I Believe That You Believe: How imagined realities become real consequences.

28 May 2026

Dr. Leandro Herrero:

We do not see the world as it is. We see it through the beliefs we carry, many of them inherited from those around us. Sometimes these beliefs heal, sometimes they harm, but they almost always shape what becomes possible.

One of the most fascinating books I’ve come across is Helen Pilcher’s This Book May Cause Side Effects (2026). The title itself contains the punchline.

The book explores the nocebo effect, the darker sibling of the placebo effect. If placebos demonstrate our astonishing capacity to heal ourselves through expectation, nocebos demonstrate our equally astonishing capacity to make ourselves worse.

Patients can develop nausea before chemotherapy has even started. Their bodies are already responding to an anticipated future. In another experiment quoted in the book, researchers manipulated wall clocks without participants knowing. Individuals with diabetes or pre-diabetes showed physiological responses (glucose levels) that corresponded not to actual elapsed time but to perceived elapsed time. Their bodies reacted to the story their minds were telling.

We tend to imagine ourselves as rational creatures responding to objective reality. The evidence suggests something rather more complicated. Human beings respond not only to reality itself but to what they believe reality to be.

This should make us pause. Because once we move beyond the individual and into society, the consequences become even more striking.

WHAT IF EVERYBODY IS WRONG?

One of the most powerful social phenomena is something psychologists call pluralistic ignorance. It describes situations where almost nobody privately believes something, yet everybody behaves as if everybody else does.

A remarkable illustration appears in Molly Melching’s account of the work of Tostan in Senegal. It’s all recounted in the beautiful book ‘However Long the Night’, by Aimee Molly (2013). Communities were examining the practice of female genital mutilation (FGM) long assumed by many to be both necessary and religiously required. What proved transformative was not simply education about health risks, which NGOs and others had been doing for a while. The turning point came when mums and girls began asking a different question: “What are neighbouring villages doing?”

For years, many families had assumed that abandoning the practice would make daughters unmarriageable or socially unacceptable. Each family believed that all the other families remained committed. But once it became visible that others were questioning the practice too, the entire landscape shifted.

People were not merely responding to facts. They were responding to what they believed other people believed. The change spread socially. A hidden consensus emerged from beneath a visible conformity.

(In an ‘hilarious’ moment of the story, women challenged their elders. ‘We thought you wanted that, but how could you…?’ To which the elders said, ‘Well, you never asked what we thought’).

René Girard (‘mimetic desire’) might have recognised the pattern. So might any student of social contagion. Human beings are imitators before they are analysts. We constantly scan the social environment for cues about what is normal, acceptable and possible. I have dedicated a whole book to this, when applied to organizations (‘Homo Imitans’, 2011). We are homo sapiens but with an incredibly sophisticated capacity for imitation, which I did develop in the book as a continuation of Viral Change™ (2006).

The question is often less “What do I think?” than “What are people like me thinking?”

The Most Dangerous Sentences In Organizations

Organizations are full of their own versions of belief systems, often explicit but other times assumed in silence.

“We’ve tried that before.”
“This place will never change.”
“We’re too big.”
“We’re not ready.”
“It would take years.”
“Not here.”

These statements often masquerade as observations. In reality, they are beliefs. More importantly, they are frequently beliefs that nobody has properly examined.

Some become organizational folklore, repeated so often that they acquire the status of facts. New employees inherit them. Leaders accommodate them. Entire strategies are quietly adjusted around them. And then something extraordinary happens.

The belief begins to manufacture the evidence required to justify itself.

If people believe change is impossible, they invest less effort. If they invest less effort, results diminish. Poor results then become proof that change was impossible all along. The prophecy fulfils itself. The nocebo effect has entered organizational life. The poison is not in the circumstance itself. The poison lies in the expectation attached to it.

This is why cultural transformation is rarely blocked by lack of information. More often it is blocked by unexamined assumptions about what can and cannot happen.

The challenge is not simply to communicate a new vision. It is to expose the invisible beliefs through which people are interpreting that vision.

Learning To See The Lens

The most important beliefs are often the ones we no longer notice possessing. They become lenses rather than opinions. We stop looking at them and start looking through them. The consequence is that we mistake interpretation for reality.

Whether at the level of physiology, society or organizations, the pattern remains surprisingly consistent. We react not only to the world as it is but to the world as we imagine it to be.

And much of that imagination is social.

We absorb assumptions from those around us. We inherit expectations. We imitate interpretations. For communicators, leaders and anyone interested in change, this may be the most important question of all: What beliefs are shaping behaviour without ever being discussed?

Because the future is influenced not only by what people know. It is profoundly shaped by what they believe everybody else knows, believes and expects.

And those beliefs can become either medicine or poison.

Our-selves are plastic. The body responds to anticipated reality (nocebo). Communities respond to anticipated social expectations (pluralistic ignorance). Organizations respond to anticipated organizational constraints (“not here”, “we’re not ready”, “it will take years”).

I believe.

1. A simple exercise we do in our Viral Change™ programmes is to unveil well upfront the ‘preconceived ideas’ brought to the team effort. We often find reactions such as ‘I thought I was the only one thinking like that, so I did not say anything, but, since you ask…’

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Dr Leandro Herrero is Chief Organizational Architect at The Chalfont Project, psychiatrist, author, and international speaker. For over 25 years, he and his team have transformed organizational cultures worldwide through his pioneering Viral Change™ methodology – where a social movement approach creates lasting change. Follow Dr Herrero on LinkedIn for his latest updates.