Collective Illusions: Conformity, Complicity, and the Science of Why We Make Bad Decisions

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…

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…

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…

Simply put, collective illusions are social lies. They occur in situations where a majority of individuals in a group privately reject a particular opinion, but they go along with it because they (incorrectly) assume that most other people accept it. When individuals conform to what they think the group wants, they can…

“Is it okay to play games with face cards?” (a prohibition originating from a Puritan hatred of British royalty and its dirty penchant for gambling).