Name anything that's important in society right now and it's a coin toss, whether it's an illusion.

Hello and welcome to the Psychology Podcast.

Today is part two of my two-part series with Todd Rose.

Todd is the co-founder and president of Populous, a non-profit think tank that works to find solutions to redistribute opportunity

so all people have the chance to live fulfilling lives in a thriving society.

Prior to Populous, Todd was a faculty member at Harvard University where he founded the Laboratory for the Science of Individuality

and he directed the Mind Brain in Education program.

Todd is the best-selling author of Dark Horse and the End of Average and his most recent book, which is the topic of this second part for the podcast, is called Collective Illusions.

For this part of the interview, I talked to Todd Rose about this notion of collective illusions.

Humans are a tribal species, prone to conformity, and in a lot of instances we act according to what are in group once rather than what we want as individuals.

Ironically, Todd's research shows that we make poor inferences about the majority consensus and that failing to recognize collective illusions can have negative consequences on our identities, relationships, values, and society.

To avoid falling into conformity traps, Todd encourages us to live congruent, private, and public lives that adhere to our personal convictions.

I absolutely love this episode, love this chat with Todd, just as much as I like Part 1, which was about intelligence.

I really like this notion of congruency, which is a topic that the humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers talked about a lot.

And as you all know, I'm a humanistic psychologist, so this really tickled my humanistic psychology side.

So without further ado, I bring you Todd Rose.

Hey Todd, I wanted to talk to you about your new book, Collective Illusions, as well.

I know we have this amazing chat about intelligence, but I really want to cover this new idea. Why do you decide to write this book?

You know, look, it's interesting.

You know, at my think tank populist, we do a lot of what's called private opinion research, right, getting around effects of social distortion, try to get at what people really think.

And, you know, I had known about this phenomenon, which we call collective illusions, historically has been called things like Pluristic ignorance, the illusion of universality, things like this.

And because we'd known about it, we started asking people not only what they thought about certain issues, but what they thought most people thought.

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