In January 2021, in the turbulent wake of the last presidential contest, a former professor named Todd Rose asked some 2,000 people a question. The survey was, at least on the surface, designed to deduce what kind of country Americans would like future generations to inherit.
Each person was presented with 55 separate goal statements for the nation—“People have individual rights” was one; “People have high-quality health care” was another—and asked to rank them in order of importance. Each person was also asked how each goal would be ranked by “other people.”
When the results were tallied, the surprise was not that “People have individual rights” came in first, or that “People have high-quality health care” finished second. The surprise was the third highest priority: “Successfully address climate change.” We know that’s a surprise because, on the list of what “other people” considered important, climate came in 33rd. In other words, no one thought their fellow Americans saw climate as the high-priority item nearly everyone actually considered it to be.
That gap—between what we ourselves think and what we reckon others must be thinking—may hold the power to upend a great deal of what we believe we know about American civic life.
“People are lousy at figuring out what the group thinks,” Rose says. This collective blind spot is a quirk he would underline to students when he was teaching the neuroscience of learning at Harvard. At Populace, the think tank he co-founded to put such knowledge to practical use, the foible plays a prominent role in efforts to undo what Rose calls the “shared illusion” that Americans are hopelessly divided.
And divided we certainly think we are. The only thing Americans seem to
