How To Be More Hopeful In A Cynical World - Dr Jamil Zaki

why do people tend towards cynicism like why is it so alluring well uh it's a great question maybe let's define cynicism first just so we have our terms straight uh the way that psychologists like me refer to cynicism is different than the ancient Greek School of philosophy led by anti and diynes we can talk about that all you want in a moment but as psychology now defines cynicism it's a theory about people the idea that in general people are selfish greedy and dishonest and therefore we might not want to trust them now why do we tend towards thinking this way to your question I think that this is actually a pretty ancient bias in the way that our minds work uh something that researchers call negativity bias so it turns out that our minds are built such that we pay much more attention to harmful or threatening information than to the good stuff so we pay more visual attention to um to threats than to positive information we remember negative events more than positive ones and we make decisions more based on what we'd like not to lose than what we would like to gain and you can see how this bias might be there for a reason it might have helped us survive maybe 200,000 years ago a person who was worried about a predator on the horizon might do better than their friend who was blister out by the sunset on the opposite Horizon so a useful bias in some ways but one that I think has gotten us in a lot of trouble in our modern context draw the line between negativity bias and cynicism is cynicism simply negativity interpersonally at work at scale I think that cynicism is what happens when you turn negativity bias into an entire world viiew uh when you allow it not only to color the information that you're taking in but your expectations of the future as well right so I teach a class of about 500 students every year and at the end of the course I get all these uh different pieces of feedback reviews of the class and usually around 480 of them are positive but of course three nights later I'm trying to fall asleep and I'm only remembering the two or three most negative inform reviews that I've received and again that's a that's simple negativity bias if I were to then transform that into a view of undergraduate students or people in my class and say ah kids these days they're not respectful they don't like their teachers uh they don't want to learn that would be turning negativity bias into cynicism not just uh taking in information asymmetrically focusing on the negative but really almost elevating that into a philosophy right so as opposed to just absorbing it you're then projecting it you're using it to predict the future too exactly that's exactly right okay what is the sort of behavior of cynics what are the things that they think about the world and people and how do they show up there's a bunch of ways that cynicism leaks out into our behavior number one is an willingness to trust trust is any decision where we put our own well-being in the hands of somebody else we loan somebody money we confide in a friend um we leave our kids with a babysitter all of these are instances in which we make a decision on the expectation that somebody else has our best interests in mind and will honor their commitments it's a bet all of social life is a series of bets and cynics think that those bets are for suckers that if you put your well-being in somebody else's hands they will inevitably betray you so you see cynics being much less willing to trust in all sorts of settings much less willing to trust strangers to trust public figures but also to even trust their friends and families a second way that cynicism leaks out into our behavior is not what we don't do but what we do uh I call this preemptive strikes so it turns out if you imagine that everybody around you is on the take the only way for you to truly be safe is to go on the attack first before somebody else will betray you so cynics for instance are more likely to spy on people to threaten them or to act selfishly themselves because they imagine that's what others will do if given the chance so a lot of it to me seems to be a kind of protection strategy against being hurt from the world Retreat from any kind of um openness any sort of Faith any kind of vulnerability as well this is really beautifully put and you know the comedian George Carlin once said if you scratch a cynic you'll find a disappointed idealist and and this is where I really want to be clear that I'm not trying to judge or condemn cynics at all I myself tend towards cynicism even though I study it uh but I think a lot of times when people lose faith in others it's not because they want to have contempt it's not because they're sneering and uh and mean it's because they've been hurt and they don't want to be hurt again it's an absolutely human response uh a craving for safety the problem is that when we shut ourselves off from the world we might be safe from betrayals in the short term but in the long term we lose so much of what makes life fulfilling and beautiful chances for connection friendship collaboration and over time that doesn't keep us safe it slowly withs us I came up with an idea about cynicism uh a little while ago so I wanted to teach you it today it seems like you're the you're the guy to to tell this too so I came up with an idea called the cynicism safety blanket cynicism is a guarded response you're setting yourself up against disappointment its role within the system is to protect you against experiencing anything bad is a preemptive strike against a perceived threat if I tell myself that all women are bad then I'm less likely to seek a relationship with women and as a consequence I'm never going to feel the pain of rejection if I tell myself that everything is [ __ ] or that things will never get better I'm excused of ever having to try it anything it's more comfortable to get fatalistic and call it pragmatism the cope is Hing is framing hope as pathetic and embarrassing and optimism as delusion it sour grapes at an existential level if everything sucks and everyone is horrible and reality is disappointing and you know that for a fact it's the people acting like things can be better that are dumb and delusional and the problem the upside of never having to try is never having to feel the pain of failure wow uh that that's beautiful uh it's like it's like a Pros poem and it also it summarizes so much of what I've been working on over these past few years really succinctly and powerfully I think you're right so good job first of all um I think all right bro science for the win I think that cynicism is an attempt at safety it is I in the book I write about it as uh as playing poker by folding every hand immediately without even looking at your cards because you don't want to lose and you're assured of never losing in any big way if you do that but of course in a game of poker if you fold every hand you will slowly lose everything and that's a guarantee I think that that analogy Works in both ways right I mean cynic it's true might not have those high-profile betrayals when you trust when you go out on a limb and somebody snaps it behind you you feel that you remember it for the rest of your life and the people around you see it as well you look like a sucker you're embarrassed in front of all your friends and family when you Retreat when you have that sour grapes at an existen level and decide to just never play along at all to just treat everything with contempt you won't fail as publicly and maybe that's safety but over time again you will lose out on basically what I think most people want out of life and you see this in that cynics over time become more depressed and lonely they become physically less healthier cynics are more likely to suffer from heart disease and they die younger there are all of these major prospective studies of cohorts of tens of thousands of people that measure people's cynicism and then follow them for years decades to see how long they live and cynics tend to live less long they have die of all cause mortality earlier than non- cynics so this is a type of safety that actually is immensely dangerous in the long term not just to what we care about but to life itself yeah I think the worldview of the cynic is the only thing worse than failure is naivity and if I can assure myself of failure on my terms I never have to face naivity and failure on their terms that's right and this too uh connects with a one of the things that surprised me most in doing research for this project which is known as the cynical genus illusion so as you're saying I think a lot of us believe that the opposite of C ism is naive that the only option if you don't want to be cynical is to be really I I guess a little bit uh dim a little bit innocently trusting yeah exactly to to to to to be gullible actually unly yeah yeah yeah yeah to put Faith in people without them deserving it and so it turns out that not just cynics feel this way most of people do so there there's a bunch of studies where people were presented with a an example of one cynical person and one non- cynical person and they were asked who do you think would be better at a variety of tasks 70% of people believed that cynics would do better on cognitive tasks that they're smarter than non- cynics 85% of people believed that cynics would be socially smarter for instance better able to tell who's lying and who's telling the truth compared to a non- cynic so in other words most people put their faith in people who don't have faith in people right but if you can say that three times fast right we we trust we believe that cynics are smart but we're wrong the data are really clear cynics do less well on cognitive tests than non cynics and they are worse at spotting Liars than non cynics now why would that be right it turns out that cynicism is not the opposite of naive it's a version of naive right a gullible person unthinkingly trusts everybody a cynical person unthinkingly trusts no one but neither one of them is evaluating the evidence from each person and each situation as it comes in that blanket assumption on either side means that we kind of stop processing information we think we already know what's going to happen and so we don't learn that's so interesting couple of things on that I remember learning that uh under the influence of alcohol people are worse Liars perhaps unsurprising because we can hold fewer thoughts in our mind at one time but under the influence of alcohol we are better liar detectors so we get out of our own way and this is one of the it's called the beer before bread hypothesis for how human uh coalitions and social structures came together that we came together to grow um wheat or whatever whatever the [ __ ] you what do you make barley what does beer come from barley yeah that's right barley hops yeah hops and barley whatever it is uh we came together to grow that uh not because we were going to make bread but because it helped to Foster group cohesion by making it harder for you to lie to me and easier for me to detect you're lying uh so that's the that's the first thing second thing is does this sense this interpretation this bias that we have that somebody who is cynical is more sophisticated oh well to arrive at this highly scrutinous very s of uh uh informed appearing to be informed position this person must have done that research but cynicism is not a signifier of intellect it's a replacement for it it's someone who is getting out of the way they're not having to do the thinking they're choosing to use cynicism as a replacement for thinking Ginder Bogel says uh being a black sheep is still being a sheep H it's brilliant I and I think you're right that we that cynics can appear to be thoughtful without actually being thoughtful the black sheep as you said I think the problem or one of the problems here is that we let them get away with it right because through this cynical genius illusion we glamorize the cynic as a wisened uh sort of person who's been around the block and has this gim eye sophistication yes exactly they can see right through all the [ __ ] but in fact they can't but in in in acting as though they can I think we encourage more cynicism by treating it like a form of wisdom when it's actually quite the opposite of wisdom so part of my mission now is to defrock cynicism and take away some of its shine in our cultural landscape I think that would be very worthwhile you know I spend a lot of time thinking about how um social groups react to news stories and and um especially content on the internet and almost nobody is ever lorded for saying something nice the top comment on a YouTube video is R very rarely something nice about the video it's always some really sort of cutting J that's trying to be back and forth about something that somebody said or their understanding or they got confused about this thing you actually meant to say such and such and instead you said this and you think well why is that the most upvoted thing well it's because it sounds sophisticated it sounds like somebody has done the work to be able to go through and and and come up with a worldview that's that's very critical but yeah I would be I would make enthusiasm great again I'm I'm I'm down for that so when it comes to actually working out whether or not someone is cynical is there a a cynical checklist a framework what how do you work out on the the scale of cynicism grading there is uh so there's a questionnaire that was developed by two Psy ologists in the 1950s uh Donald Cook and Walter medley and they uh they were trying to figure out who would be good teachers this was it started out as a test for Teacher rapport with students and so they would ask teachers things like um do you agree or disagree with these statements here you can you can try it out yourself if you want um here's here's one statement uh most people are honest chiefly for fear of getting caught do you think that's true or untrue untrue yeah uh people generally don't like helping one another untrue most people don't really care what happens to you uh true okay so you would score here you would score one out of three but they would score people on 50 items instead and the more items it that you agreed with the more that they figured these teachers won't have rapport with students but it turned out that it wasn't just teachers that this uh that this measured this could that you could give this test to any type of person in any profession and get a kind of all-purpose cynicism detector right you could get a cynicism level for almost anybody and so we we use that test now um we still do and that's what relates to for instance heart disease depression loneliness alcohol abuse and early mortality the more items of in that questionnaire that you agree with the worse off that you tend to be healthwise that's wild so these people are less happy more depressed less smart more likely to be alcoholics what else they live less Long lives what what else is in that there's sorry to and again I I I do want to express solidarity and compassion for the cynics who are listening I myself again I just want to be really clear I struggle a lot with cynicism so I'm not talking about them I'm talking about us I think we all have cynical moments and in my case cynical years but um they're listening to this podcast at best they are a cynic in Rehabilitation yes I which is how I identify myself uh as well but so I'm afraid there's more bad news here uh which is that cynics also do more poorly professionally um over the course of their careers they earn less money and there was a fascinating study that came out uh just last year that found that cynics uh at work they want to be leaders just as much as anybody else but they have a very idiosyncratic view of how to do that they believe that in order to lead you need to in essence take advantage of other people lest you be taken advantage of and so people who are disagreeable and cynical in the workplace are bruisers right they they attempt to step over or on other people they try to exert a dominant uh collegial style but it turns out that doesn't work very well because in organizations the actual way to rise to the top is yes to be dominant when you need to but also to be coalitional to build teams and relationships that are based on trust and generosity and collaboration and cynics by depriving themselves of those opportunities by not wanting to be vulnerable or trusting actually end up less likely to rise to leadership positions in their organization so you can add to this list this laundry list of cynicisms downsides some professional stuff as well they're going to be poorer also what was that story about the was it the Boston fire department yeah that's right so cynical leaders also of course run their organizations into the ground and variety of ways um which is bad news not just for them but for their employees uh in Boston my hometown of Boston uh around the turn of the century there was a new fire chief who took over the entire City's Fire Department and one of the first things he did was audit his Workforce and he discovered that firefighters were taking more sick days on Mondays and especially on Fridays than on any other day of the week and he said uh these folks are cheating the system they mingering and they're not going to get away with it on my watch now I should say that before this time firefighters could take unlimited sick days and that was a nod to how dangerous and honorable their profession was I mean the idea is if you've just been fighting a fire and inhaling smoke and you need to take the day off just go ahead no questions asked but this new Chief decided to upend that he said on starting I think it was around Christmas of 2001 uh firefighters would be capped at 15 sick days per year if you took more than that without a doctor's note your pay would be docked and if you were injured in the light of Duty you had to go before a doctor to prove that you couldn't work or else you you would you would have to be on desk Duty I mean basically he treated all of his people as though they were cheaters he he expressed a broad cynicism as his leadership style now was it true that some firefighters might have been taking long weekends on the company dime probably but how many was that 5% 3% 1% but he was treating 100% of his staff as though they were cheaters so the policy was rolled out as I said right around Christmas time very festive and the following year the number of sick days taken by the entire Boston fire department rose by more than 100% costing the city uh tens of millions of dollars the number of firefighters who took exactly 15 sick days multiplied by 10 times and it wasn't just that people were taking more sick days it was that they felt their relationships were broken these were people risking their lives for their communities and their boss is treating them like selfish cheaters and so in essence they decided Well if you're not giving me a chance to be who I want to be I might as well become the selfish person you think I am so here we see an example of cynicism not just hurting the themselves but turning into a self-filling prophecy that brings out the worst in other people yeah I'm fascinated about the social psychology of contagiousness of cynicism I remember reading uh a study a while ago about what happens when you bring low performers into high performing teams and I think it was maybe teams of six and they wanted to see if three versus three brought three up or if four versus two or if five versus one and one malingerer one sort of workplace malingerer uh in a group of six was enough to bring down the productivity of the entire group because everybody defaulted to the lower end it's the sort of One Bad Apple spoils the lot and it kind of seems that cynicism creates this weird mirroring what's going on what's the what's the dynamic that's at play with this sort of group cynicism it's this is a really good Insight it's it's highly contagious cynical thinking is because if you are part of a group and somebody in that group is expressing hey you know people here can't be trusted this is not a safe environment to be vulnerable well everyone else in the group is like oh [ __ ] I better not uh I better not go out on a limb here so you see this in all sorts of group settings um one is uh one is that when you have groups uh in teams in organizations it's exactly the same as you say with performance if you have people who act in an untrustworthy manner uh then in essence all of the other people on the team will lower their trust not just of the person who's being untrustworthy but of everybody else here's another problem I'm sorry that I'm giving you all these problems I swear we will get it's fine we'll fix it we there'll be white pills on the back end it's okay don't worry we we are going to fix this but but one of the issues is that we also gossip asymmetrically so you were talking about how YouTube comments that are more negative tend to rise to the top well so does negative conversation in our everyday networks in my lab we had people play a game in groups of four uh this was a game where they each start out with some money they could either contribute that money to a common fund that would be doubled and split across the group or keep all their money for themselves and so you can see that contributing is the Cooperative thing to do but you can always cheat if you want to and basically play everybody else in your group so the vast majority of people in this game did not cheat they cooperated but we then gave them a chance to say well do you want to gossip write a note about one of the people in your group and send it on to a future group that's going to play and people did this and they were three times more likely to gossip about a person who had cheated than somebody who had cooperated so if you in a group where three people cooperate and one person cheats those three people who cooperated are all talking about the cheater which makes it look as though the entire group is full of cheaters so it because negative information proliferates so quickly we end up with an outsized view of how untrustworthy and selfish the people in our group are which is part of why cynicism is so contagious when people kind of spoil the well they Poison the Well with negative information people are quite ready to to run away from from from any form of trust yeah in the same way that we have a negativity bias when looking at the salience of information it seems like we have a a cynicism bias when looking at the salience of Gossip or the the Intrigue of Gossip I suppose it it's kind of painting this picture that trust is very fragile it's kind of gossam a thin in many ways is that the right way to look at it I think it is uh it's which is sad because it's so necessary for our world to to work smoothly at every level from one-on-one romantic relationships to National economies but it is it's it's fragile uh as the phrase goes and I think there's a reason for this trust takes years to earn and seconds to lose right and and there's something in economics known as betrayal aversion that people will make pretty irrational decisions very risk averse decisions even when in essence gambling on another person is positively skewed so you stand to win much more than you stand to lose if that gamble is a social one where you could be betrayed people are much less willing to take those chances so I think that betrayal is extremely powerful trust is relatively fragile and that's why we're sort of swimming Upstream when we try to fight against cynicism do do you know if cynicism crosses all domains so if somebody happens to be cynical in the world of politics are they cynical in the world of relationships and their workplace has a degree of cynicism in it so it means that they're the same when they consider Sports cynicism can be measured as a trait so you can say like the questionnaire that I that I walked you through um there are some people who are more globally cynical than others but we can also be do cynical in domain specific way if you work in an organization where people really take advantage of one another and are constantly in competition you'll be quite cynical there but if you come home and you live in a really generous and interconnected neighborhood where people watch out for one another you can shed your cynicism at the door right you can feel I suppose that would that would be the only way it would work it would have to be adaptive in that way or else you would be we mentioned before this cynical genius illusion basically people are patn matching incorrectly both the cynic thinks that they're smarter and isn't and other people think that they're smarter and they're not but that's actually as you said they're inaccurate a lot of their decisions about the world in terms of detecting Liars are inaccurate so I suppose that this ability to at least for some people at least some of the time in some situations compartmentalize their cynicism helps to reduce the sort of infection and spread within your own life that's right and I would say that when we manage to compartmentalize cynicism enough it's no longer cynicism it actually turns into a much wiser more productive strategy which I would call skepticism right skepticism is where we don't have a single blanket assumption a security blanket I suppose assumption that people are great or that they're terrible but rather we think not like lawyers right where we're arguing for or against humanity we think like scientists we take each situation as its own experiment and come up with new rules for how we engage in each environment that we encounter skepticism is the truly wise philosophy in my opinion when compared to either cynicism or gullibility I think a lot of people as you often do with lexical games as soon as you say well you don't want to be cynical you want to be skeptical you go well I'm not I'm not cynical I am I am just skeptical and you go well you're skism looks an awful lot like cynicism to me exactly and I think that this is why it's so difficult to practice good skepticism because oftentimes that we want to say that that's what we're doing but again we take the easy way out and the easy way way out in this case is to appear to be thoughtful without being thoughtful it's a lot of work to evaluate every situation and every person as you encounter them sometimes we need need blanket assumptions right I mean so for instance I have a blanket assumption if I'm playing poker I think the person across the table from me is trying to take my money I don't need to evaluate each poker player I play against in order to mistrust them while we're at the table I might trust them a lot when we're not but I take that type of situation as something that I can rightly stereotype as as one where I don't want to have a lot of trust being with my family is the opposite I know I don't have to evaluate my mother or wife every time I see them I know that I can trust them right so there are ways to simplify but it's a lot of work especially when we're encountering new people and new situations to be skeptical but that work is incredibly worthwhile because it's the way that we actually learn and adapt and Achieve wisdom yeah so what about what's happening with cynicism levels across time have you done any longitudinal analysis of whether or not humanity is getting more or less cynical it's a great question and there's uh really good data from the US good in that it's high quality data not good in that the news is good because cynicism has been on the rise uh for at least 50 years here in the US so in 1972 about half of Americans believed most people can be trusted and by 2018 that had fallen to about a third of Americans that drop is as big as the the stock market took in the financial collapse of 2008 so we are living in a real trust recession and it's not just in the US there was a survey recently of 28 countries around the world uh and the researchers in this survey found that in 24 of those 28 countries most people said their default was to not trust others so there's really is a growing bias against trust and towards cynicism that appears to be occurring in many places around the world what do you attribute that to it's hard to know because history is not an experiment right you can't run it a thousand times and tinker and establish causality so anything that I say here is speculation but there are two things that I think uh at least bear some attention the first is inequality it turns out that both places and times that are more economically unequal tend to be less trusting so if you live in a town or County or a nation that is highly unequal you tend to trust less and that's not just if you're poor right if you're poor in a highly unequal area you might have reason to mistrust but even if you're wealthy in a very unequal versus a more egalitarian uh area you're less trusting now why is that well high levels of inequality tend to put people in a zero some mindset where anything that you gain right there's not enough to go around so anything you gain I lose so that's one thing that we look to one big social parameter that might track cynicism and then the second is just media saturation you know we have this ancient negativity bias but of course all throughout our lives that ancient bias has been combined with a hyper modern ecosystem that just feeds us in constant information information that's meant to keep us clicking and scrolling and watching not meant to make us happy crucially not meant to make us wise or accurate about what people are like and so organizations that provide this information have learned over the course of time that the best way to keep people engaged is to feed them as much negativity bias as we can and it turns out that people who watch more news who spend more time on social media have a more Bleak view of the world and of humanity does that by Bleak view of the world does that mean more cynical more cynical but also you know I think it's important to again dispel the cynical genius illusion here because sometimes when I when I tell people this they say well yeah if you're watching a lot of the news you're more informed they're more informed yes yeah I can I can hear the YouTube comments already me too but it turns out that that's not always the case I'll give you an example there's something something that communication theorists call mean world syndrome so people who watch more television news believe that violence is a greater danger to them than uh people who watch less news and over time as people as media has become more saturating uh at least in the US on yearly National surveys almost every year most Americans think that violent crime is getting worse in our country I pulled FBI statistics from the from a three decade period that coincided with those surveys and I found that over the 30-year span when most Americans thought every year was worse than the last they envisioned our country as like Gotham City from Batman or something right but FBI statistics reveal that over that same span violent crime around the nation decreased by 50% so here's one case where tuning into the news doesn't just make you think things are worse it makes you demonstrate more wrong about how the nation is does that mean that smart people are less accurate with their assessment of the world then why say say more about why smart people would be less cical would be less accurate with their assessment of the world yes that is true and here's where and I know we've been down in the cynical dumps for a while now maybe this can be a a turn towards the light because I I can tell you you know for me I I was a cynical person am still a recovering cynic and I started this project three four years ago in part to uncover the science of cynicism and in part to see what was going on with me and it turns out that I was inaccurate because most cynics are inaccurate it also turns out that marinating myself for years in the science of Suspicion and mistrust and hopelessness made me a much more positive and bullish person why would that be well because again it turns out that if you look at the data cynicism is driving us not just to Bleak conclusions but to unnecessarily Bleak conclusions and when you look more closely at what people are actually like the average person is more trustworthy more generous more open-minded and friendlier than most people realize right that's not to say that there aren't folks doing horrible things every day but the average person and especially the cynic underestimates the average person what about the relationship between our upbringing and cynicism other certain types of upbringings certain types of people that are predisposed to cynicism yes so first there is a uh there's a a heritable component to cynicism meaning that there's some genetic factors that like raise your potential for cynicism that seems to be a pretty minor Factor though much more reliable is our home environment and in particular attachment style so you probably know that some kids are securely attached others are insecurely attached and attachment is kind of a standin for whether you think you can count on your caregivers early in your life and by extension whether you think you can count on other people and so if as a child somebody has a history of feeling alone unsafe as though the world and other people are unreliable that tends to follow that child into adulthood and insecurely attached kids tend to become if not cynical adults at least less trusting adults in their relationships and with strangers as well yeah it's that thing about uh when you see somebody getting angry it's kind of a little like that's a a hot stone that they've carried and you wonder who gave them that stone and who gave them that stone and who gave them that stone and it's kind of the same I guess with cynicism that I don't know certainly some people will be predisposed to it certainly there's a heritable component to everything psychological that makes us but also to perpetuate that I'm British which means we're kind of uh I think culturally predisposed to a little bit of cynicism we can be quite D we can sort of think of the words think the words most of things a lot of the time personalities is a lot like the weather uh but since being in America I've noticed that it's my dispositions changed uh it's been nudged forward Bit by Bit by Bit by people that are more Blue Sky Thinking and more hopeful for the future and sort of believe that things can go right and less sort of cutting and and and such so yeah I I don't know I I really do hope that people see the uh Folly in cynicism that it's it's it seems Aur it seems sophisticated uh it seems like it protects you from the world but it doesn't it just guarantees failure on a different s of set of terms um I don't think as well that cynics come across to the people that they want to be liked by very well I mean being the king of a bunch of sort of other negative people doesn't sound like a particularly glorious Kingdom to uh you know be the Lord over it's not and I think this is something that people get really stuck in I think of cynicism almost as a psychological quicksand you know it sort of pulls you in and changes your patterns of behavior and and when you act cynically other people around you become cynical they also become more selfish and you decide you were right all along there's all these self-fulfilling prophecies that trap us and I think it's a tragedy frankly you know I again really don't blame people for feeling this way especially if they've been betrayed or hurt especially early in their lives my thought on this is not you shouldn't feel that way but rather we don't have to feel this way there are all sorts of ways to break out of cynicism there's even ways to break out of insecure attachment there are therapies that people can use that that allow them to achieve something known as earned attachment where you can shed those hot that hot stone you've been carrying can finally drop it and sort of re be reborn in new relationships and into a new identity and there are ways to shed our cynicism as well practical tools we can use to find the truth about other people which is often full of pleasant surprises to lean into a type of hope and trust that are not gullible or naive but datadriven and healthy and ultimately successful can we talk about some of those tools can you take us through them I'd love to yeah so the first is to try to shift from cynicism to skepticism so it's a change in mindset um and the way to do this again is to to challenge ourselves to think more like scientists one way that I do this with my own cynicism which is very frequent is to be skeptical of my cynical thoughts right so if I encounter a stranger and I find myself mistrusting them immediately or if I find myself making a blanket judgment about all politicians or all lawyers or whatever other group of people I stop myself I try to hit the pause button on that inner chatter right I know I have negativity bias I know that these are programs that are operating under the surface of my mind but we can call those programs up and take a hard look at them when we want to and I try to do that with my cynicism I say okay Zaki you're a sci if you were trying to support the claim that's going on in your head scientifically what evidence would you use and often times the answer is well nothing I have no evidence to support this claim and so I think kind of stepping out of our own mental Loops is a first step towards this mindset a second mindset shift and then we can talk about behaviors that we can change as well is what I call a reciprocity mindset so often times cynics and the rest of us don't realize how much influence we have on other people the fire chief in Boston probably didn't know that by trying to catch some of his firefighters cheating he would change all of them for the worse right he just thought he was trying to find out or or figure out who already was mingering um so but we do have lots of power over people when we mistrust them they become less trustworthy but the opposite is also true when we trust people they're more likely to step up and meet our expectations and in my lab we taught people this fact we said hey did you know when you put Faith in other people they become more faithful to you right they will pay that back trust isn't just you taking a chance it's you giving a gift to another person that they're likely to repay and we found that when we taught people this they were more willing to trust others and others in return became more trustworthy so that mindset of reciprocity can turn these uh dark uh sort of toxic self-fulfilling prophecies into more virtuous ones I suppose the weird asymmetry that we have as an experiencer is that we feel the pain of broken trust but we don't feel the pain of not trusting fully yes I love that this is a huge point in the you're you're like in the weeds of the literature here actually there's this great study where people could choose to trust a stranger or not and they with money and and they had to guess how often do you think this stranger will be trustworthy and most people guessed about 50% of the time people would act in a trustworthy manner uh but actually 80% of the time people acted in a trustworthy manner the thing is that when people chose not to trust they didn't learn that they were wrong right you only learn when you've trusted incorrectly you don't you never learn when you've mistrusted incorrectly and that's something that I think a lot of us don't understand we don't realize that we're taking in information asymmetrically we're only learning half the story and betrayals are you know might haunt us but all the missed opportunities we have fall completely out of our view and because of that we miss more of them yeah I I think about this a lot especially to do with internet content that the stories that rise to the top especially on a site let's say like Reddit for instance which are usually individual posts by an individual user a lot of the time about something that's happened in their life and by Design the most egregious outrageous stories are the ones that rise to the top because they're so non-typical so what what are you learning from if that's the data set that your personal GPT is learning from you're learning from the most tail end outcomes that anybody could have and then you're saying well that's the way that most of the world is it's like no that's literally the opposite like the the world's experiences are on a bell curve and you're choosing to to invert it and have this sort of U-shaped curve that is and this this is now my new worldview it's incredible isn't it I mean if I'm driving my kids to school the Thousand motorists who follow traffic laws and are very polite completely they're they're lost to me five minutes afterwards right they they recede into the landfill of lost memories but the one person who cuts me off I think about for the rest of the day and I feel like I've learned something about Humanity from that one person and you're exactly right it's because they're unusual we are over rotating on exceptions and and forgetting the rules that make those exceptions which are often that people are quite positive and and act in ways that are kind and uh and trustworthy and so we're learning from exactly the wrong evidence in many cases but we don't have to another strategy that I've used in my own life and that I encourage people to use uh it's actually inspired by cognitive behavioral therapy I call it encounter counting right so if we have 10 different conversations in a day 20 conversations 50 conversations we know because of negativity bias we're going to remember the one worst conversation more than any of the other ones so I encourage people to just take a notebook with with you just one day you don't have to do this every day and write down after each significant conversation you had what it was like and compare the actual data of what your social day was like to how you experience it how you remember it how you expect it to go and I think this is where we can try to fight against the asymmetries in our minds more effectively by treating our lives a little bit more like an experiment by being more observant by noticing more carefully and again when we do all of the quiet goodness that is all around us but that we ignore comes into Focus talk to me about the role of Hope what is Hope in the world of cynicism yeah this is a great question and hope I want to differentiate we're doing a lot of great I think uh linguistic work here um so hope is different from optimism optimism is the belief that the future will turn out well uh optimistic people tend to be happier but they can also become complacent right because if the future is going to go great no matter what you do you don't have to do anything you can kind of sit on the sidelines optimism is also a bit fragile because if you have very Rosy expectations of the future and they don't come to pass you can be disappointed quite easily right you could have sworn that everything was going to turn out great and it hasn't so it must all be terrible I think optimists are actually at Great risk of becoming cynics later on Hope by contrast is the belief that things could turn out well and I know that sounds like a small distinction but it's not because in the uncertainty that hope gives us that uncertain future makes room for our actions to matter right whereas optimism is complacent hope is action oriented and you see this in the research hopeful people more than optimistic people take action they feel agency they try not just to Envision a better future but to chart a path to that future and then walk through that path and it's especially useful for people who are facing adversity right we think of Hope as privileged or toxic or naive sort of happy go-lucky philosophy that ignores all of the world's problems in fact as researchers see it hope is a great way to attack our problems to try to overcome them through our efforts how can people cultivate more hope well there are a bunch of interventions in the world of psychology that help people do that the the first is to be really to to remember that hope is very specific right hope there's this snarky saying that people often tell me now that I've written a book about hope hope is not a plan actually hope should be a plan it should be exactly that that hope should entail a number of different things if you want to cultivate it the first is to Envision in very precise and specific terms a future that you want and hopefully a future that is within reach one where your actions could bring you closer to it the second is to draw a map between where you are and that future what are the actions that you could take what are the actions other people could take take what could come to pass that would bring that future about so create a pathway to it and then take the steps to walk along that path right so there are these great interventions for students from lowincome backgrounds that help them do these three different steps right Envision a future chart a path and then take steps to towards that path and they find that those interventions help low-income students achieve more academic through this process of active hope right not complacent optimism what do you think's happening there is it making a positive future feel more in reach by laying out step by step how it could come to pass is that the sort of fundamental mechanism I think that's exactly it one of the things that I think makes it hard for us to pursue our goals is when they feel too far away or when they feel totally out of our control and I know many people feel that way about world events right now in this social media age like my my students my undergraduates live such a different life than I did when I was 18 when I was 18 90% of the world I cared about was Framingham Massachusetts you know town of 70,000 people and in that town if I wanted to do something chances are I could or at least I could try my freshman students they're worried about problems occurring five ,000 10,000 miles away they're worried about Generations into the future and these problems feel so enormous that it's hard to feel hope because it's hard to feel agency so hope then is often a matter of trying to take those grandiose gigantic problems those goals that feel Out Of Reach and impossible and saying well let's try to work backwards from there what's something closer what's something smaller that at least moves Us in that direction it's sort of chunking one big goal into a bunch of smaller ones what do you advise your students who are uh swimming in the muck and the Meer of modern media landscape what what do you say to them to sort of maintain a hopeful mindset avoid cynicism when they're terminally online and spending a lot of time bombarded by bad news I mean first log off whenever you can you know I mean I I really do think that uh this younger generation the people who are coming into college now I think are Awakening to what social media has done to them and and I I if if if you ask me I think that younger people will begin rejecting social media uh more than than gen z um I hope at least that that's what happens um but I think that there are a bunch of other things that you can do even if you're not willing to totally log off uh one is to just audit the information that you're receiving ceing and be skeptical of it remember that their that the profit models of these companies uh depend on making you feel as bad about things as you possibly can so you are receiving half the story you're not receiving the whole story second is to try and seek out the other half of the story um in my book I talk about this great organization called the solutions journalism Network this is a group of reporters who pull together stories about people solving problems so this is positive news but it's not positive news like oh a cute kitten was rescued from a tree yesterday you know it's not that Feelgood sort of stories that that help us ignore world events instead it's stories for instance of um people citizens fighting gerrymandering to have greater power to their votes or uh or inmates teaching each other uh skills-based classes so they can work more quickly when they leave prison these are stories of people lifting each other up and solving or at least addressing major problems so I encourage my students to balance their media diet the same way that they would balance their nutritional diet and realize that what they consuming online is often a bunch of really empty if not toxic calories and that they need if they're not going to totally cleanse they at least need to supplement where's that website where can people go to read that stuff this is called the solutions journalism Network um and it's just a bril theyve there's something known as the solutions story tracker which is a a a library of thousands of stories of people again solving real problems or at least addressing problems and these days if I read something incredibly depressing in in some news source I immediately go to the solutions journalism Network and I look up the same topic to see well what are people doing about this it's like a a anesthetic to a cut or a graze that you've got from normal media and then you go across to the other one um just thinking about sort of this body of work you mentioned that this was quite a personal project for you given that well just explained that because I think I it kind of would be for me as well yeah well I mean I'm I'm happy to well I'm happy to open up I you know I I I certainly um I I made the choice early in this project that especially for something like cynicism where people I think feel so much pain I didn't want to present myself as somebody who solved this whole problem and I'm just speaking from on high so uh one of the things about me is that for 20 years I've been studying kindness empathy compassion social support friendship all these really Rosy pieces of human nature and because of that I've developed a little bit of a Persona that is people often recruit me to write or speak for them when they want to feel good about Humanity when they want a shot in the arm uh but a secret that entire time is that even though I study this stuff I can't always feel it right just understanding something scientifically isn't the same as knowing it in your heart and I myself have struggled with cynicism since I was a kid you know I was had a pretty chaotic home life and uh and have always had trouble trusting people um and have always found it quite easy to see the worst in people so there was this split really between the way I presented myself professionally and who I felt like internally and this project for me was it was an attempt to harmonize my inner and outer lives yeah I um there's that vonet quote that you're fan of we are who we pretend to be should be so we should be careful who we pretend to be and a friend that I sat down with last year stopped making content on the internet because he said that he felt like he had to live up to in private the things that he was saying in public and I suppose that there's two ways to do that you can either stop saying things in public or you can start being in private the version of you that you are in public or bring them both in line um but that's it's kind of like I don't know the the guru's fallacy or whatever that if you have done some work or if you are an evangelist for a particular worldview that people then begin to assess you personally yes about how well you can adhere to that worldview you go almost all of the people that I know their research is me search it's some flaw or interest or unrequited desire that they have deep down that is the reason that they're so passionate about the thing that they're doing and uh yeah I mean unfortunately scientists kind of have a much tougher run of it at the moment because those of us that just get to play in the shallow end of the pool aren't I don't think any of us I'm I'm certainly not held to any standard essentially at all uh but yeah I can see how that would be how that would be challenging have you so you mentioned you you've gone through a bunch of different tactics and sort of reframing strategies is there something that you have found as a uh uh rehabilitating ex cynic what's the most used strategy or Mantra that you find yourself coming back to on the daily basis there's many but one that I'll share now um is an action that I try to take much more often uh than I used to which is what I call leaps of Faith right I think that in general I'm not saying in every case and I'm not telling people what to do but I think that in general we are too risk averse in our social lives we play it safe because we worry that if we don't people will take advantage of us or maybe something more mundane will happen maybe I'll open up to somebody and they'll just be bored they they won't want to talk about what I'm what I what I have to say um or they'll judge me right and and I felt that way all the time and and to your point I was representing a public version of myself which was accurate to the science right I mean I wasn't I wasn't lying I was telling the truth about research which is my job but I wasn't feeling the I wasn't feeling the way that you might when you learned about that research which I don't it's I don't actually think it's my job to feel a certain way but people I think would be surprised because I didn't open up I I I had this my exterior was so positive as a happiness and kindness scientist that one of my friends started making fun of me and calling me Guy Smiley because she said you just are so smiley all the time and I thought huh I think she means that maybe as a compliment or a joke but it actually makes me really sad because I realized that I've felt unsafe presenting who I really am I felt unfaith unsafe putting faith in people and so since starting this project you know one of the things that I've learned is that people are much more trustworthy than we think and we vastly underestimate how well it will go when we when we put Faith in others whether that means trusting them uh with money or with ourselves and so I've tried to purposefully take more risks than I did in the past now that's not to say that I'm sending my bank account information to a prince who's going to wire me 14.5 million but I TR that works I swear that works every time at least one of these times it will work I just have to keep on opening new accounts and eventually I'll score but but I I just am much more vulnerable with people in my life than I was before I'm much quicker to say when I'm struggling I'm much quicker to say what's going on with me and to be honest even when that is unpalatable or when that requires something of a friend right so I used to suffer much more in silence because I thought that I would be a burden on other people if I if I opened up to them and now I realized that was a very cynical way of viewing other people I was assuming that they didn't want to be there for me even though they were my friends or in some cases my family and now I take these leaps of Faith all the time and I am so shocked frequently at how friendly strangers are at how trustworthy new new people in my life are at how capable my trainees are when I trust them with more responsibility and at how warm and giving the people in my in in my life are and my journey now is to try to stop being so surprised right to try to actually you know what I mean to to try to update to try to be a good beian to try to update my world viiew in light of the evidence you know I I think that and I I imagine that a lot of your listeners might experience this if they took more leaps of faith on people they might be surprised too because people are surprisingly positive because we are overly negative in our in our assumptions and it's like that uh game where you only get to find out how often people betray you with money if you give them some money that you don't actually get to have all of the positive reinforcement from people with you putting your faith in them unless you put your faith in them so I guess the final the final thing the final hurdle Horseman of the cynicism apocalypse that I can think of is the felt sense of discomfort in unsafety when you're faced with the potential of having to do a thing you're you remember even though it was six years ago the last time that somebody betrayed you or whatever it might be you've got this sort of ambient lingering sense that something might go wrong what's your advice to people who when they are faced with the potential to be hopeful or to be uh positively skeptical there's something arises inside of them that kind of feels tight and tense and and limiting because I kind of get the sense that that's probably where a lot of people may get stuck I think that's right and you know I know on your show you talk a lot about high performance and how to sort of how to achieve more whether that's in a variety of domains in life and I think a a common message that you hear in any type of high performance setting is you need to take risks you can't achieve much by just focusing on being as safe as you possibly can all the time now taking risks doesn't mean being Reckless or putting yourself In Harm's Way but I think that in essence hope is the social version of risk taking in our careers of risk taking in our athletic lives of risk taking to be as as as high achieving and as successful as we want we need to take risks and I think that a lot of us are trained to be risk seeking or at least risk accepting in a lot of domains but not socially and I think what hope demands of us what true social fulfillment demands of us is that we realize that we need to take some risks in that part of our life as well the same way that we would in any other part where we want to do something great isn't that interesting the framing around risk-taking in extreme sports or in a a a game of business or in moving to a new country or doing whatever is uh perceived bravely but taking risks socially yes is seen as naivity isn't that amazing I I this is one of the things that really floors me is we have these highly uh I suppose um we have these really shifting standards for what is brave and courageous and what is frankly stupid and I don't know why I mean I I get it that being betrayed feels bad and it makes you look bad socially but that is a poor rationale for giving up on so much that social life has to offer us friendship collaboration uh even love right those these are some of the greatest achievements you can have in your life and to lose them because you're too scared to be the chump it it strikes me as as a real tragic way to live a very understandable way to live just the same way I mean I don't do any extreme sports because I fear bodily injury but for somebody who wants to have that thrill to have that feeling they know they have to take risk and if you want to truly be able to love if you want to truly be yourself in community with other people you need to be willing to take some risk amen I love it let's bring this one into land dude where should people go they want to keep up to date with everything you're doing oh well thank you um uh you can find me at Jamil dzaki dcom uh my book hope for cynic the surprising science of human goodness is available wherever books are and my lab at Stanford is the social Neuroscience lab and you can find us at SS snl. stanford.edu awesome d i I could have this conversation all day I think it's very timely to do a book about cynicism I I'm fascinated to see what you do next and good luck with the rest of the tour as well thank you this has been really delightful um thank thank you for having me if you enjoyed that episode you will love a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last couple of months and it's available right here go on give them a watch