How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki

welcome to the huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday [Music] life I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Opthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine my guest today is Dr Jamil Zaki Dr Jamal 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 context 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 resp search 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 cynic 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 our first sponsor is Maui Nei Maui Nei venison is the most nutrient-dense and delicious red meat available I've spoken before on this podcast about the fact that most of us should be seeking to get about one gram of quality protein per pound of body weight every day that protein provides critical building blocks for things like muscle repair and synthesis but also promotes overall health given the importance of muscle as an 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really like doing Yoga Nidra or what is sometimes called non-sleep deep rest for about 10 or 20 minutes because it is a great way to restore mental and physical Vigor without the tiredness that some people experience when they wake up from a conventional nap if you'd like to try the waking up app please go to waking up.com huberman where you can access a free 30-day trial again that's waking up.com huberman to access a free 30-day trial and now for my discussion with Dr Jam Zaki Dr Jam Zaki welcome thanks so much for having me delighted to have you here and to learn from you uh 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 way 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 and so on but just to kick things off what is cynicism you know I 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 you know 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 vaget 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 uh thanks for bringing that up Kurt vut one of my favorite uh authors and to me that quote is enormously powerful because it expresses the idea of self-fulfilling prophecies you know there's this subjective sense that people have that our version of the world is the world that we are passively taking in information veridically uh 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 right 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 right 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 uh 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 uh some of these folks had a cheerleader not not an actual cheerleader but a a 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 so uh most people when they had this friendly person by their side their blood pressure as they prepared for the 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 uh in in magn itude 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 and 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 uh in a social way a second thing that happens when you choose to 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 um you know 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 great prefrontal system maybe right even if he has to eat the Box uh in order to uh get to the cookie quicker um you have Elmo who's all loving and you have Oscar the Grouch somewhat cynical but certainly grouchy and then in you know essentially every fairy tale or every Christmas story or uh you know there seems to be sort of a skeptic or somebody that can't be brought on board the celebration yeah one would otherwise have but even though kids are learning about cynicism and grouchiness and um krogans 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 the ver 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 um insecure attachment is uh 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 uh 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 uh a stranger enters the room a couple 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 uh 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 skiddish 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 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 uh of a reunion of a of a caregiver and and and infant acting in a way that felt loving and stable they looked longer as though that was surprising kids who were cely 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's 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 you know I can think of some places where they might overlap um but cynicism seems to carry um 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 the discrepancy between these two ways of viewing the 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 uh again untrustworthy and self-oriented it's a hyper darwinian view right that that ultimately people red and tooth and Claw um skepticism is instead uh the I guess restlessness uh with our assumptions a desire for new information one way I often think about it is that cynics think a little bit like lawyers right 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 right and you see this actually that cynical people will offer more ulterior motives when uh they see an act of 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 right naive gullibility is trusting people in a credulous unthinking way I would say cynicism is mistrusting people in a credulous and unthinking way so if if cynics then think like lawyers sort of in the prosecution Against Humanity Skeptics think more like scientists uh skepticism you know classically in philosophy is the belief that you can never truly know anything but as we think about it now it's more uh the desire for evidence to underly any claim that you believe uh and the great thing about skepticism is it doesn't require an ounce of naive 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 like okay these two groups disagree or um 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 I admittedly my my understanding of cynicism um is still rather uh superficial um you'll change that in the course of the uh our discussion uh but that cynics um are not embracing the complexity of disagreement they are moving away from the um certainly any notion of excitement by complexity it seems like it's a a heuristic it's a way to simplify the world around you that's exactly right uh Phil tetlock has a great uh 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 right and 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 and 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 where and I don't want to get too nerdy well I guess I can get nerdy here get as nerdy as you want this audience likes nerdy so let's think in beian terms right so beian 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 right into a posterior distribution into a new set of beliefs um and that's great that'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 so think about mistrust for instance right it's easy to understand why people mistrust you know 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 uh would have been trustworthy or not when we trust we can learn whether we've been right or not right 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 uh we can start a collaboration we can live a full social life and 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 are invisible to us wow there's certainly a lot there that maps to many people's experience so 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 um and there could be any number of reasons for this or perhaps even more interestingly uh do we find cultures where there really is isn't even a word for cynicism wow uh I I love that question there is a lot of variance in and the the data on cynicism are much more local to the US typically I mean for for uh for better and For Worse a lot of research on this is done in an American context but that said uh there's a lot of data on generalized trust which you could say as an inverse of cynicism right so for instance there are National and international uh samples of major surveys which ask people whether they agree or disagree that most people can be trusted and there's a lot of variant 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 um from uh Kate Willet and uh Richard Wilkinson um that uh they they have a book called the spirit level where they look at inequality across the world and related to Public Health outcomes and one of them is trust um there's also variance in trust over time you know so you can look at not just are there places or cultures that trust more than others but when does a 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 americ am an 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 so there's a lot of variance here um both across space and time and one of the not the only but one of the uh 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 suome 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 uh 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 uh for themselves to succeed i' like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor ag1 by now many of you have heard me say that if I could take Just One supplement that supplement would be ag1 the reason for that is ag1 is the highest quality and most complete of the foundational nutritional supplements available what that means is that it contains not just vitamins and minerals but also probiotics prebiotics and adaptogens to cover any gaps you may have in your diet and provide support for a demanding life for me even if I eat mostly Whole Foods and minimally processed foods which I do for most of my food intake it's very difficult for me to get enough fruits and vegetables vitamins and minerals micronutrients and adaptogens from food alone for that reason I've been taking ag1 daily since 2012 and often twice a day once in the morning or midm morning and again in the afternoon or evening when I do that it clearly bolsters my energy my immune system and my gut microbiome these are all critical to brain function mood physical performance and much more if you'd like to try ag1 you can go to drink a1.com Hu to claim their special offer right now they're giving away five free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3 K2 again that's drink a1.com huberman to claim that special offer 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 a Oscar the Grouch or a kudin like uh character and as I asked this question I'm thinking specifically about what you said earlier about uh 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 um classic boarding schools he grew up in South America but he went to these um boarding schools that were very strict yeah and he was taught he told me that um 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 yeah people thought that you were more Discerning yeah but that he felt it was a terrible model for going through life because it it veered into cynicism my dad happens to be a scientist yeah he's a I think a relatively happy person um sorry Dad a happy person seems happy but meaning um 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 in Daily AC small things and big things in life so clearly he resued himself from that um the forces that were kind of pushing him down that path but um that's the anecdote but I use that question more as a as a way to frame up the possible collaboration between cynicism and and and you know exuding boredom or or a challenge in shifting somebody towards a like happier affect yeah um because when I think about cynic I think that they're like kind of unhappy people um and when I think about people who are not very cynical I think of them as kind of kind of cheerful and curious and um there's some aboian there they might not be tiger-like in their um in their affect but you know they kind of Veer that direction Andrew I love this trip down memory lane I'm having all these childhood memories of uh of 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 is pretty straightforward the eff of cynicism on well-being is just really documented and and quite negative so there are large prospective studies um with tens of thousands of people several of these studies that measure cynicism and then measure life outcomes uh in the years and decades afterwards and the news is is is pretty bleak for cynics right so uh absolutely lower levels of happiness flourishing satisfaction with life uh greater incidence of depression uh greater loneliness but you know it's not just the neck up that cynicism effects cynics over the course of their lives also tend to have greater degrees of cellular inflammation uh more incidence of heart disease and uh they even uh have higher rates of all cause mortality so shorter lives than non cynics and again this might sound like wait a minute you go from a philosophical Theory to a shorter life uh the answer is yeah you do because and again these are correlational studies so I don't want to draw too many causal claims but they're quite rigorous and controll 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 you know all through your your body and your organ system so again the news here is not great and I often think about you know one of the best encapsulations of a cynical view of Life comes from Thomas Hobbs 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 and ironically I think that might describe the lives 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 right if cynicism hurts us so much why would we adopt it right 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 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 gol 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 uh relationship in in our stereotypes in our models of the world Susan Fisk and many other psychologists have studied warmth and competence right how friendly and uh 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 compet ently 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 uh and 70% of respondents pick a cynical person over a non- cynic for difficult intellectual tasks 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 Stova this great psychologist who studies cynicism has this paper called the cynical genius illusion where she uh 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 um that in in other work uh this is not from Olga Stova 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 right and we should remind people that a hypothesis is not a question uh every gr experiment starts with a question and then you generate a hypothesis which is a uh a theory or conclusion essentially uh made upfront and then you go collect data and you see if you prove or disprove the hypothesis yeah and you can never really prove a hypothesis you can only uh support it or not support it with the data that you collect depending on the Precision of your tools but uh um that's very interesting because I would think that if we view cynic as smarter which clearly they're not as a group right you're saying cynics are not more intelligent right you I believe that's covered in in your book and um and if one knows that then you know why do we send cynic in uh kind of like razors to uh you know to assess what um what the environment is like is that because um we'd rather have others um deployed for us to to kind of like weed people out is it that we're willing to um accept some false negatives meaning um for those that I guess we're using a little bit of semi- technical language here false negatives who would be you know you're trying to assess a group of people that would be uh terrific employees yeah and you send in somebody to interview them that's uh 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 yeah and we're willing to accept that you know there probably two or three uh candidates that would also be right for the job but we're willing to let them go some false some false negatives um as opposed to having someone get through the filter who really can't do the job like we're willing to let certain opportunities go by being cynical or by deploying a cynic as the you know I'm imagining the person with the clipboard you know um very rigid like cynicism and rigidity seem to go together so that's why I'm lumping these kind of uh psychological phenotypes no I I think that's absolutely right and so a couple of things one you know 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 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 you know 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 you know we are built to pay lots of attention to threats in our environment and threats to our community and in the early social world you know if you wind I mean just to do some back of the envelope evolutionary psychology if you wind the clock back 100 150,000 years what's you know what is the greatest threat to early communities it's it's people right it's people who would take advantage of our communal nature right the thing that allows human beings to thrive is that we collaborate um but that collaboration means that a free rider somebody who chooses to not pitch in but still take 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 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 uh 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 often times you know we are risk averse in general meaning that we're more scared of negative outcomes than we are uh enticed by positive outcomes but in the social world that risk aversion is I I I think quite harmful in a lot of demonstrable ways is cynicism domain specific and there again I'm using jargon meaning if somebody is cynical in one environment like cynical about the markets like well things are up now but you know have an election come so things could go this way or that way depending you know um do they tend to be cynical about other aspects of Life other domains so there's a little bit of data on this um and it suggests a couple of things one left to our own devices our levels of cynicism tend to be pretty stable over time uh and also decline in older adulthood Contra The Stereotype of the kinly older person but another is that cynicism does tend to be pretty domain General so for instance cynics uh you know people and 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 you're not a fan of people and it turns out that people answer the 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 allpurpose view of the world at least as cook and medleaf first uh 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 um came from uh Southeastern Brazil there are two fishing villages in 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 economy this was a study led by Andreas LeBron a really great Economist they went to these Villages and they gave the 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 given some money yourself would you like to share some of it with another person and they found that when they start in their careers Lake fisherman and ocean fishermen were equally trusting and equally trustworthy as well but 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 people in both of these environments are right if you're in a competitive environment you don't trust and your right to not trust if you're in a collaborative environment you do trust and your right to trust and this is from the point of view of economic games and I think much broadly construed as well so one question then becomes well which of these environments do we want to be in right I think the costs in terms of well-being and relationships is quite obvious if you're in a competitive environment and then the 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 like 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 uh the distribution of individual scores there are exeptions to this of course like I think I've never been to business school but I think they form small groups and work on projects it's true in computer science at the undergraduate level and and so on but uh 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 um kind of a an erosion of cynicism because it sounds like being cynical is I I don't want to be hard on on the synic here but um they're probably already hard on themselves and everybody else um we know they're hard on everybody else but um oh there there was my presumption okay I'm going to stay open-minded maybe they're not you'll tell me um that you know that they are on average less intelligent is what I'm hearing that um and that there's a 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 you know provided they explore the data in an open-minded way even transiently it sounds like there's an opportunity there uh you gave a long-term example of these two uh fishing scenarios um so the neuroplasticity takes you know years but we know neuroplasticity can be pretty quick would imagine if you expose a cynic to a um 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 a great perspective and you know 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 like it's hard to trust um I I think that another point that you're bringing out that I want to cosign 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 I mean it 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 that's it's incredible Feats are lished when we focus on the great things that we can do and often times 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 um I think that the broader question is whether we canr 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 know you can imagine in a workplace two people have different ideas for how they want 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 they respect the most are the folks who they're battling in the case of of uh of 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 um maybe I'm um bridging two things that don't belong together but I'm thinking about the young brain which of course is hyperplastic um 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 Etc unconsciously and then in many ways the neuroplasticity that occurs early in life is to establish these maps of prediction you know if uh you know Things fall down not up in general Things fall down not up um and so on so that mental real estate can be used for other things and learning new things so I'm I'm thinking about the sort of classic example of object permanence you know you you show a baby a um you know 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 okay and then uh we hear that characters like Santa Claus are real and then eventually learn that they're not and so on and so on in many ways we go from being um completely non- cynical about the physical world to being um one could sort of view it as cynical about the physical world right like uh I love to see magic in fact we had probably the world's best or among the very best magicians uh on this podcast uh Azie 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 in real time and it just blows your mind to the point where you you like how that can't be but you you sort of want it to be and at some point you just go you know what it's it's what we call Magic so it seems to me that cynics um apply almost physics Like rules to social interaction like that um they talk in terms of like first principles of human interactions right they talk about um this group always this and that group always that right the these like strict categories thick black lines between between categories as opposed to any kind of blending of of understanding or uh blending of rules and one can see how that would be a really useful heuristic but as we're learning it's 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 uh yes and I I appreciate you saying yeah I I 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 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 love this I I've never thought about it in this way but I I love that perspective and there is almost a philosophical certainty maybe it's not a happy philosophical certainty but we love to right 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 right and really we all use theories to predict the world right I mean 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 at least right so 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 uh earlier in life and you know I do want to your your beautiful description of kids and their sort of sense of I suppose perennial surprise um 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 daker Kelner studies awe you know this emotion of experiencing something vast and and also experiencing ourselves as small and a part of that vastness and he he wrote a great book on awe um and in it he talks about his research where he cataloged what are the experiences that most commonly produce awe in a large sample 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 Sean's pale blue dot this image of a kind of Nebula band or you know sort of sort of cluster basically Stardust really and there's one dot in it with an arrow and and Carl San says that dot is Earth and every King and Tyrant and mother and father and every person who's ever fallen in love and every person who's ever had their heartbroken 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 awe I think of outer space I think of Groves of redwood trees I think of Drone footage of the Himalayas right but daer finds that if you ask people what they experience a 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 daer and John hey 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 that that that gives you tunnel vision and prevents you from experiencing moral Beauty seems like a tragic form of Simplicity I'd like i' like to take a quick break and thank one of our sponsors function I recently became a function member after searching for the most comprehensive approach to lab testing while I've long been a fan of blood testing I really wanted to find a more in-depth program for analyzing blood urine and saliva to get a full picture of my heart health my hormone status my immune system regulation my metabolic function my vitamin and mineral status and other critical areas of my overall health and vitality function not only provides testing 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as well as how comprehensive and how actionable the tests are that I recently joined their Advisory Board and I'm thrilled that they're sponsoring the podcast tast if you'd like to try function go to function health.com huberman function currently has a weight list of over 250,000 people but they're offering Early Access to hubman lab listeners again that's function health.com huberman to get early access to function I love that your examples of a both pale blue dot and uh everyday compassion Bridge the to uh what I think of as um time domains that the or I should say space time s that the brain can Encompass you know this has long fascinated me about the human brain and presumably other animals brains as well which is that you know we can sharpen our um aperture to you know something so so small and pay attention to just like the the immense Beauty and you know like 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 I you know they're like everywhere this summer and they're climbing on me and I thought I'm just kind of like watch what they do and clearly a structure there I know um Deborah Gordon at Stanford has has studied amp behavior and others and it's like there's a lot going on there but then you look up from there you're like wow there's a big yard and then the sense of awe for me is that interactions like that must be going on everywhere in this in this yard and you know it frames up that the aperture of our cognition in space and in time you know covering small distances quickly or small distance and slowly and then then we can zoom out literally and think about us on this ball in space right you know and um and that ability I think is is incredible and that awe can be captured at um these different extremes of SpaceTime um cognition amazing it seems to me 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 I love that we're talking about awe because um to me it feels like it's a more extreme example of delight um and I'd like you to um perhaps if if there's any examples of of research on this you know um touch on to what extent uh a sense of cynicism divorces us from delight and awe or uh I guess their um collaborator uh which is creativity to me everything you're saying about cynicism makes it sound anti- creative because you're by definition you're eliminating possibility and creativity of course is the unique original combination of existing things or the creation of new things Al together creativity yeah um so what if anything has been studied about the relationship between uh cynicism I guess we call it uh open-mindedness and uh creativity and or awe yeah great questions and there is some work on this and a lot of it comes actually in the context of the workplace right so you can examine I mean these Brazilian fish fishing villages were after after all workplaces right 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 um you know 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 in the corporate world but it was very uh Durer um in the late 20th and early 21st century you know up until 10 or so years ago and it still exists in some places and 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 Darwin species it's 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 uh when they are trying to do that right 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 uh quite unhappy and more likely to leave their jobs but some of the more interes 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 and if you screw up or if it doesn't go well you're eliminated from the group right so so 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 and that'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 right a lot of our best ideas come not from our minds but from the space between us from dialogue uh or from group conversation and it turns out that in stacked rank zero some 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 so to the extent that creativity requires a sort of collaborative mindset then cynicism is uh is is preventative of that and there's actually some terrific work um uh by by Anita wooly and colleagues uh 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 right controlling for the intelligence of individuals there's a group factor that still matters and so Anita willly and others have looked at well what predicts that type of collective intelligence and a couple of factors matter one is people uh 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 uh 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 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 a an involvement of different neuromodulators and and so on but um at the level of um kind of human behavior and emotional stance uh not technical uh not a technical term but I'll use it of say being um curious like 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 uh childlike mind so-called beginner's mind where you're open to different outcomes and it seems like the examples that you're giving keep bringing me back to these developmental themes because if it's true that CICS you know exclude a lot of data that could be useful to them um it seems that the opportunities for neuroplasticity are reduced for cynic um to flip it on its head um to what extent are we all a little bit cynical and how would we explore that like if if I were in your laboratory and you had 10 minutes with me and you what questions would you ask me um to determine how cynical I might be or how um not cynical I might be well the first thing that I would do is give you that classic questionnaire from cook and Med 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 what are people like and then I would um just kind of free associate about 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 since then olus aova and others have adapted cook medley and made it a shorter scale and turned the questions into Contin 1 to n or 1 to S uh answers um but generally speaking these are discret 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 um so the trust game involves two players uh 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 it the 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 do you 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 I I actually I'm curious would would you do that oh I absolutely zip it over to them yeah yeah I'm curious great you know and and I'm willing to lose the money um 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 people's uh um there's a great study by fetchenhauer and and and Dunning uh that found that uh 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 uh in fact 80% of Trustees make the pro-social and trustworthy decision uh and again what fetchenhauer and Dunning found is that when we when we have negative assumptions we're less likely to send over the money and therefore less likely to learn that we were wrong right uh and so that's one of it's another example of where cynical beliefs I mean you you're interesting because you had the belief that's a 50% chance but you still chose to trust right so From abasan perspective when that person actually sent the money back which they would have an 80% chance of doing and if if I were to ask you again what percentage of people give back you might update your perception absolutely right uh but without any evidence you can't update your perception so 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 uh compassionate or open-minded others are people's estimates come in much lower than data suggest 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 uh black and white physics likee 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 are everywhere the social world is full of a lot more positive and helpful and kind people than we realize right the the average person underestimates the average person this is not to say that there aren't awful PE you know 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 uh to to gaining more of those opportunities to using them and and and to finding out more accurate and more hopeful information about each other there does seem to be a salience about uh 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 and and there certainly is benevolence on social media but what if any data exists about um how social media either feeds uh or impedes cynicism or maybe it doesn't change it at all um and I should say that there's also the kind of um I have to be careful I'm trying not to be cynical um there I maintain the the view that certain social media platforms um encourage uh a bit more negativity than others um and certainly there are accounts I'm trying to think of like accounts like uh on Instagram like Upworthy which it's a whole basis is to you know promote positive stuff I like that account very much um but certainly you can find the full array of emotions on social media uh to what extent is just being on social media regardless of platform increasing or decreasing cynicism it's a it's a terrific question uh 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 right I mean so so let's first stipulate how much time we're spending on there I mean the average person uh goes through 300 feet of social media feed a day is that right they've measured it in feet approximately the height of the Statue of Liberty yeah so we're we're doing one Statue of Liberty worth of scrolling a day much of it Doom scrolling if if if you're anything like me at least um and 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 uh no that what we see on social media is not representative of the human population so there's a lot of evidence uh a lot of this comes from uh from William Brady now at Northwestern and Molly Crockett uh that when people tweet for instance I mean this a lot of this is done on 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 right 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 right 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 uh that Brady found that when people tweet in Outrage and then get egg Ed on and often times 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 right 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 right on the people who are sharing but a second question becomes well what about the people watching what about the rest of us Claire Robertson has a great paper on this where she documents that a vast majority I mean 90 plus% of tweets are created by the 10% of the most active users right 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 uh and maybe how 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 communication 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 uh when stranger danger was this big uh 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 ask people how many kids are being kidnapped by strangers in the US they would they would in many cases say 50,000 children are being kidnapped each year in the US 50 can you imagine what the world would it 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 often times when we tune into media we end up with these enormously warped perceptions where 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 in the in the social media Wars 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 uh I'm just exhausted by all this we feel like well I guess I'm the only one because everybody else seems real 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 to a tiny minority of what the journalist Amanda Ripley calls conflict entrepreneurs people who Stoke conflict on purpose that were confusing them with the average so much there um I 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 um you made this point that I've never heard anyone make before um which is that many people feel alone BYT the fact that they don't share in this Waring nature um that they see on social media it's almost like um sometimes I feel like I'm watching a combat sport that I don't feel quite um cut out for yeah and um and then when I'm away from it I feel better um but I like everybody else sometimes will you know get sucked into the you know highly Salient nature of of a combat between between groups on social media it's it's um can be very alluring um in the worst ways yeah um this mean world syndrome uh what's the inverse of that the kind world syndrome I suppose um but attempts at creating those sorts of social media platforms have been made things like blue sky which has other aspects to it as well but um and while it may be thriving I don't know I haven't checked um recently uh 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 uh why do you think that is well we as a species I think are characterized by what we would call negativity bias right negative events and threats Loom larger in our minds and that happens in a number of domains our decision- making uh is Nega 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 kanaman and tersi for instance uh The Impressions that we form uh are often negatively skewed so classic work in Psychology going back to the 1950s shows that if you uh 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 um or or they could be uh 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 um for a future generation of participants who would you like to share about and when somebody in a group acted in a selfish way they 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 pro-social 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 I see it and to your question you know what do we do here you know why don't positive networks positive information why doesn't it uh 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 uh as a life sentence as as a as a 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 none of us I think or 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 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 uh while not being on social media none none of the social media platforms um Can can you have a 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 they're they're they're Phantom threats the we're we're 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 you know 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 bloodthirsty and extreme that's going to limit your life in very important ways and 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 you know there is a lot there are a lot of ways in which in in in the attempt to stay safe right now we introduce ourselves to long-term danger I'm not antisocial media but um I have to Circle back on this yet again uh former guest on this podcast one of our most popular episodes is with a former Navy SEAL David goggin who's um known for many things but um Chief among them is striving and pushing oneself and David has said many times that nowadays it's easier than ever to be extraordinary because most people are basically spending time just consuming um experiences on social media and doing a lot less just literally doing a lot less not just exercising and running as he does although by the way he's in school to become a paramedic so he's essentially gone to medical school um and is always doing a bunch of other things as well so um he's also an intellectual learner um now I don't know if I agree with him completely but it's an interesting statement you know if social media is um bringing out our cynicism polarizing us and perhaps um taking away I I would probably agree with David uh at least to some extent taking away our um time where we could be generative writing thinking uh socializing um building in other ways of uh that one builds their life then I guess an important question is do you think social media could be leveraged to decrease sinicism or as you referred to it to generate hopeful skepticism like this notion of hopeful uh skepticism as a replacement for cynicism is something that is really intriguing like what would that look like like if we were just going to do the gonan experiment here like what what would a feed on social media look like that um fed hopeful uh skepticism as opposed to cynicism this here's a far out example I mean I love this train of thought so I'm going to try to take it to a logical conclusion that would never actually occur in real life but but a great way to generate more accurate and hopeful skepticism and by hopeful skepticism I mean skepticism as we've described a scientific mindset a scientific perspective and a curiosity uh a hunger for information and then the hopeful piece I simply mean skepticism that begins with the understanding that our defaults are are often too negative so that I'm going to be open and I'm going to realize that my gut instinct is probably uh leading me towards the negative and can be challenged that I don't have to listen to it all the time so just as a working definition um 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 to to social media about what they're doing today about what they're thinking about what they want about their values right if you could compel each of course that's dystopic in many ways but just as a thought experiment and then people's feed was a representative sample of real people on the planet right real people uh and and people who over time right 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 you know a grandmother who's driving her grandkid to hockey practice um I see a nurse who's coming in to help an elderly patient you know 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 and 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 as you were saying earlier as kind of dim naive a rosec colored pair of glasses but in fact I think what the data show us is that the we're we're all wearing a pair of soot colored glasses all the time and 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 and you know there's one version of this that we've tried at Stanford in our own backyard so my lab and I we've for years been surveying uh as many Stanford undergraduates as we can about their social health right so how connected are they how mentally healthy are they um and a couple 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 and we discovered not one but two stanfords 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 pricker 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 postto Ray pay uh tried an intervention and 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 uh at Stanford would like to help their friends who are struggling 85% want to make friends with new students we also worked with uh fros 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 6 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 and 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 there'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 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 I'm quite excited about and hopeful about AI I'm not one of these um I don't know what you call them but AI doomers um 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 um it seems to me to combine neural networks and Google search with PubMed and it 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 uh human uh lack of perfectness uh well enough that it it feels something kind of like brain like personality like um you could imagine that uh given the enormous amount of cynicism that's out there that some of the large language models that make up AI uh would be somewhat cynical um would put filters that were overly stringent on certain topics um you also wouldn't want AI that was not stringent enough yeah right because we are already and soon to be uh using AI to bring us information extremely quickly and the last thing we want are errors in that information so um 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 uh laced into these large language models I'm not talking about at the technical level that's be certainly beyond my my um 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 you know where you it's you know tuned down the 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 uh I love that question um I think that there is it I could imagine an opportunity for that I think one 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 you know basically AI models eat the internet right swallow it and then give it back to us in some form to the extent that the internet is uh asymmetrically waiting right is is overweighting negative content um and cynical content then AIS that swallow that will reflect it as well I think that and I could imagine and it's it's like it's blowing my mind in real time to think about but you could uh 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 right so don't make me go through uh my social media feed go through it for me correct right debias it uh and then and then and then give it to me uh in a more accurate way that's an incredible idea and that's what I want um I was thinking about my Instagram feed and cynicism versus hopeful skepticism versus I guess awe um and I'll use the following examples um I subscribe to an Instagram account that I like very much which essentially just gives me images of beautiful animals in their like in their ultimate Essence it's a 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 uh world's animals um that really capture their Essence um and many of them are endangered wow um and some very close to extinction others are more um you know more prolific uh right now nonetheless I 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 I we've actually collaborated with Nature's metal on a on a a great white shark grabbing a tuna um video that uh that um I didn't take but someone I was with took and we got their permission to post it in any event Nature's metal is all about the harshness of Nature and then I think about like the planet Earth series hosted by David atenor and so forth which sort of has a mixture of you know beautiful ducklings you know and um 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 you know if if you look at Nature's metal long enough you um and it's a very cool account I highly recommend people follow all three of these accounts um but if you look at it long enough you get the impression like like nature is hard life is hard out there and it can be you look at the saror account and you get the impression that you know animals are just beautiful they're just being them yeah right and um and he has such a he's 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 the human brain um 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 yeah in reality how Dynamic is cynicism you earlier you described how it can be domain specific but um you know if somebody is pretty cynical you know and they're you know older than 25 they're outside the sort of Developmental plasticity range you know 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 they're after all they're cynics like that we we can't we can't bait them with uh the good that they'll do for the world but they'll do that too yeah um you know what what are what are some tools that we can all apply towards being less cynical it's a it's a brilliant question and and you're right I mean I think a lot of us are very tuned into the metal side of life and you know heavy metal is great but you know life is not all metal so how do we retune ourselves I I think about this a lot um 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 uh and I guess they come in a bunch of categories I'm going to try to tick through them but but I I really want to hear your thoughts the first has to do with our mindsets and the ways that we that we approach our own thinking so I like to engage in a practice that I call being skeptical of my cynicism um so that is in essence taking tools from cognitive behavior 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 right what evidence do you have to back it up and very often I find that the evidence is thin to non-existent right so that challenge that just unearthing of wait a minute are you sure no you're not can 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 and how trustworthy they are but what you do also matters research finds that when you trust people they're more likely to become 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 uh 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 uh reciprocates which 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 whoa 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 um what I call social savoring uh I do this a lot with my kids actually you know um 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 and and think about it so my kids and I started savoring practices a couple years ago I call it classes so you know I'll say today we're going to do an ice cream eating class or we're going to do a sunset watching class cool I want to are you adopting children applications are coming in now we're evaluating them on a rolling basis I'm already graduate college um but so we'll just sit there you know and eat ice cream slowly you know not so that it melts but we'll say you know 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 Sommers salts 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 right 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 right 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 right it 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 become became a habit of mind so those three things being skeptical of my cynicism adopting a reciprocity mindset and social savoring those are those are three of the psychological pieces and I can get to some actions but but I yeah I wonder what you think of these oh I love those three and I love the um distinguishing features of savoring versus gratitude because uh there's so much data to support gratitude practices and uh I don't think I've ever heard those two distinguished from one another but clearly savoring things is um going to be is equally powerful uh towards our neurochemistry and our well-being and I I love that you include both sensory and interpersonal aspects to this these are highly actionable and I'm I'm sure people are as excited about them as I am because um you know all this knowledge from the laboratory is indeed wonderful but of course we always want to know like what what can we do um now that you've made such a strong case for um tuning down our cynicism a little bit in order to make ourselves smarter better happier and in touch with with with awe on on a more regular basis uh 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 uh the Monk and author Pim maoon this great great writer wonderful um has uh is written beautifully about treating your life like an experiment you know 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 you know one form of this is what I call taking leaps of faith on other people right 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 you know that I share my bank information with a prince who's going to wire me $14 million right 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 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 I 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 you know there's 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 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 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 are like this if you ask them to forecast what it would be like to talk with a stranger um 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 around on ideological grounds people forecast that these conversations would be awful awkward cringe painful uh and in the case of disagreement harmful even uh this is work from Nick Epley J Schroeder and many others by the way on something known as UND 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 Juliana and others then challenge people they say go and do this have this conversation 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 try to realize when my forecasts are too risk averse and too negative and say let me just jump in you know let me take this chance if it goes badly well fine and if it if it goes well even better the second piece here though is not just to take those risks but to document their effects right I I I call this encounter counting right so in essence Gathering new data from the world is great but if you forget those data well then the effects might be shortlived 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 on on this book I said let me take a chance you know 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 mean 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 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 um and thank you for reinforcing the process of reinforcing the 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 um you know 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 don't get passed through the the filters that um uh I forget because I 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 uh emotional learning and and our own personal Evolution which brings me to um uh 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 um P Chon yeah um one wonderful writer um there's someone else more or less in that space Byron Katie who um a lot of her work is about challenging beliefs by simply asking questions about our core beliefs um this is something that um I've started to explore a bit like one could have the idea that um you know uh good people always you know I don't know show up on time and wouldn't wouldn't we all love to be punctual and as an academic I confess uh for me everything starts 10 minutes after the hour so we're we're consistently on time but late right to the non-academics my friends from the military have a saying which is uh 5 minutes early is on time on time is late and if you're late you better um bring lunch you know so that kind of thing in any event um the the practice that she promotes um in in essence is to take a core belief and then just start challenging it from a number of different directions is that always true you know are there cases where that's not true what would that look like Etc 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 um 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 um you know is that always true are there ever instances where that's not true um 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 uh tend to air toward hopeful skepticism as opposed to cynicism um there too I I could imagine it would be useful to explore hopeful skepticism also as a scientist right are there cases where hopeful skepticism here I'm going to be cynical can really get us into trouble for instance anyway these I I obviously I haven't run a study on this just because I 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 I think that it's in essence being skeptical about our beliefs putting them through their Paces right kicking the tires on our own beliefs and again this reminds me of cognitive behavioral therapy right a person who's socially anxious might tell their therapist I think all my friends seek 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 wait what are 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 Katy what would it mean if it weren't true so this is the Bedrock of one of the most successful uh forms of therapy for depression and anxiety and phobia in in the world you know I do want to also I guess Zoom in on something that that 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 like the amount of people on from every part of the political Spectrum who want more compr 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 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 uh in the course of my work I've I've done um sort of some 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 you know 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 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 uh compassion uh cooperation and and collaboration right 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's 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 you know and and I think this is one of the other actions that we can take if we're in a leadership position anywhere right 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 often times those core beliefs beliefs are incredibly beautiful and surprising to the people in them in in those communities and give them what I would call not pure pressure but pure permission to express who 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 um comments and questions critique and you know and so forth um in the comment 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 um and to see what people's core beliefs are really about now oftentimes comments are are of a different form and that's okay that's all right um but I think that um because of the anonymity involved I I think I can see that now through the lens of what you're saying as as a license for people to really share their core beliefs about something as something that could be really informative and really enriching although I I much prefer I confess the the model that uh you're presenting where people are doing this in real time face to face as opposed to just online um as long as we're talking about polarization and the Wish For Less polarization um what are the data saying about the current state of affairs we're uh recording this uh you know about what 3 months months or so out from an election or 90 some days or so from an election um presidential election so without getting into discussions about political camps per se uh what do your data and understanding about cynicism and hopeful skepticism uh tell us about uh that whole process and and how the uh 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 but so like so many of the themes in this conversation right 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 and it's it's positive as well so there's a bunch of work on political perceptions this is work done by folks like Mina chakara at Harvard uh my colleague Rob Willer in sociology at Stanford our colleague Rob Willer uh and uh 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 they their the biases are 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 Republicans 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 in the other on the other side but we're even more wrong about what they believe and what they want so data suggests that there's perceived polarization that is what we think the other side believes is much greater than polarization I mean first of all we are divided let's stipulate that and those divisions can be really dangerous and 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 brunau collected some data where he gathered Republicans and Democrats views on immigration he said what would you want immigration to look like where uh 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 in 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 right so Republic Ians 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 uh 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 they're that that people on on 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 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 will solve our our div divided uh political landscape will 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 and I confess I didn't know that the landscape was um as toward the center uh as it turns out it is uh I have also many theories about how media and social media and podcasts for that matter might be contributing to this perceived uh polarization as opposed to the reality and uh 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 um can some of the same tools that you described to better interact with one's own children with one's own self uh with other individuals and in small groups be used to um sort of uh def fragment 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 uh 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 was an amazing study that was conducted during Thanksgiving of 200 16 which as you may recall was directly after a very uh polarizing election uh and researchers used geot 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 and they used that as a proxy of whether they're having dinner with people they disagree with and it turns out that people who crossed county lines who crossed into enemy territory again in quotes this is perceived polarization uh they had dinners that were 50 minutes shorter than people who were dining with folks who presumably they agreed with so we're talking about forsaking pie Andrew they're they're giving a pie in order to not talk with people they disagree with and 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 you know that's just not a great plan the truth though is that when we can collect better data often times we end up with better uh with better perceptions and I mean better in two ways one more positive and two more accurate right now 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 uh 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 uh took part in Zoom conversations we made sure that they really disagreed about gun control immigration and climate change and they talked about those issues um we asked them to forecast what those conversations would be like and we asked other folks to forecast what those conversations would be like and 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 um we then brought these folks together oh and 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 and 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 in them to rate how positive they were on a 1 to 100 scale and the most common the modal response that people gave us was 100 out of a 100 and 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 and they reported more intellectual humility more openness to questioning their own views so 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 and we don't we don't give ourselves chances to learn that we're wrong because we don't collect the data and when we do collect the data when we step in and take that leap of faith take that social risk we are shocked uh 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 J Dr zachie thank you so much for sharing your in incredible like can only be described as wisdom into this area of um Humanity right I mean to be a cynic um is uh one potential aspect of Being Human um but you've made very clear that we have control there's plasticity over this aspect of ourselves if we adopt the right mindsets apply the right practices and you know it's so clear based on everything you've shared today that you know humans are operating rationally and yet irrationally at the same time this I'm certainly not the first to say that um but in the context of cynicism and in the context of being happier individuals and families and couples and groups that to really take a hard look at how cynical we are and to start to make even minor inroads into that through belief testing you know I I wrote down as we were talking that uh 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 and you know I can't think of any higher calling than that and you're giving us the tools and those tools are supported by data these aren't just ideas they are they are data supported ideas and I just want to thank you for uh 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 and what you've shared with us today is phenomenal and I do hope to have you back again to talk about another topic that uh you are expert in uh which is empathy but we'll have to all wait uh with baited breath for that myself included so 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 uh on so on behalf of myself and everyone listening and watching thank you ever so much Andrew this has been an absolutely delightful conversation and and I will say my forecast of it was very high and it has exceeded that forecast um I also just want to take a moment to thank thank you for your work as a science Communicator um as somebody who believes in not just uh trying to generate knowledge but also to share knowledge I think that uh 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 and uh I think it's just it's an incredible Mission and clearly has had such wonderful impact so it's it's an honor to be part of that conversation um and and to be part of that effort well thank you I'll take that in and um it's a labor of love and an honor and a privilege to sit here today with you so thank you ever so much and 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 cynic please see the links in the show note captions if you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast please subscribe to our YouTube channel that's a terrific zeroc costway to support us another terrific zeroc cost way to support us is to follow the podcast on both Spotify and apple and on both Spotify and apple you can leave us up to a festar review please check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode that's the best way to support this podcast if you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the hubman Lab podcast please put those in the comment section on YouTube I do read all the comments 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 pre-sale at protocols book.com there you can find links to various vendors you can pick the one that you like best again the book is called protocols an operating manual for the human body if you're not already following me on social media I'm hubman lab on all social media platforms so that's Instagram X formerly known as Twitter threads Facebook and Linkedin and on all those platforms I cover science and science related tools some of which overlaps with the content of the huberman Lab podcast but much of which is distinct from the content on the huberman Lab podcast again that's huberman lab on all social media channels if you haven't already subscribed to our neural network newsletter our neural network newsletter is a zeroc cost monthly newsletter that has protocols which are 1 to three-page PDFs that describe things like optimizing your sleep how to optimize your dopamine deliberate cold exposure we have a foundational 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