feelings are more obvious to observers than they actually are. This can lead to misunderstandings and social anxieties.
- Marilyn Brewer and Pierce: have multiple identities to both boost happiness and to avoid us-vs-them
- Brewer and Roccas: multiple identities make us more tolerant
- When presented with information that tells us that our in group has a different opinion in our own, we adapt, which is helpful when doing something that involves our safety. But “In group social settings, the same response means that our brains treat differences of opinion as errors to be corrected. In other words, we have a subconscious drive to conform to what appears to be the consensus of the group. “
- “Just as fish have an instinct to swim toward the center of their schools to avoid being picked off by predators, we stick close to the majority in order to hedge our bets on survival”
- Noelle Nuemann “bandwagon effect”, first used to describe German politics (also coined “spiral of silence” )
- “Our willingness to self silence is quite often a response, not to the actual majority, but rather to a vocal minority that convinces us it is the majority.”
- Mark Fisher: “the vampire castle” “open savagery” of cancel culture
- Juan Morales. Twitter bots that fake support got a politician or policy to shape opinion — limiting criticism ; almost 1 in 5 interactions on social media is a bot
- Gregory Berns replicated Asch’s line experiment under fMR : some participants actively saw different line lengths when followed experiment confederates
- Chimps and orangutans can handle tools better than toddlers but toddlers recognize emotions better
- Rene Girard: mimetic desires
- Autokinetic effect with light
- 11 megabytes of information per second from eyes but “upload” only 60 bits per second to process
- Norms have three categories: “coordination” (like traffic); “allegiance” (vulgar language or attire); and “I’m not an asshole” norms like line queuing
- “Almost all great art scrutinizes norms and wakes the audience to new modes of perception”
- Repetition bias: “the more often we see something, the faster our brains tend to process and accept it as truth”
- 2018 Yale researchers: we believed repeated false claims heard repeatedly — even when debunked
- Wittgenstein: buying a second newspaper to see if the first one was right — relying on repeated information
- “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.”
- Clemson researchers Patrick Warren and Darren Linvill: bots sway our elections and corrode our relationships by amplifying a few extremists. Most bad actors on social media are real, they found, but then amplified by the trolls to users already sympathetic.
- Linvill : “People are persuaded by things they’re already inclined to believe, not by someone yelling at you. The trolls were trying to be your friends, not your enemies.”
- As the US Senate select committee on intelligence wrote, the Russian trolls intend to “stoke anger, provoke outrage and protest, push Americans further away from one another, and foment distrust in government institutions .”
- The Friendship Paradox describes the phenomenon where, on average, your friends have more friends than you do.
- UCLA psychologists: until 2007, shows reinforced family and community values, then American idol and Hannah Montana proliferated (fame and celebrity!)
- “One generation’s collective illusion becomes the next generation’s private opinion.”
- Alice Walker: “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”
- n Carl Rogers’ humanistic psychology, incongruence refers to a state where a person’s self-concept (how they see themselves) doesn’t align with their actual experiences. This discrepancy between the real self and the ideal self can lead to psychological distress, anxiety, and a lack of self-actualization. Rogers believed that individuals strive for congruence, a state of harmony between their self-concept and their lived experiences.
- Authors research: “The only way to really succeed in life is by being true to yourself”
- Populace: spend 20% more time on what we find rewarding (gardening, etc), and its life satisfaction boost the same as up to a 50% pay raise
- Truth telling at home coin flipping experiment: we’re honest!
- Congruent: sincerity and authenticity
- In Confucianism, “cheng” (?) primarily signifies sincerity, truthfulness, and genuineness. I
- (Philadelphian) Frederick Winslow Taylor’s scientific management shaped oversight (A Penn guy but it was Harvard Business Review that grew out of his practice)
- Alex Tabarrok of George Mason shows economic impact of Taylorism
- 2019 Science: people returned wallets with a key and $100 even more than one with $13, but surveys assumed the opposite — we think less of others (David Tannenbaum)
- Paul Zak’s research, often cited in the field of neuroeconomics, has explored the role of oxytocin, a hormone sometimes called the “molecule of connection” or “trust hormone”, in promoting trust and social behavior.
- Havel’s greengrocer
- The Velvet Revolution (Czechoslovakia in 1989) happened nonviolently because it was a collective illusion
- Success with community action on Vietnam malnutrition and then female genital mutation
- Positive deviance: what small successes deviate from the behavior you want to change