Hello, friends. Welcome back to the show.
My guest today is Dr.
Jamil Zaki. He's a psychologist, professor at Stanford University, and an author.
In a world filled with fake news, bad news, and doom, it's easy to become cynical.
But what does science say about whether cynicism helps or harms us?
Why is it so seductive?
And how can we all learn to become a bit more hopeful?
Expect to learn why people are so tempted by cynicism, how skepticism is different, if cynical people are more or less happy, healthy, intelligent, or successful, whether there is a reason to feel more hopeful, the role of optimism in your life, how to cultivate more positivity, and much more.
Perhaps, unsurprisingly, I'm a massive fan of this.
I want to make enthusiasm great again as I try and detox myself of negativity.
And Dr. Zaki not only shares my desire to make people a bit more positive, but he actually knows some science too.
So an awful lot to take away from today.
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But now ladies and gentlemen please welcome Dr.
Jamil Zaki. Why do people tend towards cynicism?
Why is it so alluring?
Well it's a great question.
Maybe let's define cynicism first just so we have our terms straight the way that psychologists like me refer to cynicism is different than the ancient Greek school of philosophy led by antisthenes and diogenes.
We can talk about that all you want in a moment but as psychology now defines cynicism it's a theory about people, the idea that in general people are selfish, greedy, and dishonest and therefore we might not want to trust them.
Now why do we tend towards thinking this way to your question?
I think that this is actually a pretty ancient bias in the way that our minds work something that researchers call negativity bias.
So it turns out that our minds are built such that we pay much more attention to harmful or threatening information than to the good stuff.
So we pay more visual attention to threats than to positive information.
We remember negative events more than positive ones and we make decisions more based on what we'd like not to lose than what we would like to gain.
And you can see how this bias might be there for a reason.
It might have helped us survive maybe 200 ,000 years ago a person who was worried about a predator on the horizon might do better than their friend who was blissed out by the sunset on the opposite horizon.
So a useful bias in some ways but one that I think has gotten us in a lot of trouble in our modern context.
Draw the line between negativity bias and cynicism.
Is cynicism simply negativity interpersonally at work at scale?
I think that cynicism is what happens when you turn negativity bias into an entire world view.
When you allow it not only to color the information that you're taking in but your expectations of the future as well.
So I teach a class of about 500 students every year and at the end of the course I get all these different pieces of feedback reviews of the class and usually around 480 of them are positive.
But of course three nights later I'm trying to fall asleep and I'm only remembering two or three most negative reviews that I've received.
And again that's simple negativity bias.
If I were to then transform that into a view of undergraduate students or people in my class and say, kids these days they're not respectful, they don't like their teachers, they don't want to learn, that would be turning negativity bias into cynicism.
Not just taking in information asymmetrically focusing on the negative but really almost elevating that into a philosophy.
Right, so as opposed to just absorbing it you're then projecting it, you're using it to predict the future too.
Exactly, that's exactly right.
Okay, what is the sort of behavior of cynics?
What are the things that they think about the world and people and how do they show up?
There's a bunch of ways that cynicism leaks out into our behavior.
Number one is an unwillingness to trust.
Trust is any decision where we put our own well -being in the hands of somebody else, we loan somebody money, we confide in a friend, we leave our kids with a babysitter.
All of these are instances in which we make a decision on the expectation that somebody else has our best interests in mind and will honor their commitments.
It's a bet. All of social life is a series of bets and cynics think that those bets are for suckers, that if you put your well -being in somebody else's hands they will inevitably betray you.
So you see cynics being much less willing to trust in all sorts of settings, much less willing to trust strangers, to trust public figures, but also to even trust their friends and families.
A second way that cynicism leaks out into our behavior is not what we don't do but what we do.
I call this preemptive strikes.
So it turns out if you imagine that everybody around you is on the take, the only way for you to truly be safe is to go on the attack first before somebody else will betray you.
So cynics for instance are more likely to spy on people, to threaten them, or to act selfishly themselves because they imagine that's what others will do if given the chance.
So a lot of it to me seems to be a kind of protection strategy against being hurt from the world, this retreat from any kind of openness, any sort of faith, any kind of vulnerability as well.
This is really beautifully put and the comedian George Carlin once said, if you scratch a cynic you'll find a disappointed idealist.
And this is where I really want to be clear that I'm not trying to judge or condemn cynics at all.
I myself tend towards cynicism even though I study it.
But I think a lot of times when people lose faith in others, it's not because they want to have contempt, it's not because they're sneering and mean, it's because they've been hurt and they don't want to be hurt again.
It's an absolutely human response, a craving for safety.
The problem is that when we shut ourselves off from the world, we might be safe from betrayals in the short term, but in the long term we lose so much of what makes life fulfilling and beautiful, chances for connection, friendship, collaboration.
And over time that doesn't keep us safe.
It slowly withers us.
I came up with an idea about cynicism a little while ago, so I wanted to teach you it today.
It seems like you're the other guy to tell this to.
So I came up with an idea called the Cynicism Safety Blanket.
Cynicism is a guarded response.
You're setting yourself up against disappointment.
Its role within the system is to protect you against experiencing anything bad.
It is a preemptive strike against a perceived threat.
If I tell myself that all women are bad, then I'm less likely to seek a relationship with women and as a consequence, I'm never going to feel the pain of rejection.
If I tell myself that everything is shit or that things will never get better, I am excused of ever having to try at anything.
It's more comfortable to get fatalistic and call it pragmatism.
The cope is framing hope as pathetic and embarrassing and optimism as delusion.
It's sour grapes at an existential level.
If everything sucks and everyone is horrible and reality is disappointing and you know that for a fact, it's the people acting like things can be better that are dumb and delusional and the problem.
The upside of never having to try is never having to feel the pain of failure.
Wow. That's beautiful.
It's like a prose poem.
It summarizes so much of what I've been working on over these past few years, really succinctly and powerfully.
I think you're right.
Good job, first of all.
Hooray, bro science for the win.
I think that cynicism is an attempt at safety.
In the book, I write about it as playing poker by folding every hand immediately without even looking at your cards because you don't want to lose and you're assured of never losing in any big way if you do that.
But of course in a game of poker, if you fold every hand, you will slowly lose everything and that's a true.
It might not have those high profile betrayals.
When you trust, when you go out on a limb and somebody snaps it behind you, you feel that you remember it for the rest of your life and the people around you see it as well.
You look like a sucker.
You're embarrassed in front of all your friends and family.
When you retreat, when you have that sour grapes at an existential level and decide to just never play along at all to just treat everything with contempt, you won't fail as publicly and maybe that's safety.
But over time, again, you will lose out on basically what I think most people want out of life.
You see this in that cynics over time become more depressed and lonely.
They become physically less healthier.
Cynics are more likely to suffer from heart disease and they die younger.
There are all of these major prospective studies of cohorts of tens of thousands of people that measure people's cynicism and then follow them for years, decades to see how long they live.
Cynics tend to live less long.
They die of all -cause mortality earlier than non -cynics.
This is a type of safety that actually is immensely dangerous in the long term, not just to what we care about, but to life itself.
Yeah. I think the worldview of the cynic is the only thing worse than failure is naivety.
If I can assure myself of failure on my terms, I never have to face naivety and failure on their terms.
That's right. One of the things that surprised me most in doing research for this project, which is known as the cynical genius illusion.
As you're saying, I think a lot of us believe that the opposite of cynicism is naivety.
That the only option if you don't want to be cynical is to be a little bit dim.
Innocently trusting.
Yeah. Exactly. To be gullible, actually.
Unworldly. Yeah. Yeah.
To put faith in people without them deserving it.
It turns out that not just cynics feel this way, most people do.
There's a bunch of studies where people were presented with an example of one cynical person and one non -cynical person, and they were asked, who do you think would be better at a variety of tasks?
70 % of people believed that cynics would do better on cognitive tasks, that they're smarter than non -cynics.
85 % of people believed that cynics would be socially smarter.
For instance, better able to tell who's lying and who's telling the truth compared to a non -cynic.
So in other words, most people put their faith in people who don't have faith in people.
But if you can say that three times fast, we trust, we believe that cynics are smart, but we're wrong.
The data are really clear.
Cynics do less well on cognitive tests than non -cynics, and they are worse at spotting liars than non -cynics.
Now, why would that be?
It turns out that cynicism is not the opposite of naivete.
It's a version of naivete.
A gullible person unthinkingly trusts everybody.
A cynical person unthinkingly trusts no one, but neither one of them is evaluating the evidence from each person in each situation as it comes in.
That blanket assumption on either side means that we kind of stop processing information.
We think we already know what's going to happen, and so we don't learn.
That's so interesting.
A couple of things on that.
I remember learning that under the influence of alcohol, people are worse liars, perhaps unsurprising, because we can hold fewer thoughts in our mind at one time.
But under the influence of alcohol, we are better liar detectors.
So we get out of our own way, and this is one of the, it's called the beer before bread hypothesis for how human coalitions and social structures came together, that we came together to grow wheat or whatever the fuck you meant.
What do you make? Barley?
What does beer come from?
Barley, yeah. That's right.
Barley, hops, yeah.
Hops and barley, whatever it is.
We came together to grow that.
Not because we were going to make bread, but because it helped to foster group cohesion by making it harder for you to lie to me and easier for me to detect you're lying.
So that's the first thing.
Second thing is, does this sense, this interpretation, this bias that we have that somebody who is cynical is more sophisticated.
Oh, well, to arrive at this highly scrutinist, very sort of informed, appearing to be informed position, this person must have done that research.
But cynicism is not a signifier of intellect.
It's a replacement for it.
It's someone who is getting out of the way.
They're not having to do the thinking.
They're choosing to use cynicism as a replacement for thinking.
Gwinda Bogle says, being a black sheep is still being a sheep.
That's brilliant. And I think you're right that cynics can appear to be thoughtful without actually being thoughtful.
The black sheep, as you said, I think the problem, or one of the problems here is that we let them get away with it.
Because through this cynical genius illusion, we glamorize the cynic as a wizened sort of person who's been around the block and has this gimless sophistication.
Yes, exactly. They can see right through all the bullshit, but in fact, they can't.
But in acting as though they can, I think we encourage more cynicism by treating it like a form of wisdom when it's actually quite the opposite of wisdom.
So part of my mission now is to defrock cynicism and take away some of its shine in our cultural landscape.
I think that would be very worthwhile.
I spent a lot of time thinking about how social groups react to news stories and especially content on the internet.
And almost nobody has ever lauded for saying something nice.
The top comment on a YouTube video is very rarely something nice about the video.
It's always some really sort of cutting jibe that's trying to be back and forth about something that somebody said or their understanding.
Or they got confused about this thing.
You actually meant to say such and such and instead you said this.
And you think, well, why is that the most upvoted thing?
Well, it's because it sounds sophisticated.
It sounds like somebody has done the work to be able to go through and come up with a worldview that's very critical.
But yeah, I would make enthusiasm great again.
I'm down for that. So when it comes to actually working out whether or not someone is cynical, is there a cynical checklist, a framework?
How do you work out on the scale of cynicism grading?
There is. So there's a questionnaire that was developed by two psychologists in the 1950s, Donald Cook and Walter Medley.
And they were trying to figure out who would be good teachers.
Started out as a test for teacher rapport with students.
And so they would ask teachers things like, do you agree or disagree with these statements?
Here, you can try it out yourself if you want.
Here's one statement.
Most people are honest chiefly for fear of getting caught.
Do you think that's true or untrue?
Untrue. Yeah. People generally don't like helping one another.
Untrue. Most people don't really care what happens to you.
True. Okay. So you would score here, you would score one out of three, but they would score people on 50 items instead.
And the more items that you agreed with, the more that they figured these teachers won't have rapport with students.
But it turned out that it wasn't just teachers that this measured, that you could give this test to any type of person in any profession and get a kind of all -purpose cynicism detector, right?
You could get a cynicism level for almost anybody.
And so we use that test now.
We still do. And that's what relates to, for instance, heart disease, depression, loneliness, alcohol abuse, and early mortality.
The more items in that questionnaire that you agree with, the worse off that you tend to be health -wise.
That's wild. So these people are less happy, more depressed, less smart, more likely to be alcoholics.
What else? They live less long lives.
What else is in there?
I'm sorry. And again, I do want to express solidarity and compassion for the cynics who are listening.
I myself, again, I just want to be really clear, I struggle a lot with cynicism.
So I'm not talking about them, I'm talking about us.
I think we all have cynical moments, and in my case, cynical years.
But - They're listening to this podcast at best they are a cynic in rehabilitation.
Yes, which is how I identify myself as well.
So I'm afraid there's more bad news here, which is that cynics also do more poorly professionally.
Over the course of their careers, they earn less money.
And there was a fascinating study that came out just last year that found that cynics at work, they want to be leaders just as much as anybody else, but they have a very idiosyncratic view of how to do that.
They believe that in order to lead, you need to, in essence, take advantage of other people lest you be taken advantage of.
And so people who are disagreeable and cynical in the workplace are bruisers, right?
They attempt to step over or on other people.
They try to exert a dominant collegial style.
But it turns out that doesn't work very well, because in organizations, the actual way to rise to the top is, yes, to be dominant when you need to, but also to be coalitional, to build teams and relationships that are based on trust and generosity and collaboration and cynics by depriving themselves of those
opportunities by not wanting to be vulnerable or trusting actually end up less likely to rise to leadership positions in their organizations.
So you can add to this laundry list of cynicism downsides, some professional stuff as well.
They're going to be poorer also.
What was that story about?
Was it the Boston Fire Department?
Yeah, that's right.
So cynical leaders also, of course, run their organizations into the ground in a variety of ways, which is bad news not just for them, but for their employees.
In Boston, my hometown of Boston, around the turn of the century, there was a new fire chief who took over the entire city's fire department.
And one of the first things he did was audit his workforce.
And he discovered that firefighters were taking more sick days on Mondays and especially on Fridays than on any other day of the week.
And he said, these folks are cheating the system, they're malingering, and they're not going to get away with it on my watch.
Now, I should say that before this time, firefighters could take unlimited sick days.
And that was a nod to how dangerous and honorable their profession was.
I mean, the idea is, if you've just been fighting a fire and inhaling smoke and you need to take the day off, just go ahead.
No questions asked.
But this new chief decided to upend that.
He said, starting, I think it was around Christmas of 2001, firefighters would be capped at 15 sick days per year.
If you took more than that, without a doctor's note, your pay would be docked.
And if you were injured in the light of duty, you had to go before a doctor to prove that you couldn't work or else you would have to be on desk duty.
I mean, basically he treated all of his people as though they were cheaters.
He expressed a broad cynicism as his leadership style.
Now, was it true that some firefighters might have been taking long weekends on the company dime?
Probably. But how many was that?
5%, 3%, 1 %? But he was treating 100 % of his staff as though they were cheaters.
So the policy was rolled out, as I said, right around Christmas time, very festive.
And the following year, the number of sick days taken by the entire tens of millions of dollars, the number of firefighters who took exactly 15 sick days multiplied by 10 times.
And it wasn't just that people were taking more sick days.
It was that they felt their relationships were broken.
These were people risking their lives for their communities and their bosses treating them like selfish cheaters.
And so in essence, they decided, well, if you're not giving me a chance to be who I want to be, I might as well become the selfish person you think I am.
So here we see an example of cynicism not just hurting the cynic themselves, but turning into a self -fulfilling prophecy that brings out the worst in other people.
Yeah, I'm fascinated about the social psychology of contagiousness of cynicism.
I remember reading a study a while ago about what happens when you bring low performers into high -performing teams.
And I think it was maybe teams of six, and they wanted to see if three versus three brought three up, or if four versus two or five versus one, and one malingerer, one sort of workplace malingerer in a group of six was enough to bring down the productivity of the entire group, because everybody defaulted
to the lower end, it's sort of one bad apple spoils the lot.
And it kind of seems that cynicism creates this weird mirroring.
What's going on? What's the dynamic that's at play with this sort of group cynicism?
This is a really good insight.
It's highly contagious, cynical thinking is, because if you are part of a group and somebody in that group is expressing, hey, you know, people here can't be trusted.
This is not a safe environment to be vulnerable.
Well, everyone else in the group is like, oh, shit, I better not go out on a limb here.
So you see this in all sorts of group settings.
One is that when you have groups in teams, in organizations, it's exactly the same as you say with performance.
If you have people who act in an untrustworthy manner, then in essence, all of the other people on the team will lower their trust, not just of the person who's being untrustworthy, but of everybody else.
Here's another problem.
I'm sorry that I'm giving you all these problems.
I swear we will get to you.
That's fine. We'll fix it.
There'll be white pills on the back end.
It's okay. Don't worry.
We are going to fix this.
But one of the issues is that we also gossip asymmetrically.
So you were talking about how YouTube comments that are more negative tend to rise to the top.
Well, so does negative conversation in our everyday networks.
In my lab, we had people play a game in groups of four.
This is a game where they each start out with some money.
They could either contribute that money to a common fund that would be doubled and split across the group or keep all their money for themselves.
You can see that contributing is the cooperative thing to do, but you can always cheat if you want to and basically play everybody else in your group.
So the vast majority of people in this game did not cheat.
They cooperated. But we then gave them a chance to say, well, do you want to gossip?
Write a note about one of the people in your group and send it on to a future group that's going to play.
And people did this and they were three times more likely to gossip about a person who had cheated than somebody who had cooperated.
So if you were in a group where three people cooperate and one person cheats, those three people who cooperated are all talking about the cheater, which makes it look as though the entire group is full of cheaters.
So because negative information proliferates so quickly, we end up with an outsized view of how untrustworthy and selfish the people in our group are, which is part of why cynicism is so contagious.
When people kind of spoil the well, they poison the well with negative information, people are quite ready to run away from any form of trust.
Yeah, in the same way that we have a negativity bias when looking at the salience of information, it seems like we have a cynicism bias when looking at the salience of gossip or the intrigue of gossip, I suppose.
It's kind of painting this picture that trust is very fragile.
It's kind of gossamer thin in many ways.
Is that the right way to look at it?
I think it is, which is sad because it's so necessary for our world to work smoothly at every level from one -on -one romantic relationships to national economies.
But it is. It's fragile.
As the phrase goes, and I think there's a reason for this, trust takes years to earn and seconds to lose.
There's something in economics known as betrayal aversion that people will make pretty irrational decisions, very risk averse decisions, even when, in essence, gambling on another person is positively skewed.
So you stand to win much more than you stand to lose.
If that gamble is a social one where you could be betrayed, people are much less willing to take those chances.
So I think that betrayal is extremely powerful.
Trust is relatively fragile.
And that's why we're sort of swimming upstream when we try to fight against cynicism.
Do you know if cynicism crosses all domains?
So if somebody happens to be cynical in the world of politics, are they cynical in the world of relationships?
And their workplace has a degree of cynicism in it, so it means that they're the same when they consider sports?
Cynicism can be measured as a trait.
So you can say, like the questionnaire that I walked you through, there are some people who are more globally cynical than others.
But we can also be cynical in a domain -specific way.
If you work in an organization where people really take advantage of one another and are constantly in competition, you'll be quite cynical there.
But if you come home and you live in a really generous and interconnected neighborhood where people watch out for one another, you can shed your cynicism at the door.
That would be the only way it would work.
It would have to be adaptive in that way, or else we mentioned before this cynical genius illusion, basically that people are pattern matching incorrectly.
But the cynic thinks that they're smarter and isn't, and other people think that they're smarter and they're not.
But that's actually, as you said, they're inaccurate.
A lot of their decisions about the world in terms of detecting liars are inaccurate.
So I suppose that this ability to, at least for some people, at least some of the time in some situations, compartmentalize their cynicism helps to reduce the sort of infection and spread within your own life.
That's right. And I would say that when we manage to compartmentalize cynicism enough, it's no longer cynicism.
It actually turns into a much wiser, more productive strategy, which I would call skepticism.
Skepticism is where we don't have a single blanket assumption, a security blanket, I suppose, assumption that people are great or that they're terrible, but rather we think not like lawyers, where we're arguing for or against humanity.
We think like scientists.
We take each situation as its own experiment and come up with new rules for how we engage in each environment that we encounter.
Skepticism is the truly wise philosophy, in my opinion, when compared to either cynicism or gullibility.
I think a lot of people, as you often do with lexical games, as soon as you say, well, you don't want to be cynical.
You want to be skeptical.
And I'm not, I'm not cynical.
I am just skeptical.
And you go, well, your skepticism looks an awful lot like cynicism to me.
Exactly. And I think that this is why it's so difficult to practice good skepticism, because oftentimes we want to say that that's what we're doing.
But again, we take the easy way out.
And the easy way out in this case is to appear to be thoughtful without being thoughtful.
It's a lot of work to evaluate every situation and every person as you encounter them.
Sometimes we need blanket assumptions, right?
I mean, so for instance, I have a blanket assumption.
If I'm playing poker, I think the person across the table from me is trying to take my money.
I don't need to evaluate each poker player I play against in order to mistrust them while we're at the table.
I might trust them a lot when we're not, but I take that type of situation as something that I can rightly stereotype as one where I don't want to have a lot of trust.
Being with my family is the opposite.
I know I don't have to evaluate my mother or wife every time I see them.
I know that I can trust them, right?
So there are ways to simplify, but it's a lot of work, especially when we're encountering new people in new situations to be skeptical.
But that work is incredibly worthwhile because it's the way that we actually learn and adapt and achieve wisdom.
Yeah. So what's happening with cynicism levels across time?
Have you done any longitudinal analysis of whether or not humanity is getting more or less cynical?
It's a great question.
And there's really good data from the US, good in that it's high quality data, not good in that the news is good because cynicism has been on the rise for at least 50 years here in the US.
So in 1972, about half of Americans believed most people can be trusted.
And by 2018, that had fallen to about a third of Americans.
That drop is as big as the stock market took in the financial collapse of 2008.
So we are living in a real trust recession.
And it's not just in the US.
There was a survey recently of 28 countries around the world.
And the researchers in this survey found that in 24 of those 28 countries, most people said their default was to not trust others.
So there really is a growing bias against trust and towards cynicism that appears to be occurring in many places around the world.
What do you attribute that to?
It's hard to know because history is not an experiment, right?
You can't run it a thousand times and tinker and establish causality.
So anything that I say here is speculation, but there are two things that I think at least bear some attention.
The first is inequality.
It turns out that both places and times that are more economically unequal tend to be less trusting.
So if you live in a town or county or a nation that is highly unequal, you tend to trust less.
And that's not just if you're poor.
If you're poor in a highly unequal area, you might have reason to mistrust.
But even if you're wealthy in a very unequal versus a more egalitarian area, you're less trusting.
Now, why is that? Well, high levels of inequality tend to put people in a zero -sum mindset where there's not enough to go around.
So anything you gain, I lose.
So that's one thing that we look to, one big social parameter that might track cynicism.
And then the second is just media saturation.
We have this ancient negativity bias, but of course all throughout our lives, that ancient bias has been combined with a hyper -modern ecosystem that just feeds us in constant information, information that's meant to keep us clicking and scrolling and watching, not meant to make us happy, crucially not meant
to make us wise or accurate about what people are like.
And so organizations that provide this information have learned over the course of time that the best way to keep people engaged is to feed them as much negativity bias as we can.
And it turns out that people who watch more news, who spend more time on social media, have a more bleak view of the world and of humanity.
Does that, by bleak view of the world, does that mean more cynical?
More cynical, but also I think it's important to, again, dispel the cynical genius illusion here.
Because sometimes when I tell people this, they say, well yeah, if you're watching a lot of the news, you're more informed.
They're more informed, yes.
Exactly. I can hear the YouTube comments already.
Me too. But it turns out that that's not always the case.
I'll give you an example.
There's something that communication theorists call mean world syndrome.
So people who watch more television news believe that violence is a greater danger to them than people who watch less news.
And over time, as media has become more saturating, at least in the US, on yearly national surveys, almost every year most Americans think that violent crime is getting worse in our country.
I pulled FBI statistics from a three decade period that coincided with those surveys, and I found that over the 30 -year span when most Americans thought every year was worse than the last, they envisioned our country as Gotham City from Batman or something.
But FBI statistics revealed that over that same span, violent crime around the nation decreased by 50%.
So here's one case where tuning into the news doesn't just make you think things are worse, it makes you demonstrably more wrong about how the nation is.
Does that mean that smart people are less accurate with their assessment of the world then?
Say more about why smart people would be less accurate.
Cynical people would be less accurate with their assessment of the world.
Yes, that is true. And I know we've been down in the cynical dumps for a while now.
Maybe this can be a turn towards the light because I can tell you, for me, I was a cynical person, am still a recovering cynic.
And I started this project three, four years ago, in part, to uncover the science of cynicism and in part to see what was going on with me.
And it turns out that I was inaccurate because most cynics are inaccurate.
It also turns out that marinating myself for years in the science of suspicion and mistrust and hopelessness made me a much more positive and bullish person.
Why would that be? Well, because again, it turns out that if you look at the data, cynicism is driving us not just to bleak conclusions, but to unnecessarily bleak conclusions.
And when you look more closely at what people are actually like, the average person is more trustworthy, more generous, more open -minded and friendlier than most people realize.
That's not to say that there aren't folks doing horrible things every day, but the average person, and especially the cynic, underestimates the average person.
What about the relationship between upbringing and cynicism?
Are there certain types of upbringings, certain types of people that are there's a heritable component to cynicism, meaning that there's some genetic factors that likely raise your potential for cynicism?
That seems to be a pretty minor factor though.
Much more reliable is our home environment and in particular attachment style.
So you probably know that some kids are securely attached, others are insecurely attached, and attachment is kind of a count on your caregivers early in your life, and by extension, whether you think you can count on other people.
And so if as a child somebody has a history of feeling alone, unsafe, as though the world and other people are unreliable, that tends to follow that child into adulthood.
And insecurely attached kids tend to become, if not cynical, adults, at least less trusting adults in their relationships and with strangers as well.
Yeah. It's that thing about when you see somebody getting angry, it's kind of a little bit like that's a hot stone that they've carried and you wonder who gave them that stone and who gave them that stone and who gave them that stone.
And it's kind of the same, I guess, with cynicism that certainly some people will be predisposed to it.
Certainly there's a heritable component to everything psychological that makes us.
But also to perpetuate that I'm British, which means we're kind of, I think, culturally predisposed to a little bit of cynicism, we can be quite dour, we can sort of think the worst of things a lot of the time, personality is a lot like the weather.
But since being in America, I've noticed that it's my dispositions changed.
It's been nudged forward bit by bit by bit by people that are more blue sky thinking and more hopeful for the future and sort of believe that things can go right and less sort of cutting and such.
So yeah, I really do hope that people see the folly in cynicism that it seems alluring, it seems sophisticated, it seems like it protects you from the world, but it doesn't, it just guarantees failure on a different sort of set of terms.
I don't think as well that cynics come across to the people that they want to be liked by very well.
I mean, being the king of a bunch of sort of other negative people doesn't sound like a particularly glorious kingdom to, you know, be the Lord over.
It's not. And I think this is something that people get really stuck in.
I think of cynicism almost as a psychological quicksand.
It sort of pulls you in and changes your patterns of behavior.
And when you act cynically, other people around you become cynical.
They also become more selfish and you decide you were right all along.
There's all these self -fulfilling prophecies that trap us.
And I think it's a tragedy, frankly.
Again, really don't blame people for feeling this way, especially if they've been betrayed or hurt, especially early in their lives.
My thought on this is not, you shouldn't feel that way, but rather we don't have to feel this way.
There are all sorts of ways to break out of cynicism.
There's even ways to break out of insecure attachment.
There are therapies that people can use that allow them to achieve something known as earned attachment, where you can shed that hot stone you've been carrying.
You can finally drop it and sort of be reborn in new relationships and into a new identity.
And there are ways to shed our cynicism as well, practical tools we can use to find the truth about other people, which is often full of pleasant surprises to lean into a type of hope and trust that are not gullible or naive, but data -driven and healthy and ultimately successful.
Can we talk about some of those tools?
Can you take us through them?
I'd love to. Yeah. The first is to try to shift from cynicism to skepticism.
It's a change in mindset.
The way to do this, again, is to challenge ourselves to think more like scientists.
One way that I do this with my own cynicism, which is very frequent, is to be skeptical of my cynical thoughts.
If I encounter a stranger and I find myself mistrusting them immediately, or if I find myself making a blanket judgment about all politicians or all lawyers or whatever other group of people, I stop myself.
I try to hit the pause button on that inner chatter.
I know I have negativity bias.
I know that these are programs that are operating under the surface of my mind, but we can call those programs up and take a hard look at them when we want to.
And I try to do that with my cynicism.
I say, okay, Zaki, you're a scientist.
If you were trying to support the claim that's going on in your head scientifically, what evidence would you use?
And oftentimes, the answer is, well, nothing.
I have no evidence to support this claim.
And so, I think stepping out of our own mental loops is a first step towards this mindset.
A second mindset shift, and then we can talk about behaviors that we can change as well, is what I call a reciprocity mindset.
So oftentimes, cynics and the rest of us don't realize how much influence we have on other people.
The fire chief in Boston probably didn't know that by trying to catch some of his firefighters cheating, he would change all of them for the worse.
He just thought he was trying to find out or figure out who already was malingering.
But we do have lots of power over people.
When we mistrust them, they become less trustworthy.
But the opposite is also true.
When we trust people, they're more likely to step up and meet our expectations.
And in my lab, we taught people this fact.
We said, hey, did you know when you put faith in other people, they become more faithful to you, right?
They will pay that back.
Trust isn't just you taking a chance, it's you giving a gift to another person that they're likely to repay.
And we found that when we taught people this, they were more willing to trust others and others in return became more trustworthy.
So that mindset of reciprocity can turn these dark, toxic, self -fulfilling prophecies into more virtuous ones.
I suppose the weird asymmetry that we have as an experiencer is that we feel the pain of broken trust, but we don't feel the pain of not trusting fully.
Yes, I love that. This is a huge point.
You're in the weeds of the literature here, actually.
There's this great study where people could choose to trust a stranger or not with money, and they had to guess how often do you think this stranger will be trustworthy.
And most people guessed about 50 % of the time people would act in a trustworthy manner.
But actually, 80 % of the time people acted in a trustworthy manner.
The thing is that when people chose not to trust, they didn't learn that they were wrong, right?
You only learn when you've trusted incorrectly.
You never learn when you've mistrusted incorrectly.
And that's something that I think a lot of us don't understand.
We don't realize that we're taking in information asymmetrically.
We're only learning half the story, and betrayals might haunt us, but all the missed opportunities we have fall completely out of our view.
And because of that, we miss more of them.
Yeah, I think about this a lot, especially to do with internet content that the stories that rise to the top, especially on a site, let's say like Reddit, for instance, which are usually individual posts by an individual user, a lot of the time about something that's happened in their life.
By design, the most egregious, outrageous stories are the ones that rise to the top because they're so non -typical.
So what are you learning from?
If that's the data set that your personal GPT is learning from, you're learning from the most tail end outcomes that anybody could have.
And then you're saying, well, that's the way that most of the world is.
It's like, no, that's literally the opposite.
The world's experiences are on a bell curve, and you're choosing to invert it and have this sort of U -shaped curve.
And this is now my new worldview.
It's incredible, isn't it?
I mean, if I'm driving my kids to school, the thousand motorists who follow traffic laws and are very polite, completely, they're lost to me five minutes afterwards.
They recede into the landfill of lost memories.
But the one person who cuts me off, I think about for the rest of the day, and I feel like I've learned something about humanity from that one person, and you're exactly right, it's because they're unusual.
We are over -rotating on exceptions and forgetting the rules that make those exceptions, which are often that people are quite positive and act in ways that are kind and trustworthy.
And so we're learning from exactly the wrong evidence in many cases, but we don't have to.
Another strategy that I've used in my own life and that I encourage people to use, it's actually inspired by cognitive behavioral therapy.
I call it encounter counting.
So if we have 10 different conversations in a day, 20 conversations, 50 conversations, we know because of negativity bias, we're going to remember the one worst conversation more than any of the other ones.
So I encourage people to just take a notebook with you just one day, you don't have to do this every day, and write down after each significant conversation you had what it was like, and compare the actual data of what your social day was like to how you experience it, how you remember it, how you expect
it to go. And I think this is where we can try to fight against the asymmetries in our minds more effectively by treating our lives a little bit like an experiment, by being more observant, by noticing more carefully.
And again, when we do, all of the quiet goodness that is all around us but that we ignore comes into focus.
Talk to me about the role of hope.
What is hope in the world of cynicism?
Yeah, this is a great question.
And hope, I want to differentiate.
We're doing a lot of great, I think linguistic work here.
So hope is different from optimism.
Optimism is the belief that the future will turn out well.
Optimistic people tend to be happier, but they can also become complacent.
Because if the future is going to go great no matter what you do, you don't have to do anything.
You can kind of sit on the sidelines.
Optimism is also a bit fragile because if you have very rosy expectations of the future and they don't come to pass, you can be disappointed quite easily.
You could have sworn that everything was going to turn out great and it hasn't.
So it must all be terrible.
I think optimists are actually at great risk of becoming cynics later on.
Hope, by contrast, is the belief that things could turn out well.
And I know that sounds like a small distinction, but it's not because in the uncertainty that hope gives us.
That uncertain future makes room for our actions to matter.
Whereas optimism is complacent, hope is action -oriented.
And you see this in the research.
Hopeful people, more than optimistic people, take action.
They feel agency. They try not just to envision a better future, but to chart a path to that future and then walk through that path.
And it's especially useful for people who are facing adversity.
We think of hope as privileged or toxic or naive sort of happy -go -lucky philosophy that ignores all of the world's problems.
In fact, as researchers see it, hope is a great way to attack our problems, to try to overcome them through our efforts.
How can people cultivate more hope?
Well, there are a bunch of interventions in the world of psychology that help people do that.
The first is to remember that hope is very specific.
There's this snarky saying that people often tell me now that I've written a book about hope, hope is not a plan.
Actually, hope should be a plan.
It should be exactly that.
Hope should entail a number of different things if you want to cultivate it.
The first is to envision in very precise and specific terms a future that you want and hopefully a future that is within reach, one where your actions could bring you closer to it.
The second is to draw a map between where you are and that future.
What are the actions that you could take?
What are the actions other people could take?
What could come to pass that would bring that future about?
So create a pathway to it and then take the steps to walk along that path.
There are these great interventions for students from low -income backgrounds that help them do these three different steps.
Envision a future, chart a path, and then take steps towards that path.
They find that those interventions help low -income students achieve more academically through this process of active hope, not complacent optimism.
What do you think is happening there?
Is it making a positive future feel more in reach by laying out step by step how it could come to pass?
Is that the sort of fundamental mechanism?
I think that's exactly it.
One of the things that I think makes it hard for us to pursue our goals is when they feel too far away or when they feel totally out of our control.
I know many people feel that way about world events right now in this social media age.
My students, my undergraduates lived such a different life than I did when I was 18.
When I was 18, 90 % of the world I cared about was Framingham, Massachusetts, a town of 70 ,000 people.
In that town, if I wanted to do something, chances are I could or at least I could try.
My freshmen students, they're worried about problems occurring 5 ,000, 10 ,000 miles away.
They're worried about generations into the future, and these problems feel so enormous that it's hard to feel hope because it's hard to feel agency.
Hope then is often a matter of trying to take those grandiose, gigantic problems, those goals that feel out of reach and impossible and saying, well, let's try to work backwards from there.
What's something closer?
What's something smaller that at least moves us in that direction?
It's sort of chunking one big goal into a bunch of smaller ones.
What do you advise your students who are swimming in the muck and the mire of modern media landscape?
What do you say to them to maintain a hopeful mindset, avoid cynicism when they're terminally online and spending a lot of time bombarded by bad news?
First, log off whenever you can.
I really do think that this younger generation, people who are coming into college now I think are awakening to what social media has done to them.
And if you ask me, I think that younger people will begin rejecting social media more than Gen Z.
I hope at least that that's what happens.
But I think that there are a bunch of other things that you can do even if you're not willing to totally log off.
One is to just audit the information that you're receiving and be skeptical of it.
Remember that the profit models of these companies depend on making you feel as bad about things as you possibly can.
So you are receiving half the story.
You're not receiving the whole story.
Second is to try and seek out the other half of the story.
In my book, I talk about this great organization called the Solutions Journalism Network.
This is a group of reporters who pool together stories about people solving problems.
So this is positive news, but it's not positive news like, oh, a cute kitten was rescued from a tree yesterday.
It's not that feel -good stories that help us ignore world events.
Instead, it's stories, for instance, of citizens fighting gerrymandering to have greater power to their votes or inmates teaching each other skills -based classes so they can work more quickly when they leave prison.
These are stories of people lifting each other up and solving or at least addressing major problems.
So I encourage my students to balance their media diet the same way that they would balance their nutritional diet and realize that what they're consuming online is often a bunch of really empty, if not toxic, calories and that they need.
If they're not going to totally cleanse, they at least need to supplement.
This is called the Solutions Journalism Network.
There's something known as the Solutions Story Tracker, which is a library of thousands of stories of people solving real problems or at least addressing problems.
These days, if I read something incredibly depressing in some news source, I immediately go to the Solutions Journalism Network and I look up the same topic to see, well, what are people doing about this?
It's like anesthetic to a cut or a graze that you've got from normal media and then you go across to the other one.
Just thinking about this body of work, you mentioned that this was quite a personal project for you, given that...
Just explain that because I think it would be for me as well.
Yeah. Well, I'm happy to open up.
I made the choice early in this project that especially for something like cynicism where people, I think, feel so much pain, I didn't want to present myself as somebody who solved this whole problem and I'm just speaking from on high.
One of the things about me is that for 20 years, I've been studying kindness, empathy, compassion, social support, friendship, all these really rosy pieces of human nature.
Because of that, I've developed a little bit of a persona that is people often recruit me to write or speak for them when they want to feel good about humanity, when they want a shot in the arm.
But a secret that entire time is that even though I study this stuff, I can't always feel it.
Just understanding something scientifically isn't the same as knowing it in your heart.
I myself have struggled with cynicism since I was a kid.
I had a pretty chaotic home life and have always had trouble trusting people and have always found it quite easy to see the worst in people.
So there was this split between the way I presented myself professionally and who I felt internally.
This project for me was an attempt to harmonize my inner and outer lives.
There's that Kurt Vonnegut quote that you're a fan of.
We are who we pretend to be.
So we should be careful who we pretend to be.
A friend I sat down with last year stopped making content on the internet because he said that he felt like he had to live up to in private the things that he was saying in public.
I suppose that there's two ways to do that.
You can either stop saying things in public, or you can start being in private.
The version of you that you are in public will bring them in line.
But it's kind of like the Guru's fallacy or whatever, that if you have done some work, or if you are an evangelist for a particular worldview, that people then begin to assess you personally about how well you can adhere to that worldview.
Almost all of the people that I know, their research is me -search.
It's some flaw or interest or unrequited desire that they have deep down that is the reason that they're so passionate about the thing that they're doing.
Unfortunately, scientists kind of have a much tougher run of it at the moment because those of us that just get to play in the shallow end of the pool aren't, I don't think any of us, I'm certainly not held to any standard essentially at all.
But I can see how that would be challenging.
You mentioned you've gone through a bunch of different tactics and sort of reframing strategies.
Is this something that you have found as a rehabilitating ex cynic?
What's the most used strategy or mantra that you find yourself coming back to on the daily basis?
There's many, but one that I'll share now is an action that I try to take much more often than I used to, which is what I call leaps of faith.
I think that in general, I'm not saying in every case, and I'm not telling people what to do, but I think that in general, we are too risk averse in our social lives.
We play it safe because we worry that if we don't, people will take advantage of us or maybe something more mundane will happen.
Maybe I'll open up to somebody and they'll just be bored.
They won't want to talk about what I have to say or they'll judge me.
I felt that way all the time.
To your point, I was representing a public version of myself, which was accurate to the science.
I wasn't lying. I was telling the truth about research, which is my job, but I wasn't feeling the way that you might when you learned about that research.
I don't actually think it's my job to feel a certain way, but people I think would be surprised because I didn't open up.
My exterior was so positive as a happiness and kindness scientist that one of my friends started making fun of me and calling me guy smiley because she said, you just are so smiley all the time.
I thought, huh, I think she means that maybe as a compliment or a joke, but it actually makes me really sad because I realized that I've felt unsafe presenting who I really am.
I've felt unsafe putting faith in people.
Since starting this project, one of the things that I've learned is that people are much more trustworthy than we think and we vastly underestimate how well it will go when we put faith in others, whether that means trusting them with money or with ourselves.
I've tried to purposefully take more risks than I did in the past.
Now that's not to say that I'm sending my bank account information to a prince who's going to wire me $14 .5 million.
That's why that works every time.
At least one of these times it will work.
I just have to keep on opening new accounts and eventually I'll score.
I just am much more vulnerable with people in my life than I was before.
I'm much quicker to say when I'm struggling, I'm much quicker to say what's going on with me and to be honest, even when that is unpalatable or when that requires something of a friend.
I used to suffer much more in silence because I thought that I would be a burden on other people if I opened up to them.
Now I realized that was a very cynical way of viewing other people.
I was assuming that they didn't want to be there for me, even though they were my friends or in some cases my family.
Now I take these leaps of faith all the time and I am so shocked frequently at how friendly strangers are, at how trustworthy new people in my life are, at how capable my trainees are when I trust them with more responsibility, and at how warm and giving the people in my life are.
My journey now is to try to stop being so surprised.
To try to be a good Bayesian, to try to update my worldview in light of the evidence.
I imagine that a lot of your listeners might experience this if they took more leaps of faith on people they might be surprised too.
Because people are surprisingly positive, because we are overly negative in our assumptions.
And it's like that game where you only get to find out how often people betray you with money if you give them some money.
That you don't actually get to have all of the positive reinforcement from people with you putting your faith in them unless you put your faith in them.
So I guess the final hurdle horseman of the cynicism apocalypse that I can think of is the felt sense of discomfort in unsafety when you're faced with the potential of having to do a thing.
You remember, even though it was six years ago, the last time that somebody betrayed you or whatever it might be, you've got this sort of ambient lingering sense that something might go wrong.
What's your advice to people who when they are faced with the potential to be hopeful or to be positively skeptical, something arises inside of them that kind of feels tight and tense and limiting?
Because I kind of get the sense that that's probably where a lot of people may get stuck.
I think that's right.
I know on your show you talk a lot about high performance and how to achieve more whether that's in a variety of domains in life.
And I think a common message that you hear in any type of high performance setting is you need to take risks.
You can't achieve much by just focusing on being as safe as you possibly can all the time.
Now taking risks doesn't mean being reckless or putting yourself in harm's way.
But I think that in essence, hope is the social version of risk taking in our careers, of risk taking in our athletic lives, of risk taking to be as high achieving and as successful as we want.
We need to take risks and I think that a lot of us are trained to be risk seeking or at least risk accepting in a lot of domains, but not socially.
And I think what hope demands of us, what true social fulfillment demands of us is that we realize that we need to take some risks in that part of our life as well, the same way that we would in any other part where we want to do something great.
Isn't that interesting?
The framing around risk taking in extreme sports or in a game of business or in moving to a new country or doing whatever is perceived bravely, but taking risks socially is seen as naivety.
Isn't that amazing?
This is one of the things that really floors me is we have these really shifting standards for what is brave and courageous and what is frankly stupid.
And I don't know why.
I get it that being betrayed feels bad and it makes you look bad socially, but that is a poor rationale for giving up on so much that social life has to offer us.
Friendship, collaboration, even love, right?
These are some of the greatest achievements you can have in your life and to lose them because you're too scared to be the chump.
It strikes me as a real tragic way to live, a very understandable way to live.
Just the same way. I mean, I don't do any extreme sports because I fear bodily injury, but for somebody who wants to have that thrill, to have that feeling, they know they have to take risk.
And if you want to truly be able to love, if you want to truly be yourself in community with other people, you need to be willing to take some risk.
Amen. I love it. Let's bring this one into land, dude.
Why should people go?
They want to keep up to date with everything you're doing.
Oh, well, thank you.
You can find me at jameel -zaki .com.
My book, Hope for Cynics, The Surprising Science of Human Goodness, is available wherever books are.
And my lab at Stanford is the Social Neuroscience Lab.
And you can find us at ssnl .stanford .edu.
Awesome. I could have this conversation all day.
I think it's very timely to do a book about cynicism.
I'm fascinated to see what you do next.
Good luck with the rest of the tour as well.
Thank you. This has been really delightful.
Thank you for having me.
