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Take, for example, the issue of gender representation in politics. Despite the fact that they comprise more than half of our nation’s population, women are profoundly underrepresented in American politics. And the easy answer—sexism—only partially explains the problem. Indeed, private opinion research conducted by Populace found that 79 percent of respondents agreed with the statement “A woman is equally capable as a man of being a good president of the United States.” Moreover, when they get to a general election—whether at the local, state, or national level—women actually win at the same rate as men.
But the moment you ask, “Is a woman as electable as a man?” everything changes. Because, at the most fundamental level, electability is about what you think other people think, not which candidate you believe is the most capable. For instance, the political scientist Regina Bateson found that most people didn’t personally care about a candidate’s gender. However, once they learned that a competing candidate with the same qualifications was a white male, they overwhelmingly deemed him the most electable.
Given the structure of our winner-take-all politics, voters regularly play “who-can-win” games that highlight our societal biases. So they think, “I’m not sexist, but other people are, so I’m going to vote for the white man because I want my party to win.” This is exactly the problem with collective illusions. You may, in fact, be the least sexist person on the planet, but nevertheless your misreading of other people may lead you to become part of the problem without realizing it.
This problem isn’t just hypothetical: we actually saw it play out in the 2020 presidential election. In a poll conducted prior to the Democratic convention, Avalanche Insights asked Democratic voters whom they would choose if the election were held that day. They responded (1) Joe Biden, (2) Bernie Sanders, and (3) Elizabeth Warren. However, when asked whom they would choose if they could just wave a magic wand and that person would automatically become president, respondents selected Elizabeth Warren as the winner, hands down.
Bateson calls this phenomenon “strategic discrimination.” As she explains, the problem here “is not animus toward the candidate. In contrast to direct bias, strategic discrimination is motivated by the belief that a candidate’s identity will cause other people not to donate, volunteer, or vote for him or her.” Thus, “Americans consider white male candidates more electable than equally qualified Black women and white women and, to a lesser extent, Black men.”

Unfortunately, stereotypes tend to become supersized by collective illusions. Thus, in China, people perceive other Chinese people as holding more negative views of Japanese people than they actually do, driving them to express a more anti-Japanese public attitude. In Japan, most men want to take paternity leave, but they believe most other men in their country do not. As a result, those who want to take paternity leave are significantly less likely to do so. In California, both Democrats and Republicans assume the other side holds more extreme views than they actually do, creating a self-fulfilling misperception of political polarization. Most American student athletes have positive views about academic achievement, but their notion that most other student-athletes do not drives them to act like they don’t care about grades, damaging their own academic performance and reinforcing a collective illusion.

The most famous illustration of a collective illusion is Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” published in 1837. You know the story: two con men convince a vain emperor that they are weaving fine clothes for him. They claim that the clothes are exceptionally beautiful but visible only to intelligent people. Of course no one wants to be seen as stupid, so everyone goes along with the con, even though the clothes don’t actually exist. As the emperor parades through town, proud and nearly buck naked, the spell breaks when a small boy speaks up, outing the truth.