Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.
I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.
My guest today is Dr. Jamil Zaki.
Dr. Jamil Zaki is a professor of psychology at Stanford University.
He is also the director of the Social Neuroscience Laboratory at Stanford.
His laboratory focuses on key aspects of the human experience, such as empathy and cynicism, which lie at the heart of our ability to learn and can be barriers to learning, such as the case with cynicism.
Today you'll learn the optimal mindsets to adopt when trying to understand how to learn, conflict resolution, and how to navigate relationships of all kinds and in all contexts, including personal relationships and in the workplace.
What sets Dr. Zaki's work apart from others is that he's able to take laboratory research and apply that to real-world scenarios to direct optimal strategies for things like how to set personal boundaries, how to learn information in uncertain and sometimes even uncomfortable environments, and then how to bring that to bear in terms of your relationship to
yourself, your relationship to others, and how to collaborate with others in more effective ways.
I want to be very clear that today's discussion, while focused on cynicism, trust, and empathy, is anything but squishy.
In fact, it focuses on experimental data derived from real-world contexts.
So it is both grounded in solid research and it is very practical, such that by the end of today's episode, you'll be armed with new knowledge about what cynicism is and is not, what empathy is and is not.
This is very important because there's a lot of confusion about these words and what they mean.
But I can assure you that by the end of today's discussion, you will have new frameworks and indeed new tools, protocols that you can use as strategies to better navigate situations and relationships of all kinds and indeed to learn better.
I'd also like to mention that Dr.
Zaki has authored a terrific new book entitled Hope for Cynics, The Surprising Science of Human Goodness.
And I've read this book and it is spectacular.
There is a link to the book in the show note captions.
Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.
It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public.
In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.
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And now for my discussion with Dr.
Jamil Zaki. Dr. Jamil Zaki.
Welcome. Thanks so much for having me.
Delighted to have you here.
And to learn from you, you have decided to tackle an enormous number of very interesting and challenging topics.
Challenging because my read of it, not just your book, but of these fields and the science that you've done, is that people default to some complicated states and emotions sometimes that in some ways serve them well, in some ways serve them less well.
So I'd like to talk about this at the level of the individual and interactions between pairs and larger groups and so on.
But just to kick things off, what is cynicism?
I have my own ideas, but what is cynicism?
What does it serve in terms of its role in the human mind?
The way that psychologists think of cynicism these days is as a theory, a theory about human beings.
It's the idea that generally people at their core are selfish, greedy, and dishonest.
Now that's not to say that a cynical person will deny that somebody could act kindly, for instance, could donate to charity, could help a stranger.
But they would say all of that, all of that kind and friendly behavior is a thin veneer covering up who we really are, which is self-interested.
Another way of putting this is there are these ancient philosophical questions about people.
Are we good or bad, kind or cruel, caring or callous?
And cynicism is answering all of those in the relatively bleak way that you might.
I believe in your book, you quote Kurt Vonnegut, who says, we are who we pretend to be, so we need to be careful who we pretend to be.
What do you think that quote means?
How do you interpret that quote?
Thanks for bringing that up, Kurt Vonnegut, one of my favorite authors.
And to me, that quote is enormously powerful because it expresses the idea of self-fulfilling prophecies.
There is this subjective sense that people have that our version of the world is the world, that we are passively taking in information veridically, dispassionately, and in fact, that's not the case.
We each construct our own version of the world.
And so, for instance, if you think about cynicism, are people kind or cruel?
That's pretty much an unanswerable question at the level of science.
It's a philosophical, some could argue, even a theological question.
But it turns out that the way you answer that goes a long way in constructing and shaping the life that you live, the decisions that you make.
So cynics, maybe it's not so much about who they pretend to be, but it's about who they pretend everybody else is.
If you decide that other people are selfish, for instance, you'll be far less likely to trust them, and there's a lot of evidence that cynics, when they're put in situations with new people, even when they interact with their friends, romantic partners, and families, that they still have their guard up, that they're not able to make trusting and deep connections
with other people. But guess what?
When you treat other people in that way, a couple of things happen.
One, you're not able to receive what most of us need from social connections.
There's one really classic and very sad study where people were forced to give an extemporaneous speech about a subject they don't know much about, a very stressful experience that raised people's blood pressure.
Some of these folks had a cheerleader, not an actual cheerleader, but a friendly stranger who was with them while they prepared, saying, you've got this, I know you can do it, I'm in your corner.
Other people had no support.
As you know, one of the great things about social support is that it buffers us from stress.
Most people, when they had this friendly person by their side, their blood pressure as they prepared for this speech went up only half as much as when they were alone.
But cynical people had a spike in their blood pressure that was indistinguishable in magnitude, whether or not a person was by their side or not.
One way that I think about this is social connection is a deep and necessary form of psychological nourishment.
Living a cynical life, making the decision that most people can't be trusted, stops you from being able to metabolize those calories, leaves you malnourished in a social way.
A second thing that happens when you choose to pretend that others are selfish, greedy, and dishonest is that you bring out the worst in them.
There's a lot of research that finds that cynical people tend to do things like monitoring others, spying on them, or threatening them to make sure that that other person doesn't betray them.
But of course, other people can tell how we're treating them, and they reciprocate our kindness and retaliate against our unkindness.
So cynical people end up bringing out the most selfish qualities of others, telling a story full of villains and then ending up stuck living in that story.
How early in life does cynicism show up?
I'm thinking about Sesame Street characters, which to me embody different neural circuits.
You've got Cookie Monster, some strong dopaminergic drive there, knows what he wants, knows what he likes, and he's going to get it.
That's a great prefrontal system, maybe.
Even if he has to eat the box in order to get to the Cookie quicker.
You have Elmo, who's all loving, and you have Oscar the Grouch.
Somewhat cynical, but certainly grouchy.
And then in essentially every fairy tale or every Christmas story, there seems to be sort of a skeptic or somebody that can't be brought on board the celebration that one would otherwise have.
But even though kids are learning about cynicism and grouchiness and curmudgens, I often think about those phenotypes in older folks, because that's how they've been written into most of those stories.
I guess Oscar the Grouch is, we don't know how old Oscar is.
If one observes children, how early can you observe classically defined cynicism?
That's a great question.
Classically defined cynicism would be hard to measure very early in life, because you typically measure it through self-report.
So people have to have relatively well-developed, elaborated stories that they can tell you about their version of the world.
That said, one early experience and one early phenotype that's very strongly correlated with generalized mistrust and unwillingness to count on other people would be insecure attachment early in life.
So for instance, you might know, but just for listeners, insecure attachment is a way of describing how kids experience the social world.
It's often tested using something known as the strange situation where a one-year-old is brought to a lab with their caregiver, mother, father, whoever is caring for them.
They're in a novel environment and researchers are observing, how much do they explore the space?
How comfortable do they seem?
Then after that, a stranger enters the room.
A couple of minutes after that, their mother leaves the room or their caregiver leaves the room, which is of course incredibly strange and stressful for most one-year-olds.
The caregiver then returns after a minute.
And what researchers look at is a few things.
One, how comfortable is the child exploring a space with their caregiver present?
Two, how comfortable are they when other people are around?
Three, how do they react when their caregiver leaves?
And four, how do they react at the reunion with their caregiver?
And the majority of kids, approximately two-thirds of them, are securely attached, meaning that they are comfortable exploring a new space, they get really freaked out, of course, as you might when their caregiver leaves, but then they soothe quickly when their caregiver returns.
The remaining third or so of kids are insecurely attached, meaning that they're skittish in new environments even when their parent or caregiver is there.
They really freak out when their caregiver leaves and they're not very soothed upon their return.
Now, for a long time, attachment style was viewed in very emotional terms.
And it is, it is an emotional reaction first and foremost.
But researchers more recently have started to think about, well, what are the cognitive schemas?
What are the underpinnings, the ways that children think when they are securely or insecurely attached?
And one brilliant study used looking time.
Looking time in kids is a metric of what surprises them.
If something really surprising happens, they look for a very long time.
And researchers found that insecurely attached kids, when they saw a video of a reunion, of a caregiver and infant acting in a way that felt loving and stable, they looked longer, as though that was surprising.
Kids who were securely attached didn't look very long at those stable interactions, but looked longer at interactions that were unstable.
Interesting. It's almost as though there is a setup that kids develop very early.
Can I count on people? Am I safe with people?
And insecure attachment is a signal coming early in life, no, you're not safe with people.
That I think, well, and the data show elaborates later in life into mistrust in other relationships.
How different is cynicism from skepticism?
I can think of some places where they might overlap, but cynicism seems to carry something of a lack of anticipation about any possibility of a positive future.
Is that one way to think about it?
That's a very sharp way of thinking about it, actually.
And I wish that people knew more about the discrepancy between these two ways of viewing the world.
Cynicism and skepticism, people often use them interchangeably.
In fact, they're quite different.
And I would argue that one is much more useful for learning about the world and building relationships than the other.
Again, cynicism is a theory that's kind of locked in that no matter what people show you, their true colors are, again, untrustworthy and self-oriented.
It's a hyper-Darwinian view that ultimately people are red in tooth and claw.
Skepticism is, instead, I guess, restlessness with our assumptions, a desire for new information.
One way I often think about it is that cynics think a little bit like lawyers.
They have a decision that they've already made about you and about everybody.
And they're just waiting for evidence that supports their point.
And when evidence comes in that doesn't support their point, they explain it away.
And you see this, actually, that cynical people will offer more ulterior motives when they see inactive kindness, for instance, they'll explain it away.
In that way, I think cynics actually are quite similar to the naive, trusting, gullible folks that they love to make fun of.
Naive-tay gullibility is trusting people in a credulous, unthinking way.
I would say cynicism is mistrusting people in a credulous and unthinking way.
So if cynics then think like lawyers, sort of in the prosecution against humanity, skeptics think more like scientists.
Skepticism classically in philosophy is the belief that you can never truly know anything.
But as we think about it now, it's more the desire for evidence to underlie any claim that you believe.
And the great thing about skepticism is it doesn't require an ounce of naivety.
You can be absolutely sharp in deciding, I don't want to trust this person or I do want to trust this person.
But it allows you to update and learn from specific acts, specific instances, and specific people.
When I think about scientists, one of the first things I think about is not just their willingness, but their excitement to embrace complexity.
Yes. Okay, these two groups disagree or these two sets of data disagree, and it's the complexity of that interaction that excites them.
Whereas when I think of cynics in the way that it's framed up in my mind, which I'm getting more educated now, but I admittedly my understanding of cynicism is still rather superficial.
You'll change that in the course of our discussion.
But that cynics are not embracing the complexity of disagreement.
They are moving away from the certainly any notion of excitement by complexity.
It seems like it's a heuristic.
It's a way to simplify the world around you.
That's exactly right. Phil Tetlock has a great term for this called integrative complexity.
To what extent can you hold different versions of the world, different arguments in mind?
To what extent can you pick from each one what you believe based on the best evidence available?
Integrative complexity is a great way to learn about the world and about the social world, whereas cynicism, as you rightly point out, is much more of a heuristic.
It's a black and white form of thinking.
The really sad thing is that cynicism then puts us in a position where we can't learn very much.
This is what in learning theory is called a wicked learning environment.
I don't want to get too nerdy.
Well, I guess I can get nerdy here.
You can get as nerdy as you want.
This audience likes nerdy.
Let's think in Bayesian terms.
Bayesian statistics is where you have a set of beliefs about the world.
You take new information in and that new information allows you to update your priors into a posterior distribution into a new set of beliefs.
That's great. It's a great way to learn about the world, to adapt to new information and new circumstances.
A wicked learning environment is where your priors prevent you from gathering the information that you would need to confirm or disconfirm them.
Think about mistrust, for instance.
It's easy to understand why people mistrust.
Some of us are insecurely attached and we've been heard in the past.
We're trying to stay safe.
We don't want to be betrayed.
This is a completely natural response.
It's a totally understandable response.
But when we decide to mistrust, we never are able to learn whether the people who we are mistrusting would have been trustworthy or not.
When we trust, we can learn whether we've been right or not.
Somebody can betray us and that hurts and we remember it for years.
Or, more often than not, the data turn out to show us, they can honor that trust.
We can build a relationship.
We can start a collaboration.
We can live a full social life.
It turns out that the problem is that trusting people incorrectly, you do learn from.
But mistrusting people incorrectly, you don't learn from because the missed opportunities are invisible to us.
Wow. There's certainly a lot there that maps to many people's experience.
You pointed out that some degree of cynicism likely has roots in insecure attachment.
That said, if one looks internationally, do we find cultures where it's very hard to find cynics?
And there could be any number of reasons for this.
Or perhaps even more interestingly, do we find cultures where there really isn't even a word for cynicism?
Wow. I love that question.
There is a lot of variance in...
The data on cynicism are much more local to the US typically.
For better and for worse, a lot of research on this is done in an American context.
But that said, there's a lot of data on generalized trust, which you could say is an inverse of cynicism.
For instance, there are national and international samples of major surveys which ask people whether they agree or disagree that most people can be trusted.
And there's a lot of variance around the world.
In general, the cultures that are most trusting have a couple of things in common.
One, they are more economically equal than untrusting cultures.
So there's a lot of great work from Kate Willett and Richard Wilkinson that they have a book called The Spirit Level where they look at inequality across the world and relate it to public health outcomes.
One of them is trust. There's also variance in trust over time.
You can look at not just are there places or cultures that trust more than others, but when does the culture trust more or less?
And in the US, that's sadly a story of decline.
In 1972, about half of Americans believed that most people can be trusted.
And by 2018, that had fallen to about a third of Americans.
And that's a drop as big, just to put it in perspective, as the stock market took in the financial collapse of 2008.
So there's a lot of variance here, both across space and time.
And one of the, not the only, but one of the seeming characteristics of cultures that tracks that is how unequal they are.
In part because research suggests that when you are in a highly unequal society economically, there's a sense of zero sum competition that develops.
There's a sense that, wait a minute, anything that another person gets, I lose.
And if you have that inherent sense of zero sum competition, then it's very difficult to form bonds.
It's very difficult to trust other people because you might think, well, in order to survive, this person has to try to outrun me.
They have to try to trip me.
They have to try to make me fail for themselves to succeed.
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What is the relationship, if any, between cynicism and happiness or lack of happiness?
When I think of somebody who's really cynical, I think of it Oscar the Grouch or a curmudgeon-like character.
As I asked this question, I'm thinking specifically about what you said earlier about how cynicism prevents us from certain forms of learning that are important and very valuable to us.
Here's the reason why. I'll give just a little bit of context.
I remember when I was a kid, my dad who went to classic boarding schools.
He grew up in South America, but he went to these boarding schools that were very strict.
He was taught, he told me, that to be cheerful and happy, people would accuse you of being kind of dumb.
Whereas if you were cynical and you acted a little bored with everything, people thought that you were more discerning, but that he felt it was a terrible model for going through life because it veered into cynicism.
My dad happens to be a scientist.
He's a relatively happy person.
Sorry, dad. A happy person seems happy, but meaning he's a person who has happiness and he has other emotions too.
I wouldn't say he's happy all the time, but he experiences joy and pleasure and daily activities, small things and big things in life.
Clearly he rescued himself from the forces that were pushing him down that path.
That's the anecdote, but I use that question more as a way to frame up the possible collaboration between cynicism and exuding boredom or a challenge in shifting somebody towards a happier affect.
When I think about cynics, I think that they're unhappy people.
When I think about people who are not very cynical, I think of them as kind of cheerful and curious.
There's some aboolience there.
They might not be tigger-like in their affect, but they kind of veer that direction.
Andrew, I love this trip down memory lane.
I'm having all these childhood memories of tigger and Sesame Street.
There's so much in what you're saying.
I want to try to pull on a couple of threads here if that's okay.
First, and this one is pretty straightforward, the effect of cynicism on well-being is just really documented and quite negative.
There are large perspective studies with tens of thousands of people, several of these studies, that measure cynicism and then measure life outcomes in the years and decades afterwards.
The news is pretty bleak for cynics.
Absolutely, lower levels of happiness, flourishing satisfaction with life, greater incidents of depression, greater loneliness.
It's not just the neck-up that cynicism affects.
Cynics over the course of their lives also tend to have greater degrees of cellular inflammation, more incidents of heart disease, and they even have higher rates of all-cause mortality, so shorter lives than non-cynics.
Again, this might sound like, wait a minute, you go from a philosophical theory to a shorter life.
The answer is, yeah, you do.
And again, these are correlational studies, so I don't want to draw too many causal claims, but they're quite rigorous and controlled for a lot of other factors.
But I would say that this is consistent with the idea that really one of the great protectors of our health is our sense of connection to other people.
And if you are unable or unwilling to be vulnerable around others, to really touch in to that type of connection, it stands to reason that things like chronic stress and isolation would impact not just your mind, but all through your body and your organ systems.
So again, the news here is not great, and I often think about one of the best encapsulations of a cynical view of life comes from Thomas Hobbes, the philosopher who, in his book Leviathan, said, we need a restrictive government because left to our own devices, human life is nasty, brutish, and short.
Ironically, I think that might describe the lives of cynics themselves more than most people.
So that's point one, right, is that there is this pretty stark negative correlation between cynicism and a lot of life outcomes that we might want for ourselves.
But point two, I think, is related to what your dad also noticed, which is that if cynicism hurts us so much, why would we adopt it?
If it was a pill, if there was a pill that, as its side effects, listed depression, loneliness, heart disease, and early death, it would be a poison, right?
It would have a skull and crossbones on the bottle.
But yet we're swallowing it.
More of us are swallowing it than we did in years and decades past.
Why? Well, one of the answers, I think, is because our culture glamorizes cynicism.
It's because of the very stereotype that your father pointed out, which is that if you're happy go lucky, if you trust people, that kind of seems dull.
It seems like maybe you're not that sharp.
Maybe you don't understand the world.
And there is that strong relationship in our stereotypes, in our models of the world.
Susan Fisk and many other psychologists have studied warmth and competence, right?
How friendly and caring does somebody seem?
And how able do they seem to accomplish hard things?
And it turns out that in many studies, people's perception is that these are inversely correlated.
That if you're warm, maybe you're not that competent.
And if you're competent, maybe you shouldn't be that warm.
And in fact, if you tell people to act as competently as they can, they'll often respond by being a little bit less nice, a little bit less warm than they would be otherwise.
There's also data that find that, you know, where people are presented in surveys with a cynic and a non-cynic.
They're told about, here's one person, they really think that people are great overall, and they tend to be trusting.
Here's another person who thinks that people are kind of out for themselves and really doesn't trust most folks.
And then they'll ask those people, who should we pick for this difficult intellectual task?
And 70% of respondents pick a cynical person over a non-cynic for difficult intellectual tasks.
And 85% of people think that cynics are socially wiser, that they'd be able, for instance, to detect who's lying and who's telling the truth.
So most of us put a lot of faith in people who don't have a lot of faith in people.
Ironically, and even more ironically, we're wrong to do so.
Olga Stavrova, this great psychologist who studies cynicism, has this paper called The Cynical Genius Illusion, where she documents all these biases, the way that we think cynics are bright and wise, and then uses national data, tens of thousands of people, to show that actually cynics do less well on cognitive tests, on mathematical tests.
That trust is related with things like intelligence and education.
And that in other work, this is not from Olga Stavrova, but from others, that actually cynics do less well than non-cynics in detecting liars.
Because if you have a blanket assumption about people, you're not actually attending to evidence in a sharp way.
You're not actually taking in new information and making wise decisions.
In other words, cynics are not being scientific.
Their hypothesis is cast, but they're not looking at the data equally.
We should remind people that a hypothesis is not a question.
Every great experiment starts with a question, and then you generate a hypothesis, which is a theory or a conclusion essentially made up front, and then you go collect data, and you see if you prove or disprove the hypothesis.
And you can never really prove a hypothesis.
You can only support it or not support it with the data that you collect, depending on the precision of your tools.
That's very interesting because I would think that if we view cynics as smarter, which clearly they're not as a group, you're saying cynics are not more intelligent.
I believe that's covered in your book.
If one knows that, then why do we send cynics and razors to assess what the environment is like?
Is that because we'd rather have others deployed for us to weed people out?
Is it that we're willing to accept some false negatives?
Meaning for those that I guess we're using a little bit of a semi-technical language here, false negatives would be, you're trying to assess a group of people that would be terrific employees, and you send in somebody, interview them, that's very cynical.
So presumably in one's mind, that filter of cynicism is only going to allow in people that are really, really right for the job.
And we're willing to accept that there are probably two or three candidates that would also be right for the job, but we're willing to let them go, some false negatives as opposed to having someone get through the filter who really can't do the job.
We're willing to let certain opportunities go by being cynical or by deploying a cynic as the, I'm imagining the person with the clipboard, very rigid.
Cynicism and rigidity seem to go together.
So that's why I'm lumping these psychological phenotypes.
No, I think that's absolutely right.
And so a couple of things.
One, you said that if we know that cynics aren't smarter than non-cynics, why are we deploying them?
Well, let's be clear, we know this, meaning you and I know this and scientists know this, but the data show that most people don't know this, that we maintain the stereotype in our culture that being negative about people means that you've been around the block enough times, that it is a form of wisdom.
So that's a stereotype that I think we need to dispel first of all.
But I do think that to your point, when we deploy cynics out in the field, when we say, I'm going to be nice, but I want somebody who's really pretty negative, who's really pretty suspicious to protect me or to protect my community, I think that's a really, again, understandable instinct.
Almost from an evolutionary perspective, we are built to pay lots of attention to threats in our environment and threats to our community.
And in the early social world, if you wind, just to do some back of the envelope evolutionary psychology, if you wind the clock back 100, 150,000 years, what's the greatest threat to early communities?
It's people, right? It's people who would take advantage of our communal nature.
The thing that allows human beings to thrive is that we collaborate.
But that collaboration means that a free rider, somebody who chooses to not pitch in, but still take out from the common pool anything that they want can do exceptionally well.
They can live a life of leisure on the backs of a community that's working hard.
And if you select then for that type of person, if that type of person proliferates, then the community collapses.
So it makes sense that we depend on cynics from that perspective, from a threat mitigation perspective, from a risk aversion perspective.
But it doesn't make sense from the perspective of trying to optimize our actual social lives, right?
And I think that oftentimes we are risk averse in general, meaning that we're more scared of negative outcomes than we are enticed by positive outcomes.
But in the social world, that risk aversion is, I think, quite harmful in a lot of demonstrable ways.
Is cynicism domain specific?
If somebody is cynical in one environment, like cynical about the markets, like, well, things are up now, but have an election come so things can go this way or that way, do they tend to be cynical about other aspects of life, other domains?
So there's a little bit of data on this.
And it suggests a couple of things.
One, left to our own devices, our levels of cynicism tend to be pretty stable over time.
And also decline in older adulthood, contra the stereotype of the curmudgeonly older person.
But another is that cynicism does tend to be pretty domain general.
So for instance, cynics, you know, people, and this makes sense if you look at questionnaires that assess cynicism, which are things like people are honest chiefly through fear of getting caught, or most people really don't like helping each other.
I mean, if you're answering those questions positively, you're just not a fan of, you're probably not great at parties, you're not a fan of people.
And it turns out that people who answer, this is an old scale developed by a couple of psychologists named Walter Cook and Donald Medley in the 1950s.
If you answer the Cook-Medley hostility scale, if you answer these questions positively, you tend to be less trusting of strangers, but you also tend to, for instance, have less trust in your romantic partnerships, you have less trust in your friends, and you have less trust in your colleagues.
So this is sort of an all purpose view of the world, at least as Cook and Medley first thought about it.
But I do want to build on a great intuition you have, which is that different environments might bring out cynicism or tamp it down.
And it turns out that that's also very true.
As trait-like as cynicism can be, there's lots of evidence that the type of social environment we're in matters a lot.
One of my favorite studies in this domain came from Southeastern Brazil.
There are two fishing villages in Southeastern Brazil.
They're separated by about 30, 40 miles.
They're similar in socioeconomic status, religion, culture, but there's one big difference between them.
One of the villages sits on the ocean, and in order to fish on the ocean, you need big boats, heavy equipment.
You can't do it alone. You must work together.
The other village is on a lake where fishermen strike out on small boats alone, and they compete with one another.
About 10 years ago, economists, this was a study led by Andreas Librand, a really great economist, they went to these villages and they gave the folks who work there a bunch of social games to play.
These were not with fellow fishermen, but with strangers.
Games like, would you trust somebody with some money and see if they then want to share dividends with you?
Or give in some money yourself.
Would you like to share some of it with another person?
They found that when they start in their careers, lake fishermen and ocean fishermen were equally trusting and equally trustworthy as well.
Over the course of their careers, they diverged.
Being in a collaborative environment where people must count on one another to survive made people over time more trusting and more trustworthy.
Being in a competitive zero sum environment over time made people less trusting and less trustworthy.
Now one thing that always amazes me about this work is that people in both of these environments are right.
If you're in a competitive environment, you don't trust and you're right to not trust.
If you're in a collaborative environment, you do trust and you're right to trust.
This is from the point of view of economic games and I think much broadly construed as well.
One question then becomes, well, which of these environments do we want to be in?
I think the cost in terms of well-being and relationships is quite obvious if you're in a competitive environment.
The second question, of course, is how do we put ourselves in the type of environment that we want knowing that that environment will change who we are over the course of our lives?
So much of schooling in this country is based on at first cooperation.
We're all going to sit around and listen to a story and then we're going to work in small groups but in my experience, over time, it evolves into more independent learning and competition.
They post the distribution of scores that's largely the distribution of individual scores.
There are exceptions to this, of course.
I think I've never been to business school but I think they form small groups and work on projects that's true in computer science at the undergraduate level and so on.
But to what extent do you think having a mixture of cooperative learning, still competition, perhaps, between groups as well as individual learning and competition can foster an erosion of cynicism?
Because it sounds like being cynical is, I don't want to be hard on the cynics here, but they're probably already hard on themselves and everybody else.
We know they're hard on everybody else.
But oh, there was my presumption.
Okay, I'm going to stay open-minded.
Maybe they're not. You'll tell me that they are, on average, less intelligent is what I'm hearing and that there's something really big to be gained from anybody who decides to embrace novel ideas.
Even if they decide to stick with their original decision about others or something, provided they explore the data in an open-minded way even transiently, it sounds like there's an opportunity there.
You gave a long-term example of these two phishing scenarios.
So the neuroplasticity takes years, but we know neuroplasticity can be pretty quick.
I would imagine if you expose a cynic to a counter example to their belief that it's not going to erode all of their cynicism, but it might make a little dent in that neural circuit for cynicism.
Yeah, this is a great perspective.
And a couple of things I want to be clear on.
One, I am not here to judge or impune cynics.
I should confess that I myself struggle with cynicism and have for my entire life part of my journey to learn more about it and even to write this book was an attempt to understand myself and to see if it is possible to unlearn cynicism, because frankly, I wanted to.
So you will get no judgment from me of people who feel like it's hard to trust.
I think that another point that you're bringing out that I want to cosine is that saying that competition over the long term, zero-sum competition can erode our trust, isn't the same as saying that we should never compete.
Competition is beautiful.
It's the Olympics are going on right now, and it's amazing to see what people do when they are at odds trying to best one another.
Incredible feats are accomplished when we focus on the great things that we can do, and oftentimes we are driven to greatness by people we respect who are trying to be greater than us.
So absolutely competition can be part of a very healthy social structure and a very healthy life.
I think that the broader question is whether we can screw that competition at the level of a task or at the level of the person.
In fact, there's a lot of work in the science of conflict and conflict resolution that looks at the difference between task conflict and personal conflict.
You can imagine in a workplace, two people have different ideas for what direction they want to take a project in.
Well, that's great if it leads to healthy debate and if that is mutually respectful.
But the minute that that turns into blanket judgments about the other person, oh, the reason that they want this direction is because they're not so bright or because they don't have vision or because they're trying to gain favor.
That's when we go from healthy skeptical conflict into cynical and destructive conflict.
And you see this with athletes as well.
Athletes often are very good friends and some of the people that they respect the most are the folks who they're battling.
In the case of contact sports and boxing, literally battling, but they can have immense and positive regard for one another outside of the ring in those contexts.
So I think that there's a huge difference between competition that's oriented on tasks which can help us be the best version of ourselves and competition that bleeds into judgment, suspicion and mistrust.
I'd like to take us back just briefly to these developmental stages.
Maybe I'm bridging two things that don't belong together, but I'm thinking about the young brain, which of course is hyperplastic and comparing that to the older brain.
But the young brain learns a number of things while it does a number of things.
It handles heart rate, digestion, et cetera unconsciously.
And then in many ways, the neuroplasticity that occurs early in life is to establish these maps of prediction.
Things fall down, not up in general.
Things fall down, not up and so on.
So that mental real estate can be used for other things and learning new things.
So I'm thinking about the classic example of object permanence.
You show a baby a block or a toy and then you hide that toy and they at a certain age, a very young age, will look as if it's gone.
And then you bring it back and then they're amazed.
And then at some point along their developmental trajectory, they learn object permanence.
They know that it's behind your back.
And then we hear that characters like Santa Claus are real and then eventually we learn that they're not and so on and so on.
In many ways, we go from being completely non-cynical about the physical world to being, one could sort of view it as cynical about the physical world.
I love to see magic. In fact, we had probably the world's best or among the very best magicians on this podcast, Ozzy Wind.
He's a mentalist and magician.
And to see him do magic, even as an adult who understands that the laws of physics apply, they seem to defy the laws of physics in real time and it just blows your mind to the point where you like that can't be but you sort of want it to be and at some point you just go, you know what?
It's what we call magic.
So it seems to me that cynics apply almost physics like rules to social interaction.
Like that they talk in terms of like first principles of human interactions.
They talk about this group always this and that group always that.
These like strict categories, thick black lines between categories as opposed to any kind of blending of understanding or blending of rules.
And one can see how that would be a really useful heuristic but as we're learning, it's not good in the sense that we don't want to judge but it's not good if our goal is to learn more about the world or learn the most information about the world.
Can we say that? Yes. And I appreciate you saying, yeah, I also try to avoid good, bad language or moral judgment but I think that many of us have the goals of having strong relationships and of flourishing psychologically and of learning accurately about the world.
And if those are your goals, I think it's fair to say that cynicism can block your way towards them.
I've never thought about it in this way but I love that perspective.
And there is almost a philosophical certainty.
Maybe it's not a happy philosophical certainty but we love to, human beings love explanatory power.
We love to be able to have laws that determine what will happen and the laws of physics are some of our most reliable.
And really we all use theories to predict the world.
We all have a theory of gravity that lives inside our head.
We don't think objects with mass attract one another but we know if we drop a bowling ball on our foot, we're going to probably maybe not walk for the next week or at least.
So we use theories to provide explanatory simplicity to a vast and overwhelmingly complex world and absolutely.
I think cynicism has a great function in simplifying.
But of course in simplifying, we lose a lot of the detail.
We lose a lot of the wonder that maybe we experienced earlier in life.
And I do want to, your beautiful description of kids and their sense of, I suppose, perennial surprise makes me think about another aspect of what we lose to cynicism, which is the ability to witness the beauty of human action and human kindness.
My friend, Dacker Keltner, studies awe, this emotion of experiencing something vast and also experiencing ourselves as small and a part of that vastness.
And he wrote a great book on awe.
And in it, he talks about his research where he catalogued what are the experiences that most commonly produce awe in a large representative sample of people.
Now I don't know about you, Andrew, but when I think about awe, my first go-to is Carl Sagan's pale blue dot.
This image of a kind of nebula band, sort of cluster, basically, star dust, really.
And there's one dot in it with an arrow.
And Carl Sagan says, that dot is earth, and every king and tyrant and mother and father, every person who's ever fallen in love and every person who's ever had their heart broken, they're all on that tiny dot there.
I go to that, I show that to my kids all the time.
When I think of outer space, I think of groves of redwood trees, I think of drone footage of the Himalayas, right?
But Dacker finds that if you ask people what they experience awe in response to, the number one category is what he calls moral beauty.
Everyday acts of kindness, giving, compassion, and connection.
This is also related to what Dacker and John Hype talk about in terms of moral elevation, witnessing positive actions that actually make us feel like we're capable of more.
And moral beauty is everywhere.
If you are open to it, it is the most common thing that will make you feel the vastness of our species.
And to have a lawful physics-like prediction about the world that blinkers you from seeing that, that gives you tunnel vision and prevents you from experiencing moral beauty seems like a tragic form of simplicity.
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I'd love to hear your examples of both pale blue dot and everyday compassion, a bridge that to what I think of as time domains, or I should say space time domains, that the brain can encompass.
This has long fascinated me about the human brain, and presumably other animals' brains as well, which is that we can sharpen our aperture to something so, so small and pay attention to just the immense beauty.
I have a lot of ants in my yard right now, and lately I've been watching them interact because they were driving me crazy.
They were just like, they're everywhere this summer, and they're climbing on me, and I thought, I'm just going to watch what they do.
Clearly, there's a structure there.
I know Deborah Gordon at Stanford has studied ant behavior and others, and it's like, there's a lot going on there, but then you look up from there, and you're like, wow, there's a big yard.
Then the sense of awe for me is that interactions like that must be going on everywhere in this yard.
It frames up that the aperture of our cognition in space and in time, covering small distances quickly or small distances slowly, and then we can zoom out literally and think about us on this ball in space.
That ability, I think, is incredible, and that awe can be captured at these different extremes of space-time cognition.
Amazing. It seems to me that what you're saying is that cynicism and awe are also opposite ends of the continuum, and that's taking us in a direction slightly different than I was going to try and take us, but I love that we're talking about awe because to me, it feels like it's a more extreme example of delight.
I'd like you to perhaps, if there's any examples of research on this, touch on to what extent a sense of cynicism divorces us from delight and awe or I guess their collaborator, which is creativity.
To me, everything you're saying about cynicism makes it sound anti-creative because by definition, you're eliminating possibility.
Creativity, of course, is the unique original combination of existing things or the creation of new things altogether, creativity.
What if anything has been studied about the relationship between cynicism, I guess we call it open-mindedness, and creativity and or awe?
Great questions. Some work on this, and a lot of it comes actually in the context of the workplace.
You can examine, I mean, these Brazilian fishing villages were after all workplaces that led people to more or less cynicism, but other workplaces also have structures that make people more or less able to trust one another.
One version of this is what's known as stack ranking, and this is where people, managers, are forced to pick the highest performing and lowest performing members of their team and in essence eliminate the people who are at the bottom 10% every six or 12 months.
Stack ranking has thankfully mostly fallen out of favor in the corporate world, but it was very deroger in the late 20th and early 21st century, up until 10 or so years ago, and it still exists in some places.
The idea, again, was if you want people to be creative, if you want them to do their best, tap into who they really are and who are we really?
We are really a hyper individualistic, again, Darwinian species.
Really, stack ranking is a social Darwinist approach to management, and the idea is, well, great, if you threaten people, if you make them want to defeat one another, they will be at their most creative when they are trying to do that, that it will bring out their best.
The opposite is true. I mean, stack ranked workplaces, of course, are miserable.
The people in them are quite unhappy and more likely to leave their jobs, but some of the more interesting work pertains to what stack ranking does to creativity, because it turns out that if your job is to just not be at the bottom of the pile, then the last thing you want to do is take a creative risk.
You do not want to go out on a limb.
You do not want to try something new if other people are going to go after you for doing that.
If you screw up, or if it doesn't go well, you're eliminated from the group.
I think you're exactly right that these cynical environments are also highly conservative.
I, of course, don't mean politically conservative.
I mean conservative in terms of the types of choices that people make.
It's sort of, I think, at the level of individual creativity, but there's also a cost at the level of what we might call group creativity.
A lot of our best ideas come not from our minds, but from the space between us, from dialogue, or from group conversation.
It turns out that in stack ranked zero-sum environments, people are less willing to share knowledge and perspective, because doing so amounts to helping your enemy succeed, which is the same as helping yourself fail.
To the extent that creativity requires a sort of collaborative mindset, then cynicism is preventative of that.
There's actually some terrific work by Anita Woolley and colleagues that looks at group intelligence, collective intelligence.
This is the idea that, of course, people have levels of intelligence that can be measured in various ways and have various forms of intelligence as well.
But groups, when they get together, have a type of intelligence, and especially creative problem-solving intelligence that goes above and beyond the sum of their parts, that can't be explained, and actually in some cases is almost orthogonal to the intelligence of the individuals in that group.
Looking for the intelligence of individuals, there's a group factor that still matters.
And so, Anita Woolley and others have looked at, well, what predicts that type of collective intelligence?
And a couple of factors matter.
One is people's ability to understand each other's emotions, so interpersonal sensitivity.
But another is their willingness to, in essence, pass the mic, to share the conversation and to collaborate.
And so, again, succeeding, thriving, optimizing, and being creative both at the individual and at the group level require environments where we feel free and where we feel safe and where we feel that contributing to somebody else can also contribute to ourselves.
It's so interesting to think about all of this in the context of neuroplasticity.
I feel like one of the holy grails of neuroscience is to finally understand, you know, what are the gates to neuroplasticity?
We understand a lot about the cellular mechanisms.
We know it's possible throughout the lifespan.
We know that there's sure an involvement of different neuromodulators and so on.
But at the level of kind of human behavior and emotional stance, not a technical term, but I'll use it of, say, being curious.
To me, curiosity is an interest in the outcome with no specific emotional attachment to the outcome.
But of course, we could say you're curious with the hope of getting a certain result.
You know, so one could modify it.
But there is something about that childlike mind, so-called beginner's mind, where you're open to different outcomes.
It seems like the examples that you're giving keep bringing me back to these developmental themes because if it's true that cynics exclude a lot of data that could be useful to them, it seems that the opportunities for neuroplasticity are reduced for cynics.
To flip it on its head, to what extent are we all a little bit cynical?
And how would we explore that?
Like if I were in your laboratory and you had 10 minutes with me, what questions would you ask me to determine how cynical I might be or how not cynical I might be?
Well, the first thing that I would do is give you that classic questionnaire from Cook and Medley, which would just ask you about your theories of the world.
What do you think people are like?
Do you think that people are generally honest?
Do you think that they are generally trustworthy?
So it loads the questions or it's open-ended where I would, would you say, what are people like and then I would just kind of free associate about that?
It's a series of 50 statements and you're asked in a binary way, do you agree or disagree with each of these statements?
Just then Olga Stavrova and others have adapted Cook-Medley and made it a shorter scale and turned the questions into continuous one to nine or one to seven answers.
But generally speaking, these are discrete questions that numerically or quantitatively tap our general theories of people.
If you were in my lab, I might also ask you to play some different economic games, you know, the trust game being the number one that we might use here.
So I can explain it. So the trust game involves two players and one of them is an investor.
They start out with some amount of money, let's just say $10.
They can send as much of that money as they want to a trustee.
The money is then tripled in value.
So if the investor sends $10 in the hands of the trustee, it becomes $30.
The trustee can then choose to give back whatever amount they want to the investor so they can be exactly fair and give 15 back, in which case both people end up pretty much better off than they would have without an act of trust.
The trustee can keep all $30 themselves, betraying the investor, or the trustee can give more than 50% back.
They can say, well, I started out with nothing.
Why did you take two thirds back?
And this is one terrific behavioral measure of trust, and it can be played in a couple of different ways.
One is binary, where I would say, Andrew, you can send $10 to an internet stranger, or you can send nothing, and they can choose to send you back half, or they can choose to send you back nothing.
Would you do it? Actually, I'm curious, would you do that?
Oh, I absolutely have been over to them.
Yeah, I'm curious. Great.
And I'm willing to lose the money, so I suppose that factors in as well.
Yeah, follow-up question.
In that type of study, what percentage of trustees do you think make the trustworthy decision of sending back the money?
Gosh. 55%. Yeah. So your prediction there is quite aligned with most peoples.
There's a great study by Fetchin-Hauer and Dunning that found that people, when they're asked to forecast, they say, I bet 52%, 55% of people will send this money back, will make this binary trust decision.
In fact, 80% of trustees make the pro-social and trustworthy decision.
And again, what Fetchin-Hauer and Dunning found is that when we have negative assumptions, we're less likely to send over the money, and therefore less likely to learn that we were wrong.
And so that's another example of where cynical beliefs, I mean, you're interested because you had the belief that's a 50% chance, but you still chose to trust.
So from a Bayesian perspective, when that person actually sent the money back, which they would have an 80% chance of doing, and if I were to ask you again, what percentage of people give back, you might update your perception.
Absolutely. Right? But without any evidence, you can't update your perception.
And this is just one of many examples.
It turns out that there's a lot of evidence that when asked to estimate how friendly, trustworthy, compassionate, or open-minded others are, people's estimates come in much lower than data suggests.
And this to me is both the tragedy of cynical thinking, those heuristics that we're using, and a major opportunity for so many of us.
Right? It's a tragedy because we're coming up with these simple black and white physics-like predictions about the world, and they're often wrong.
They're often unduly negative.
An opportunity because to the extent that we can tap into a more scientific or curious mindset, to the extent that we can open ourselves to the data, pleasant surprises are everywhere.
The social world is full of a lot more positive and helpful and kind people than we realize.
Right? The average person underestimates the average person.
This is not to say that there aren't awful people who do awful things every day around the world.
There, of course, are. But we take those extreme examples and over-rotate on them.
We assume that the most toxic, awful examples that we see are representative when they're not.
So we miss all these opportunities.
But understanding that, I hope, opens people to gaining more of those opportunities, to using them and to finding out more accurate and more hopeful information about each other.
There does seem to be a salience about negative interactions or somebody stealing from us or doing something that we consider cruel to us or to others.
Nowadays with social media, we get a window into, gosh, probably billions of social interactions in the form of comments and clapbacks and retweets.
There certainly is benevolence on social media.
But what if any data exists about how social media either feeds or impedes cynicism or maybe it doesn't change it at all?
And I should say that there's also the kind of, I have to be careful, I'm trying not to be cynical.
I maintain the view that certain social media platforms encourage a bit more negativity than others.
And certainly there are accounts, I'm trying to think of accounts like on Instagram, like Upworthy, which its whole basis is to promote positive stuff.
I like that account very much.
But certainly you can find the full array of emotions on social media.
To what extent is just being on social media, regardless of platform, increasing or decreasing cynicism?
It's a terrific question.
It's hard to provide a very clear answer.
And I don't want to get out over my skis with what is known and what's not known.
Social media has been a tectonic shift in our lives.
It has coincided with a rise in cynicism.
But as you know, history is not an experiment.
So you can't take two temporal trends that are coincident with one another and say that one caused the other.
That said, my own intuition and a lot of the data suggest that in at least some ways social media is a cynicism factory.
So let's first stipulate how much time we're spending on there.
The average person goes through 300 feet of social media feed a day.
Is that right? Yeah. They've measured it in feet?
Approximately the height of the Statue of Liberty.
So we're doing one Statue of Liberty worth of scrolling a day, much of it doom scrolling, if you're anything like me at least.
So then the question becomes, what are we seeing when we scroll for that long?
Who are we seeing? And are they representative of what people are really like?
And the answer in a lot of ways is no, what we see on social media is not representative of the human population.
So there's a lot of evidence.
A lot of this comes from William Brady now at Northwestern and Molly Crockett, that when people tweet, for instance, I mean, this is a lot of this is done on the site formerly known as Twitter, when people tweet in outrage and when they tweet negatively and when they tweet about in particular immorality, moral outrage, that algorithmically those tweets are broadcast
further, they're shared more.
And this does a couple of things.
One, it reinforces the people who are already tweeting in that way.
So William Brady has this great work using a kind of reinforcement learning model.
Reinforcement learning is where you do something, you're rewarded and that reward makes you more likely to do that same thing again.
And it turns out that Brady found that when people tweet in outrage and then get egged on.
And oftentimes I should say this is tribal in nature.
It's somebody tweeting against somebody who's an outsider and then being rewarded by people who they consider to be part of their group.
When that happens, that person is more likely in their future tweets to turn up the volume on that outrage and on that moral outrage in particular.
So there's a sort of ratchet effect on the people who are sharing.
But a second question becomes, well, what about the people watching?
What about the rest of us?
Senator Robertson has a great paper on this where she documents that a vast majority, I mean, 90 plus percent of tweets are created by the 10 percent of the most active users.
And this is in the political sphere.
And these are probably not representative, these folks, not representative of the rest of us in terms of how extreme and maybe how bitter their opinions are.
And so we, when we're scrolling that Statue of Liberty's worth of information, we think that we're seeing the world.
We think that we're seeing our fellow citizens.
We think that we're getting a picture of what people are like.
In fact, we're pulling from the fringes.
And what this leads to is a misconstrual of what the world is really like.
This is, by the way, not just part of social media.
It's also part of legacy media.
Human theorists talk about something called the mean world syndrome, right?
Where the more time that you spend looking at the news, for instance, the more you think violent crime is up in your area, the more you think you're in danger of violent crime, even during years when violent crime is decreasing.
I'm old enough to remember when Stranger Danger was this big, massive story.
And every time you wanted cereal, the milk carton would have a picture of a kid who had been kidnapped by a stranger.
And during that time, if you asked people how many kids are being kidnapped by strangers in the US, they would, in many cases, say 50,000 children are being kidnapped each year in the US.
Can you imagine what the world would be?
There would be SWAT teams on every corner.
The real number in those years was closer to 100 kids per year.
Now let me be clear, each one of those is an absolute tragedy.
But there's a big difference here, and oftentimes when we tune into media, we end up with these enormously warped perceptions where we think that the world is much more dangerous than it really is.
We think that people are much more extreme than they really are.
And because stories of immorality go viral so much more often than stories of everyday goodness.
I mean, I love Upworthy as well, but it's not winning right now in the social media wars.
Not yet. Not yet. Not yet.
And so this leaves us all absolutely exhausted and also feeling alone.
People who feel like, wow, I actually don't feel that much outrage or I don't want to feel that much outrage.
I actually don't want to hate everybody who's different from me, for instance.
I'm just exhausted by all this.
We feel like, well, I guess I'm the only one because everybody else seems really excited about this battle royale that we've put ourselves in.
But in fact, most people are just like the exhausted majority, right?
We're paying so much attention to a tiny minority of what the journalist Amanda Ripley calls conflict entrepreneurs, people who stoke conflict on purpose that we're confusing them with the average.
So much there. I have a, I suppose, a mixed relationship to social media.
I teach there and I learn there and I also have to be very discerning in terms of how I interact with it.
And you made this point that I've never heard anyone make before, which is that many people feel alone by virtue of the fact that they don't share in this warring nature that they see on social media.
It's almost like sometimes I feel like I'm watching a combat sport that I don't feel quite cut out for.
And then when I'm away from it, I feel better.
But I like everybody else.
Sometimes we'll get sucked into the highly salient nature of combat between groups on social media.
It can be very alluring in the worst ways.
This mean world syndrome, what's the inverse of that?
The kind world syndrome, I suppose.
But a temset creating those sorts of social media platforms have been made, things like Blue Sky, which has other aspects to it as well.
And while it may be thriving, I don't know, I haven't checked recently, it seems like people aren't really interested in being on there as much as they are these other platforms, clearly the numbers play out that way.
Why do you think that is?
Well, we as a species, I think, are characterized by what we would call negativity bias, negative events and threats loom larger in our minds.
And that happens in a number of domains.
Our decision making is negatively biased in that we'd prefer to avoid a negative outcome than to pursue a positive outcome.
That's the classic work of Kahneman and Tversky, for instance.
The impressions that we form are often negatively skewed.
So classic work in psychology going back to the 1950s shows that if you teach somebody about a new person who they've never met and you list three positive qualities that this person has and three negative qualities, people will very much judge the person on their worst qualities.
And also, remember more about their negative qualities than about their positive qualities.
And again, you can see why this would be part of who we are because we need to protect one another.
We also tend to, by the way, not just think in a negatively biased way, but speak and share in a negatively biased way.
In my lab, we had a study where people witnessed other groups of four playing an economic game where they could be selfish or they could be positive.
And we asked them, okay, we're going to ask you to share a piece of information about one of the people you were playing this game with for a future generation of participants.
Who would you like to share about?
And when somebody in a group acted in a selfish way, people shared information about them three times more often than when they acted in a generous way.
So we gossip negatively.
And again, that gossip is prosocial.
The idea is if there's somebody out there harming my community, of course, I'm going to shout about them from the rooftops because I want to protect my friends.
It's a very noble instinct in a way.
But we further found that when we actually showed a new generation of participants the gossip that the first generation shared, and we asked, hey, how generous and how selfish were people in that first generation?
They vastly underestimated that group's generosity.
Does that make sense? In other words, in trying to protect our communities, we send highly biased information about who's in our community and give other people the wrong idea of who we are.
And I see that unfolding on social media every day of my life.
Every day that I'm on social media, I do try to take breaks.
But when I'm on there, I see it.
And to your question, what do we do here?
Why don't positive networks, positive information, why doesn't it proliferate more?
I think it's because of these ingrained biases in our mind.
And I understand that that can sound fatalistic because it's like, oh, maybe this is just who we are.
But I don't think that we generally accept our instincts and biases as a life sentence, as destiny.
A lot of us, well, human beings in general, have the instinct to trust and be kinder towards people who look like us versus people who don't, for instance, who share our racial makeup.
And some of us, I think a few of us sit here and say, well, I have that bias in my mind, so I guess I'm always going to be racially biased.
We try to counteract those instincts.
We try to become aware of those biases.
Depressed people have the bias to see themselves as worthless and to interpret new information they receive through that framework.
Well, therapy is the attempt to say, I don't want to feel this way anymore.
I want to fight the default settings in my mind.
I want to try to explore curiosity, to explore something new.
So to say that this toxic environment that we're in corresponds with some of our biases is to me not the same as saying we are destined to remain in that situation.
Do you think it's possible to be adequately informed about threats, to be able to live one's life in the most adaptive way while not being on social media?
None of the social media platforms.
Can you have a great life that way?
A safe life? This is a quasi-philosophical question, but from my perspective, absolutely.
I mean, I think some of the threats that we learn about on social media are simply wrong.
They're phantom threats.
We're made to fear something that actually is not happening, made to fear a group of people who are not as dangerous as they're made out to be on social media.
Of course, I think being informed about the world around us matters to staying safe.
But again, I think we can also more broadly construe what safety is.
If being on social media makes you avoidant of taking chances on people, if it makes you feel as though anybody who's different from you ideologically, for instance, is blood thirsty and extreme, that's going to limit your life in very important ways.
You can talk about being safe in terms of safe from acute threats, but as we've talked about living a diminished and disconnected life, is its own form of danger over a longer time horizon?
So really, there are a lot of ways in which in the attempt to stay safe right now, we introduce ourselves to long-term danger.
I'm not anti-social media, but I have to circle back on this yet again.
Former guest on this podcast, one of our most popular episodes is with a former Navy SEAL David Goggins, who's known for many things, but chief among them is striving and pushing oneself.
David has said many times that nowadays it's easier than ever to be extraordinary because most people are basically spending time just consuming experiences on social media and doing a lot less, just literally doing a lot less, not just exercising and running as he does.
David has been in school to become a paramedic, so he's essentially gone to medical school and is always doing a bunch of other things as well.
So he's also an intellectual learner.
Now, I don't know if I agree with him completely, but it's an interesting statement.
If social media is bringing out our cynicism, polarizing us, and perhaps taking away, I would probably agree with David, at least to some extent, taking away our time where we could be generative, writing, thinking, socializing, building in other ways that one builds their life, then I guess an important question is, do you think social media could be leveraged
to decrease cynicism or as you referred to it, to generate hopeful skepticism?
This notion of hopeful skepticism as a replacement for cynicism is something that is really intriguing.
What would that look like?
We were just going to do the Gadanke experiment here.
What would a feed on social media look like that fed hopeful skepticism as opposed to cynicism?
Here's a far out example.
I love this train of thoughts.
I'm going to try to take it to a logical conclusion that would never actually occur in real life, but a great way to generate more accurate and hopeful skepticism.
By hopeful skepticism, I mean skepticism as we've described, a scientific mindset, a scientific perspective, and a curiosity, a hunger for information.
On the hopeful piece, I simply mean skepticism that begins with the understanding that our defaults are often too negative, so that I'm going to be open and I'm going to realize that my gut instinct is probably leading me towards the negative and can be challenged, that I don't have to listen to it all the time.
Just as a working definition, I think that what I would want in a social media feed would be for it to have more data.
If you could compel every person on earth to post to social media about what they're doing today, about what they're thinking, about what they want, about their values, if you could compel each, of course, that's dystopic in many ways, but just as a thought experiment.
Then people's feed was a representative sample of real people on the planet, real people and people who over time, as I scroll through my Statue of Liberty now, I see what people are really like.
I see the people who are extreme and negative and toxic, but I also see a grandmother who's driving her grandkids to hockey practice.
I see a nurse who's coming in to help an elderly patient.
I see somebody who's made an unlikely connection with somebody who they disagree with.
A veridical, accurate feed, I think, would drive hopeful skepticism.
That's again one of the things that has struck me most over the last few years of doing this research is that we stereotype hope and positivity, as you were saying earlier, as kind of dim, naive, a rose-colored pair of glasses.
In fact, I think what the data show us is that we're all wearing a pair of soot-colored glasses all the time.
Actually the best way to make people more hopeful is to ask them to look more carefully, not to look away, but look towards in a more accurate and open fashion.
There's one version of this that we've tried at Stanford in our own backyard.
My lab and I, for years, been surveying as many Stanford undergraduates as we can about their social health.
How connected are they?
How mentally healthy are they?
A couple of years ago, we asked thousands of undergraduates to describe both themselves and the average Stanford student on a number of dimensions.
For instance, how empathic are you?
How empathic is the average Stanford student?
How much do you like helping people who are struggling?
What do you think the average Stanford student would respond to that?
How much do you want to meet new people on campus?
How do you think the average student would respond?
We discovered not one, but two, Stanford's.
The first was made up of real students who are enormously compassionate, who really want to meet new friends, who want to help their friends when they're struggling.
The second Stanford existed in students' minds.
Their imagination of the average undergraduate was much less friendly, much less compassionate, much priclier and more judgmental than real students were.
So again, we've got this discrepancy between what people perceive and social reality.
We found that students who underestimated their peers were less willing to do things like strike up a conversation with a stranger or confide in a friend when they were struggling, and that left them more isolated and lonelier.
This is the kind of vicious cycle of cynicism, right?
But more recently, my lab led by a great postdoc, Ray Pei, tried an intervention.
The intervention was as simple as you can imagine.
It was show students the real data.
We put posters in a number of dorms, experimental dorms we called them, that simply said, hey, did you know 95% of students at Stanford would like to help their friends who are struggling.
85% want to make friends with new students.
We also worked with Frosh 101, a one-unit class that most first-year students take, and show them the data.
We're just showing students to each other.
And we found that when students learned this information, they were more willing to take social risks.
And six months later, they were more likely to have a greater number of friends to be more socially integrated.
So here again is a tragic and vicious cycle, but then there's a virtuous cycle that can replace it if we just show people better information.
You know, again, I don't imagine that they'll ever be a social media feed where everybody has to post and you see an actually representative sample of the world.
But if we could, I do think that that would generate a more hopeful perspective because the truth is more hopeful than what we're seeing.
Do you think there's a version of AI that is less cynical than people tend to be?
The reason I ask this is I'm quite excited about and hopeful about AI.
I'm not one of these. I don't know what you call them, but AI.
Doomers. And it's here.
It's happening. It's happening in the background now.
And I've started using AI in a number of different realms of life and I find it to be incredible.
It seems to me to combine neural networks and Google search with PubMed and it's fascinating.
It's not perfect. It's far from perfect.
Right. But that's also part of its beauty is that it mimics a human lack of perfectness well enough that it feels something kind of like brain-like personality-like.
You could imagine that given the enormous amount of cynicism that's out there that some of the large language models that make up AI would be somewhat cynical, would put filters that were overly stringent on certain topics.
You also wouldn't want AI that was not stringent enough.
Right? Because we are already and soon to be using AI to bring us information extremely quickly and the last thing we want are errors in that information.
So if we were to take what we know from humans and the data that you've collected and others have collected about ways to shift ourselves from cynicism to hopeful skepticism, do you think that's something that could be laced into these large language models?
I'm not talking about at the technical level, certainly beyond my understanding, but could you build an AI version of yourself that could forage the internet for news and what's going on out there that is where you tune down the cynicism a little bit since it's difficult to be less cynical.
In other words, could it do a better job of being you than you and then therefore make you better?
Wow. I love that question.
I think that there is, I could imagine an opportunity for that.
I think one roadblock that I don't think is insurmountable but that you would need to face in that really fascinating goal is that AI models are, of course, products of the data that we feed them.
And so if basically AI models eat the internet, swallow it and then give it back to us in some form to the extent that the internet is asymmetrically waiting, is over-waiting negative content and cynical content, then AI's that swallow that will reflect it as well.
I think that, and I could imagine, it's blowing my mind in real time to think about, but you could imagine retuning the way that AI takes information to account for negativity bias and to correct.
This is what you're getting at, I think, right?
To correct for that negativity bias and then produce an inference that is less biased, more accurate and less cynical and then give that as a kind of digest to people.
So don't make me go through my social media feed, go through it for me, correct, de-bias it and then give it to me in a more accurate way.
That's an incredible idea.
That's what I want. I was thinking about my Instagram feed and cynicism versus hopeful skepticism versus, I guess, awe.
And I'll use the following examples.
I subscribe to an Instagram account that I like very much, which essentially just gives me images of beautiful animals in their ultimate essence.
It's an account by a guy named Joel Sartore who works for National Geographic and he's created what's called the photo arc.
He's trying to get images of all the world's animals that really capture their essence and many of them are endangered and some very close to extinction, others are more prolific right now.
And the last, I think of that account as all goodness, all benevolence.
And then at the other extreme, I subscribe to an animal account called Nature is Metal.
I subscribe to that one as well.
Right. We've actually collaborated with Nature is Metal on a great white shark grabbing a tuna video that I didn't take but someone I was with took and we got their permission to post it.
In any event, Nature is Metal is all about the harshness of nature.
And then I think about like the Planet Earth series hosted by David Attenborough and so forth which sort of has a mixture of beautiful ducklings but then also animals hunting each other and dying of old age or of starvation and so the full array.
So I think about that as an example of if you look at Nature is Metal long enough, it's a very cool account.
I highly recommend people follow all three of these accounts.
But if you look at it long enough, you get the impression like nature is hard, life is hard out there.
And it can be. If you look at the Sartori account and you get the impression that animals are just beautiful, they're just being them.
Right. And he has such a, he has a gift for capturing the essence of insects, reptiles and mammals and everything in between.
So when I think about social media or I even just think about our outlook onto the landscape of real life, non-virtual life.
I feel like the human brain potentially can like all these things but what you're describing in cynicism is the people that for whatever reason they're skewed toward this view that like life is hard and therefore I need to protect myself and protect others at all times.
In reality, how dynamic is cynicism?
You earlier described how it can be domain specific.
But if somebody is pretty cynical and they're older than 25, they're outside the sort of developmental plasticity range, what are the things that they can do on a daily basis to either tune down their cynicism or create room for this hopeful skepticism in a way that enriches them?
Let's just start with them because after all they're cynics.
We can't bait them with the good that they'll do for the world but they'll do that too.
What are some tools that we can all apply towards being less cynical?
It's a brilliant question and you're right.
I think a lot of us are very tuned into the metal side of life and heavy metal is great but life is not all metal.
So how do we retune ourselves?
I think about this a lot in part because over the last several years I haven't just been studying cynicism.
I've been trying to counteract it in myself and in others.
So I've focused on practical everyday things that I can do and I guess they come in a bunch of categories.
I'm going to try to tick through them but I really want to hear your thoughts.
The first has to do with our mindsets and the ways that we approach our own thinking.
So I like to engage in a practice that I call being skeptical of my cynicism.
So that is, in essence, taking tools from cognitive behavioral therapy and applying them to my cynical inferences.
So again, my default mode, my factory settings are pretty suspicious.
I want to lay my cards on the table.
It's ironic given what I study but there we are.
So I often find myself in new situations suspecting people, mistrusting people, wondering if they might take advantage of me.
And what I do these days that I didn't do in the past is say, well, wait a minute, Zaki, where is this coming from?
You're a scientist. Defend your inference.
Defend your hypothesis.
What evidence do you have to back it up?
And very often I find that the evidence is thin to non-existent.
So that challenge, that just unearthing of wait a minute, are you sure?
No you're not. Can tap into a little bit of intellectual humility.
A second thing that I try to do is apply what my lab and I call a reciprocity mindset.
That is understanding that yes, people vary in how trustworthy they are, but what you do also matters.
Which finds that when you trust people, they're more likely to become trustworthy because they want to reciprocate.
You've honored them in this small way and so they step up.
It's known as earned trust in economics.
And when you mistrust people, they become less trustworthy.
So in my lab, we found that when you teach people this, when you teach people to own the influence that they have on others, they're more willing to be trusting.
And when you're more trusting, then of course the other person reciprocates, which again turns into this positive cycle.
So I try, when I make a decision as to whether or not I'm going to trust somebody, I think the default is to say, well, I'm taking on this risk.
Is this a good choice for me?
And I try to rotate that a little bit and say, what am I doing for the relationship here?
Is this act of trust maybe a gift to this other person?
How can it positively influence who they become in the course of this interaction?
And then a third thing on the sort of mindset side, and then we can get to some behaviors, is what I call social savoring.
I do this a lot with my kids, actually.
Savoring is a general term for appreciating good things while they happen.
It's related to gratitude, but gratitude is more appreciating the things that have happened to us in the past that are good.
Savoring is let's grab this moment right now and think about it.
So my kids and I started savoring practices a couple of years ago.
I call it classes. So today we're going to do an ice cream eating class, or we're going to do a sunset watching class.
Cool. Are you adopting children?
Applications are coming in now.
We're evaluating them on a rolling basis.
I've already graduated college.
But so we'll just sit there and eat ice cream slowly, not so that it melts, but we'll say, what are you enjoying about this?
Is it the texture? Is it the flavor?
What do you want to remember about this moment?
And I noticed more recently while working on this book that all of this was sensory, sunsets, somersaults, ice cream, you name it.
But it wasn't very social.
And what they were hearing from me about other people was negatively skewed, because gossip is negatively skewed.
If somebody cut me off in traffic while I'm driving them to summer camp, they learn all about that person, but they don't learn about the people who are politely following traffic laws all around us, which is 90 plus percent of drivers.
And so I started a practice of social savoring where I try to share with my kids positive things that I notice about other people.
You could call it positive gossip as well.
And one thing that I noticed is that that habit of savoring for them changed my mental processing.
It actually changed what I noticed, because of course, if you're trying to tell somebody about something, you look for examples that you can tell them about.
So a habit of action of speech in that case became a habit of mine.
So those three things, being skeptical of my cynicism, adopting a reciprocity mindset and social savoring, those are three of the psychological pieces.
And I can get to some actions, but yeah, I wonder what you think of these.
I love those three, and I love the distinguishing features of savoring versus gratitude, because there's so much data to support gratitude practices.
And I don't think I've ever heard those two distinguished from one another, but clearly savoring things is going to be, is equally powerful towards our neurochemistry and our well-being.
And I love that you include both sensory and interpersonal aspects to this.
These are highly actionable, and I'm sure people are as excited about them as I am, because all this knowledge from the laboratory is indeed wonderful.
But of course, we always want to know what can we do now that you've made such a strong case for tuning down our cynicism a little bit in order to make ourselves smarter, better, happier and in touch with awe on a more regular basis.
Would love to hear about some of the actions one can take as well.
Yeah. So if you imagine the mindset shifts that I've talked about as thinking more like a scientist about the social world, then the second step to me is to act more like a scientist in the social world, the monk and author Pima Chodron, this great writer, has written beautifully about treating your life like an experiment.
In this moment, you could interrupt the defaults, you could interrupt the patterns and look around more carefully.
And I try to do that, and I encourage other people to do that as well.
One form of this is what I call taking leaps of faith on other people.
Collecting more social data requires risk.
So I try to do that. I try to take more risks, become less risk averse in a social context.
Now this is not to say that I share my bank information with a prince who's going to wire me $14 million.
You need to be calculated.
You need to be smart and safe in the risks that you take.
But I would argue that many of us are far too risk averse in the social world.
And there are lots of ways that I try to do this and lots of ways that people can do this.
One is to just be more open to the social world.
I'm an introvert. Andrew, I think you've said you're an introvert as well.
Is that true? I am. Yeah.
And so as introverts, we tend to think that the social world is maybe tiring and we need to recharge on our own.
It's completely valid.
I experience that all the time.
I think that sometimes my introversion morphs into something else where I underestimate the joy of social contact.
There are so many times that before a dinner party, I would pay an embarrassing amount of money for the other party to cancel on me.
I don't want to be the person to cancel, but I would feel so relieved if they canceled.
But then while I'm there and afterwards, I feel totally fulfilled by the experience.
It's a little bit like running is another thing that I love, but there are many times that before a run, I think, gosh, I really don't want to do this.
And then afterwards, I'm so grateful to have done so.
There's a bunch of research that finds that people in general are like this.
If you ask them to forecast what it would be like to talk with a stranger, to open up about a problem that they're having with a friend, to express gratitude, to try to help somebody, even to have a disagreement on ideological grounds, people forecast that these conversations would be awful, awkward, cringe, painful, and in the case of disagreement, harmful even.
This is work from Nick Epley, Julianne Schroeder, and many others, by the way, on something known as under-sociality.
And because we have these forecasts, we simply don't pursue the conversations.
We don't go deeper. We stay on the surface.
Nick, Julianne, and others then challenge people.
They say, go and do this, have this conversation, and then report back.
And people's actual experiences are vastly more positive and more fulfilling than their forecasts.
So I try to remember this in my own life.
I tried to realize when my forecasts are too risk averse and too negative and say, let me just jump in.
Let me take this chance.
If it goes badly, well, fine, and if it goes well, even better.
The second piece here, though, is not just to take those risks, but to document their effects.
I call this encounter counting.
So in essence, gathering new data from the world is great, but if you forget those data, well, then the effects might be short-lived.
I try to really remember when a social encounter is a mismatch with my expectations.
I have a relative who, for instance, I disagree with politically quite a bit.
And when I was working on this book, I said, let me take a chance.
We've known each other for 30 years.
We've never talked politics.
Let me try. And so I invited her to have this conversation about an issue we really disagree on.
And we did not agree by the end of the conversation, but it was an immensely deep and meaningful conversation.
And I actually felt like I knew her better, even though we've been close for decades.
And I could just say, well, that was nice.
And then forget all about it and imagine that any future conversations on disagreement would be terrible.
But I tried to write down in my journal, sort of, this is what happened.
This is how it counteracted my expectations.
Try to lock in that learning from the social world so that pleasant surprises hopefully aren't as surprising anymore.
I love those practices.
And thank you for reinforcing the process of reinforcing the experiences, because many times I'll be listening to an audiobook or I'll think of something when I'm running and I'll put it into my voice memos or notes in my phone and then I move them to this very notebook or another similar to it and I'll go back and read it.
But many things don't get passed through the filters that I forget because I didn't do that.
And we know this is one of the best ways to solidify information is to think about experiences and information after being exposed to it.
This is true studying. This is true clearly for emotional learning and our own personal evolution, which brings me to another example of somebody from the, I don't know what to call them, is it sort of philosophy, wellness, self-help space you mentioned, Pamela Chodron.
Wonderful writer. There's someone else more or less in that space, Byron Katie, who a lot of her work is about challenging beliefs by simply asking questions about our core beliefs.
This is something that I've started to explore a bit.
One could have the idea that good people always, I don't know, show up on time and wouldn't we all love to be punctual.
And as an academic, I confess, for me, everything starts 10 minutes after the hour.
So we're consistently on time but late, right?
Because of the non-academics.
My friends from the military have a saying which is, five minutes early is on time, on time is late and if you're late, you better bring lunch.
So that kind of thing. In any event, the practice that she promotes in essence is to take core belief and then just start challenging it from a number of different directions.
Is that always true? In other cases where that's not true, what would that look like, et cetera, as a way to really deconstruct one's own core beliefs, which is, I think, a bit of what you're talking about.
And I feel like this could go in at least two directions.
You can have a core belief that leads in the direction of cynicism that you can deconstruct by just simply asking questions.
Is that always true? Are there ever instances where that's not true?
And what would it mean if that weren't true in a given instance, this sort of thing?
And then on the other side, where we tend to err toward hopeful skepticism as opposed to cynicism, there too, I could imagine it would be useful to explore hopeful skepticism also as a scientist.
Are there cases where hopeful skepticism here, I'm going to be cynical, can really get us into trouble?
Yeah. Yeah. For instance.
Anyway, these, obviously, I haven't run a study on this just because I came up with this example on the fly.
But does what I just described fit more or less into the framework that you're describing?
Absolutely. I think that it's, in essence, being skeptical about our beliefs, putting them through their paces, kicking the tires on our own beliefs.
And again, this reminds me of cognitive behavioral therapy.
A person who's socially anxious might tell their therapist, I think all my friends secretly hate me.
They might believe that to their core.
It might affect every decision that they make.
And the therapist might challenge them and say, well, what's the evidence that you have for that?
Are there any instances in your entire life where that seemed to not be true?
And to your point from Byron Katie, what would it mean if it weren't true?
So this is the bedrock of one of the most successful forms of therapy for depression and anxiety and phobia in the world.
I do want to also, I guess, zoom in on something that you're sharing there about our core beliefs.
Because I think that in addition to testing our core beliefs, one thing that I wish we would do more is share our core beliefs.
Because I don't think we know what each other's core beliefs are.
And I think oftentimes we think that we are more alone in our core beliefs than we actually are.
So this is true in our politics, for instance.
The amount of people from every part of the political spectrum who want more compromise, more peace, and less conflict is north of 80% in surveys that my lab has conducted.
But people don't know that.
And so the lack of evidence, the lack of data about what other people want is a hindrance to the goals that we actually all share.
This is also true in workplaces.
So in the course of my work, I've done some different projects with school systems, hospital systems, businesses.
And one of the things I love doing is starting with an anonymous survey of everybody in the community.
And I ask, how much do you value empathy and collaboration?
How much would you prefer a workplace or community defined by cooperation versus competition?
And invariably, and I'm talking about some places where you might imagine people would be competitive, invariably a super majority of individuals in those communities want compassion, cooperation, and collaboration.
Much more than they want competition or isolation.
So one of the things that I love to do when I speak for those groups is to say, hey, look, here are some data.
Look around you. Here you've got 90% of people in this organization who want more cooperation.
So if you just take a look in your periphery, almost everybody around you wants that as well.
I also survey these communities and say, what do you think the average person would respond to these questions?
And invariably, they're wrong.
And so I say, you have underestimated each other, and now I'm giving you permission to stop.
And I think this is one of the other actions that we can take if we're in a leadership position anywhere.
I think that looking for more data is great.
If you're a leader, you can collect those data and you can show people to themselves.
You can unveil the core beliefs of your community.
And oftentimes, those core beliefs are incredibly beautiful and surprising to the people in those communities and give them what I would call not peer pressure, but peer permission to express who they've been all along.
I love that. And one of the things that we've done on this podcast is to always invite comments and questions, critique and so forth in the comments section on YouTube.
And I always say, and I do read all the comments, and sometimes it takes me a while and I'm still sifting through them.
But I think comment sections can be, yes, they can be toxic in certain environments and certain contexts, but they can also be tremendously enriching, not just for the reader, but for the commenter and to see what people's core beliefs are really about.
Now oftentimes, comments are of a different form, and that's okay.
That's all right. But I think that because of the anonymity involved, I think I can see that now through the lens of what you're saying as a license for people to really share their core beliefs about something that can be really informative and really enriching.
Although I much prefer, I confess, the model that you're presenting where people are doing this in real time, face to face, as opposed to just online.
As long as we're talking about polarization and the wish for less polarization, what are the data saying about the current state of affairs?
We're recording this about what, three months or so out from an election?
We're 90 some days or so from an election, presidential election.
So without getting into discussions about political camps per se, what do your data and understanding about cynicism and hopeful skepticism tell us about that whole process and how the two camps are presenting themselves?
There is so much to say about this.
I'm going to try to not give a lecture here, but like so many of the themes in this conversation, I think that the headline for me, when I look at the data on polarization, and I'm going to talk about perceived polarization as well, is twofold.
One, it's tragic because we are underestimating one another.
And two, there's a lot of opportunity here because the delta between the world that we think we're in and the one that we're actually in is great, and it's positive as well.
So there's a bunch of work on political perceptions.
This is work done by folks like Mina Chikara at Harvard, my colleague Rob Willer in sociology at Stanford, our colleague Rob Willer.
And a lot of this focuses on what people think the average member of the other side is like.
So if you're a Republican, what do you think the average Democrat believes?
What do you think they're like?
If you're a Democrat, what do you think the average Republican is like?
And so I'll stop talking about Republicans and Democrats here because a lot of these data are bipartisan.
The biases are pretty even across camps.
And it turns out that in all cases, we are dead wrong about who's on the other side.
We're even wrong demographically about who's on the other side.
For instance, Democrats think that 25% of Republicans make more than $250,000 a year.
The actual number is 2%, but the stereotype of Republicans that Democrats hold is that they're wealthy, I suppose.
Because vastly overestimate the percentage of Democrats who are part of the LGBTQ community, for instance.
Again, it's just a cultural stereotype.
So we're wrong about even who's on the other side, but we're even more wrong about what they believe and what they want.
So data suggests that there is perceived polarization, that is, what we think the other side believes is much greater than real polarization.
I mean, first of all, we are divided.
Let's stipulate that. And those divisions can be really dangerous and are, in some cases, existential.
But the division in our mind is much greater than the division that we actually have.
My late friend, Emil Bruno, collected some data where he gathered Republicans and Democrats' views on immigration.
He said, what would you want immigration to look like where zero is the borders are totally closed and 100 is there totally open?
And he plotted the distributions of what that looks like.
He also asked people on either side, what do you think the other side would respond if asked that same question?
And he plotted those distributions as well.
Other side meaning which group?
If you're a Democrat, what do you think Republicans would want?
And if you're a Republican, what would Democrats want?
And the distributions are totally different.
The distributions of our actual preferences are like a hill with two peaks.
Also Republicans want more closed borders, Democrats want them more open, but they're not that far apart, first of all, the means.
And there's a lot of overlap in the distributions.
The distributions of our perceptions are two hills on opposite sides of a landscape.
Republicans think that Democrats want totally open borders and Democrats think Republicans want totally closed borders.
And this, the same pattern plays out for all sorts of issues where we think the other side is much more extreme.
We think the average member of the other side is much more extreme than they really are.
There's also work on meta-perceptions.
What do you think the other side thinks about you?
And it turns out that people on both sides imagine that their rivals hate them twice as much as their rivals really do.
There's work on Democratic norms that my grad student, Louisa Santos, collected where we overestimate how anti-democratic the other side is by two times.
And Rob has collected data on violence.
How much do you think the other side would support violence to advance their aims?
And here the overestimates are 400%.
So we think that the average person on the other side is four times as enthusiastic about violence as they really are.
We have an image in our mind of the other as violent extremists who want to burn down the system.
And again, we've talked about the warped media ecosystem that we're in, and that probably contributes here.
But the fact is that those misperceptions are making all the problems that we fear worse.
Because if you think that the other side is gearing up for war, what do you do?
You have to defend yourself.
And so we're caught in this almost cycle of escalation that really very few of us want.
Now I want to be really clear here that I'm not saying that we don't have actual disagreements.
I'm also not saying that people across our political spectrum are all peaceable and all kind.
There are absolutely extreme and violent people around our country that represent their political views in horrible and toxic ways.
But that's not the average.
And again, I want to get back to this point that the average person underestimates the average person.
Not that we underestimate everybody, but that we're wrong about most people.
And so again, to me, this is a tragedy and an opportunity.
Rob and Mina and lots of other people find that when you ask people to actually pay attention to the data, when you show them, hey, actually, the other side fears violence just as much as you do.
When you show them that actually the other side is terrified of losing our democracy, when you show them that the other side doesn't actually hate you, that mitigates, that pulls back all of these escalatory impulses.
In essence, you can decrease the threat that people feel from the other side by showing them who the other side really is.
I understand this is such a massive and toxic sort of environment that we're in.
I'm not saying that hopeful skepticism will solve our divided political landscape.
We'll solve our problems.
But I do think it's worth noting how wrong we are and that being a little bit less wrong can at least open a door, maybe let our minds wander towards a place of greater compromise and peace, which is what most people actually want.
Wow. I say that for several reasons.
First of all, I've never heard the landscape described that way.
I confess I didn't know that the landscape was as toward the center as it turns out it is.
I have also many theories about how media and social media and podcasts for that matter might be contributing to this perceived polarization as opposed to the reality.
There's certainly a lot to explore in terms of what we can each and all do to remedy our understanding of what's going on out there.
As a consequence, I'll ask, can some of the same tools that you described to better interact with one's own children, with one's own self, with other individuals and in small groups be used to sort of defragment some of the cynicism circuitry that exists in us around this polarized, excuse me, perceived highly polarized political landscape?
I love that clarification.
Yeah, absolutely. I think that the answer is yes.
There is lots of evidence that we are actively avoiding having conversations in part because of who we think the other side is.
There is an amazing study that was conducted during Thanksgiving of 2016, which as you may recall was directly after a very polarizing election.
Researchers used geo-tracking on people's cell phones to examine whether in order to go to Thanksgiving dinner, they crossed between a blue county into a red county or a red county into a blue county.
In other words, are they going into, and I'm using air quotes here, quote unquote, enemy territory for Thanksgiving dinner?
They use that as a proxy of whether they're having dinner with people they disagree with.
It turns out that people who crossed county lines, who crossed into enemy territory, again in quotes, this is perceived polarization, they had dinners that were 50 minutes shorter than people who were dining with folks who presumably they agreed with.
We're talking about forsaking pie, Andrew.
They're giving up pie in order to not talk with people they disagree with.
I think a lot of us are very skittish about these conversations because if you believe that the other side is a bunch of bloodthirsty marauders, why would you want to talk with them?
Why have a beer with a fascist?
That's just not a great plan.
The truth though is that when we can collect better data, oftentimes we end up with better perceptions.
I mean better in two ways, one more positive and two more accurate.
Again, I want to say that there are real threats in our political environment.
I'm not asking anybody to make themselves unsafe in any way.
But in our lab, again, my wonderful graduate student, Louisa Santos, ran a study where we had about 160 people, these are folks from all over the country, who took part in Zoom conversations.
We made sure that they really disagreed about gun control, immigration, and climate change.
They talked about those issues.
We asked them to forecast what those conversations would be like.
We asked other folks to forecast what those conversations would be like.
The forecasts went from neutral to negative.
Some people thought it won't make any difference, and other people thought it would be counterproductive.
Some folks in our survey said, dialogue is dead.
There's no point in any of these conversations.
We then brought these folks together.
I should say, among the people who were cynical about these conversations and who forecasted that they would go poorly was us, the research team.
Louisa and I spent hours talking about what if people start to threaten each other or dox each other or look up each other's addresses.
You know, Andrew, that we have institutional review boards that make sure that we're keeping human subjects safe.
The IRB wanted all sorts of safeguards in place because we all thought that these conversations might go really poorly.
After the conversations occurred, we asked folks who had taken part of them to rate how positive they were on a one to 100 scale.
The most common, the modal response that people gave us was 100 out of 100.
It wasn't just that they liked the conversation.
They were shocked by how much they liked the conversation.
They also reported less negative emotion for the other side as a whole, not just for the person that they talked with.
They reported more intellectual humility, more openness to questioning their own views.
Here are conversations that we as a culture are actively avoiding because of our priors.
Our priors are wrong given the data, but we don't know that.
We don't give ourselves chances to learn that we're wrong because we don't collect the data.
When we do collect the data, when we step in and take that leap of faith, take that social risk, we are shocked and humbled and feel more positive and maybe even feel a slightly greater sense of hope that there can be some way out of this toxic environment that we're all trapped in.
Well, Jamil, Dr. Zachi, thank you so much for sharing your incredible, like, what can only be described as wisdom into this area of humanity.
To be a cynic is one potential aspect of being human, but you've made very clear that we have control.
There is plasticity over this aspect of ourselves if we adopt the right mindsets, apply the right practices.
It's so clear based on everything you've shared today that humans are operating rationally and yet irrationally at the same time.
I'm certainly not the first to say that.
But in the context of cynicism and in the context of being happier individuals and families and couples and groups, to really take a hard look at how cynical we are and to start to make even minor inroads into that through belief testing, I wrote down as we were talking that what I really feel you're encouraging us to do, correct me if I'm wrong, is to do both internal
and external reality testing in an effort to move us away toward internal and external polarization.
I can't think of any higher calling than that.
You're giving us the tools and those tools are supported by data.
These aren't just ideas.
They are data supported ideas and I just want to thank you for your incredible generosity in coming here today to talk about those ideas.
Your book is phenomenal.
I already learned so much from it and I highly encourage people to read it.
What you've shared with us today is phenomenal and I do hope to have you back again to talk about another topic that you are expert in, which is empathy, but we'll have to all wait with bated breath for that, myself included.
Once again, I just want to thank you for your time, the incredible work that you're doing and the evolution that you're taking us on.
On behalf of myself and everyone listening and watching, thank you ever so much.
Andrew, this has been an absolutely delightful conversation.
I will say my forecast of it was very high and it has exceeded that forecast.
I also just want to take a moment to thank you for your work as a science communicator, as somebody who believes in not just trying to generate knowledge, but also to share knowledge.
I think that it's absolutely one of the most important services that we can do as folks who have been trained and learned all this stuff to bring that information to as many people as we can.
I think it's just an incredible mission and clearly has had such wonderful impact.
It's an honor to be part of that conversation and to be part of that effort.
Thank you. I'll take that in.
It's a labor of love and an honor and a privilege to sit here today with you.
Thank you ever so much. Please do come back again.
I would love that. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr.
Jamil Zaki. To learn more about his work and to find a link to his new book, Hope for Cinex, please see the links in the show note captions.
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For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out.
It's my very first book.
It's entitled, Protocols, an operating manual for the human body.
This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience.
And it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to stress control protocols related to focus and motivation.
And of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included.
The book is now available by presale at protocolsbook.com.
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