If you’re someone who always thinks the sky is falling, chances are you’re not very happy. Jamil Zaki, professor of psychology at Stanford University and the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab, joins host Krys Boyd to discuss why cynicism leads to not only a more dismal outlook on life, but deleterious health effects. Plus we’ll hear why a little dose of hope can inject joy into everyday living. Zaki’s book is “Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness.”
This episode originally aired on September 6, 2024.
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Transcript
Krys Boyd [00:00:00] If you’ve been let down multiple times in your life, say, by people who were supposed to love you or jobs that didn’t work out the way you hoped or repeated experiences being mistreated based on your identity or your socioeconomic status, you might start viewing other people as inherently selfish, unreliable, even corrupt. After all, if you never go out on a limb to trust anybody else, you can’t be surprised when another person makes the cut that plunges you to the ground. The trouble is, cynicism doesn’t actually protect us from getting hurt. It just alienates us from sources of comfort. From Kera in Dallas, this is Think. I’m Krys Boyd. Expecting the worst from everyone in every interaction can feel like a tough and radical worldview in that it inspires us to seek out and call out bad behavior by others. But if we believe everybody is terrible and nothing will ever get better, we tend to not even try. Ironically, that serves elites who want nothing more than to perpetuate a status quo that works better for them than for the rest of us. My guest is a former cynic now remaking himself into what he calls a skeptical optimist. Jamil Zaki is professor of psychology at Stanford University and director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab. His book is called “Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness.” Jamil, welcome back to Think.
Jamil Zaki [00:01:24] Thanks, Krys. It’s great to be back.
Krys Boyd [00:01:26] Although this book is all about the downsides of cynicism, you do share here, it’s an outlook that comes pretty naturally to you as a result, in part of an upbringing you describe as chaotic. Would you say before you underwent these changes, your first instinct was to not look for the good in people.
Jamil Zaki [00:01:46] I think that I wanted to look for the good in people. But there was, as you said, an instinct deeper than what I wanted, which is what I feared. And as you mentioned, this is an old instinct for me that probably dates back to my childhood. I think a lot of people with relatively chaotic home lives feel as though they don’t really have much of a foundation for trust. Like, it’s harder for us to count on people because we might have felt let down very early on. So, you know, as you know, Krys, I’ve then ended up studying for 20 years the science of human goodness. And sometimes I wonder whether I got into studying compassion and kindness because I wanted to have an easier time spotting it in the wild.
Krys Boyd [00:02:31] When you met someone that you did instantly perceived to be likable and trustworthy and pretty good, when you were taking a more cynical view of things, did you assume like this has to be some kind of game in service to some manipulation?
Jamil Zaki [00:02:49] No, no, I wouldn’t say it was that bleak inside my mind. I certainly liked lots of people. I loved lots of people and obviously still do. I think for me, it was more this aching sense that people needed to feel that I was providing them some value. I don’t mean that people would express this to me. It was more like an internal world view that, Wow, I better be entertaining, I better be interesting because otherwise maybe people will leave me behind after all. Aren’t we all just looking for value from our interactions so I better provide value? I would say it was more of an anxious type of cynicism than a contemptuous form of cynicism where I really thought people were out to get me.
Krys Boyd [00:03:33] Got it. You were deeply influenced by a dear friend of yours who was just an extraordinarily hopeful person. Will you tell us a little bit about Emile Bruno?
Jamil Zaki [00:03:43] Absolutely. Emil was a friend and colleague, but he also remains one of my heroes. He was a peace neuroscientist. A lot of people don’t know that that’s even a thing you can do because he sort of invented it. He used tools from cognitive neuroscience to understand why people come into violent conflict and tried to also use tools from psychology to reduce that conflict. Emil’s work was extraordinary, but as you say, his life was as well. He had this philosophy of always wanting to see the best in people and push for them to show their best. And this is despite the work that he did, which brought him into contact with people actively in violent conflict with hate group members. And for me and a lot of people, Emil, positivity seemed almost unrealistic to be like, What’s up with this guy? Is he naive? Is he sheltered? But it turns out he was the opposite. When he was born, Emil, his mother, developed severe schizophrenia. She was unable to raise him. And that, again, would have been a tumultuous childhood that could have led him to cynicism. Instead, though, he made the choice as a teenager that he would live intentionally and pursue his values and especially pursue trying to see the good in others. And that philosophy carried him to the end of his life, which was cut far too short. In 2018, he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of brain cancer, and he died in 2020. And it was remarkable, you know, in our calls and emails. After his diagnosis, he, of course, felt the sadness and fear that any of us would, especially given that he had a young family. But he told me he was filled with this sense of all that is beautiful in the world and that he wanted to continue living with purpose and again, finding the good in others. And I take his life as such an inspiration, but also as a challenge. And it’s part of what set me out on the journey of writing this book was to try to see what can we take what he had in any small measure and spread it just a little bit to the rest of us.
Krys Boyd [00:05:59] It’s interesting, Jamil, that we sometimes look back on the past and assume it was a better, kinder, safer time to live in society. That’s actually not true, right?
Jamil Zaki [00:06:11] That’s right. In many ways. I mean, certainly we are a more egalitarian society than we were decades ago, and that’s wonderful. But there are other clearer ways that we are exactly wrong about how society is operating or not operating. One example is that over the last 30 or so years, there have been dozens of national polls asking a representative sample of Americans, Do you think crime, violent crime around the nation is worse than it was last year, better than it was last year, or has it stayed the same? And in a vast majority of those surveys, most Americans think that violent crime is increasing year after year after year. I pulled the FBI’s statistics from that same period of time, and it turns out violent crime has decreased by about 50% over that same 30 year span. So this is just one of many cases where if you ask people how are things going, they think that they’re getting worse. But if you look at the data, they’re actually getting better.
Krys Boyd [00:07:15] One thing that has gotten worse or at least changed is the amount of trust Americans tend to have in one another. Tell us a little bit about that.
Jamil Zaki [00:07:25] That’s right. So when I began working on this book, I was really trying to understand my own cynicism and what it was doing to me. But I quickly discovered that I was by no means alone. And actually, cynicism has been on the rise in our culture for at least 50 years. In 1972, about half of Americans believed that most people can be trusted. By 2018, that had fallen to about a third of Americans. A drop as big as the stock market took in the financial collapse of 2008. And when our faith in each other and in our institutions vanishes, disintegrates, a boom occurs in its place, a boom of cynicism. This worldview, as you put it well, that people in general are selfish, greedy and dishonest. And that’s hurtful to us at basically every level psychologists can measure.
Krys Boyd [00:08:19] More of us now are taking this cynical attitude toward institutions and toward one another based on three myths that you’ve identified. So I want to take them in turn. First, what causes us to think cynicism is a smart way to be?
Jamil Zaki [00:08:34] Well, this is a stereotype that dates back a long time. I love this quote from the writer George Bernard Shaw. He said, “the power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who haven’t got it.” The idea is that cynicism might not feel good, but it’s clever. It’s wise. And if you aren’t cynical, you must be a naive chump who’s about to be taken advantage of. This is a stereotype many of us hold. Researchers have described to hundreds of people a cynic and a non cynic, and ask them, Who do you think would be better at various tasks? And it turns out that 70% of people believe that cynics would be better at cognitive tasks, that they’re smarter, basically. And 85% of people think cynics are socially smarter, for instance, that they’d be better at picking out who’s lying and who’s telling the truth. This is called the cynical genius illusion. And it is exactly that. It’s an illusion. In fact, data from lots of people find that cynics do less well on cognitive tests and are worse at picking out liars than nonsense. So our perception of cynicism as a form of wisdom is entirely backwards.
Krys Boyd [00:09:50] You shared that your own cynicism was rooted in maybe some anxiety. We also tend to assume cynicism will keep us safe.
Jamil Zaki [00:09:59] That’s right. I think many people who are cynical are not the kind of sneering, judgmental folks that we imagine and stereotype as cynics, but maybe a little bit more like me, people who have been hurt in the past and put their defenses up. I call this going from being disappointed where you lower your expectations of somebody who let you down to becoming pre disappointed. That is lowering your expectations of everyone in order to not be let down again. And first, I want to express complete solidarity and compassion for anyone who feels that way. I myself have lived that way for a long time and still do. When I let myself go to sort of default mode, it’s completely natural if you’ve been hurt to not want to be hurt again. But that sort of defensive crouch, pre disappointment and cynicism actually hurt us more over the long term. Yes. If you stay home and never talk to anyone, you won’t be betrayed. If you never open up or be vulnerable people can’t let you down as much, but you also lose so much of what makes life beautiful connection, collaboration, friendship, love. And over time, that wears away at our health. Cynics tend to suffer from depression, loneliness, substance abuse, but also heart disease and even early mortality. So cynics die younger than non cynics. I think that’s because, well, decades of evidence show us that supportive social connections are psychologically nourishing. They keep us healthy. They lower our stress. And if you’re cynical and don’t believe in people can’t open up to them. It’s like you can’t metabolize those calories.
Krys Boyd [00:11:46] You’ve also found a lot of people attach a kind of moral relevance to cynicism. How does that work?
Jamil Zaki [00:11:52] Yeah, you know, Krys, ever since I’ve started working on this book and talking a lot about fighting cynicism and finding hope, I get a lot of messages that go something like, Well, yeah, you can be hopeful. You’re a professor at a fancy university. Things are going fine for you. Hope is a form of privilege. Maybe it’s even toxic, avoiding our problems. And maybe cynicism is radical because it focuses us on all that’s wrong and holds power to account. But that, too, turns out to be a little bit backwards. Yes, cynics see all of the problems in our culture, as we all should. But if you’re cynical and you believe that broken systems in our culture reflect who we really are, that politicians are corrupt because people are corrupt, that oppression exists because you met humanity is inherently oppressive, then there’s nothing you can do about it. And in fact, cynics tend to vote less, protest less take part less often in collective action. If you look through the history of activism and social change, it hasn’t been driven by cynical people. It’s been driven by people who absolutely see the problems inherent to our culture, to our society right now, but know that many people want something better. And through that faith in each other right now, we can fight together for a future most of us want.
Krys Boyd [00:13:19] So cynics are great at going around calling out injustice, but because they believe nothing can be done to curb that injustice, they don’t take action.
Jamil Zaki [00:13:27] I think that’s right. Yeah. It’s a little bit of a white flag of surrender, right? You can you can talk about everything that’s wrong, but you can’t think of a solution. And actually, because of that, cynicism is a powerful tool for the status quo. Autocrats and authoritarians really appreciate a cynical population because people who don’t trust each other are easier to control.
Krys Boyd [00:13:52] Jamil, you remind us here that the term cynicism has pretty ancient roots. It comes to us from Diogenes.
Jamil Zaki [00:14:00] That’s right. Well, technically, Antisthenes is another Greek philosopher. It would be the founder of the School of Ancient Cynicism. But Diogenes is the philosopher most associated with it. And he was really quite a character. I mean, less a philosopher and more like a public philosophical stunt man, almost. He would. He lived in the streets of Athens and would basically challenge and insult people while they walked through the Agora, trying to almost browbeat them out of their regular rituals and customs. And he was known for being, I guess, for lack of a better term, snarky. He would shine a light in people’s faces, saying that he was looking for a truly good human and never finding one. So he gained this notoriety that is now associated with this idea of cynicism, which actually. I believe comes from the Greek Kinnock’s because people said that Diogenes was like a dog, and he loved that. He said, Yeah, I am like a dog. I, I sink my teeth in rascals. So I think that he had this gruff sensibility that we now associate with modern cynicism.
Krys Boyd [00:15:16] But modern cynicism leaves out some of the things that Diogenes also believed.
Jamil Zaki [00:15:22] That’s right. Krys. Yeah, I loved, you know, I by no means am a scholar of Greek philosophy. So this is just a little bit of research that I did. But it was so fun to learn about Diogenes and the ancient cynics, in part because we really get them wrong. As I said, Diogenes and other cynics love to challenge people and they might have seemed kind of rude, I suppose, in the process. But actually, if you dig into their philosophy a little bit more deeply, it’s beautiful. They believed that each person is capable of great virtue. And what’s holding us back is not who we are deep down inside. It’s social customs. It’s the way that society infects us with the desire for status, power and wealth. And so what Diogenes was trying to do through his raucous challenges to people is to almost snap them out of those routines and get them to discover who they wanted to be. He believed in a few different ideas. One was autarky or self-sufficiency, in essence, finding your own values instead of letting society do it for you. He also believed in cosmopolitanism. He did not believe that your identity as a member of a city or nation should define you. And he also believed in a deep care for all of humanity. So if you dig under the surface, ancient big sea cynicism is actually a remarkably hopeful and loving philosophy with an affection for humanity and disdain not for people, but for the structures that ensnare us. The problem is that because Diogenes and the other cynics were more performers and not as much scribes, their philosophy or a lot of it ended up being sort of lost to time And in copies of copies of copies of the philosophy, what remained was the snark. And what was lost was this deep love of who people are and can be.
Krys Boyd [00:17:29] There are in this world, some communities where people tend to trust one another more than others. And there may be multiple reasons for that. I know a lot of people imagine like big cities as universally places where you can’t trust people and small towns as places where you definitely can. Is there actually any geographic pattern to how, like trustworthy individuals and individuals willing to trust are distributed throughout any given society?
Jamil Zaki [00:17:56] That’s an amazing question. There are differences in the geography of trust, but they tend not to fall along the lines that you might think. There is less of a clear division, for instance, between urban and rural environments. Yes, small communities, tight knit communities tend to be more trusting. But as a citizen, as a as a resident of a large city, I can tell you that large cities are small communities, just many small communities bound up in the same subway system. Right? So I and my neighbors on my block in the next block over, we think of ourselves almost like a tiny little village of our own. And you see this in lots of people who live in big cities. Instead, the geography of trust tends to map on to other things. For instance, more economically equal communities are much more trusting than more economically unequal ones and communities that are more collectivist, like where people define themselves through relationships tend to be more trusting than those that are more individualistic, where people try to stand out and define themselves by the ways that they are different from others.
Krys Boyd [00:19:06] You have found that high trust communities that experience catastrophes together on a large scale, talking like earthquake level stuff, they actually cooperate better in the wake of these things. And low trust communities tend to fall apart.
Jamil Zaki [00:19:22] That’s right. So we’ve talked about how cynicism is unhealthy for the individual right, that it degrades our bodies through stress and through the an inability to decrease that stress through social contact. Well, it turns out that cynicism is also unhealthy for the body of various communities, from families to companies to towns. And that’s also true during disasters. So in the book, I chronicle this earthquake that occurred in in Kobe, Japan in 1995. And there are a number of different neighborhoods in Kobe that differ in along different dimensions. One of those neighborhoods, Mano, had this history of activism. It had gone to the city and tried to fight for better sort of cleanup services, for instance. And because of that history of activism, it was a really tight knit neighborhood. Another neighborhood very close by. Micra did not have that history and people there were less tight knit and probably trusted one another less well when the earthquake struck. And there were fires that followed it. These two neighborhoods had fundamentally different experiences. In Nicaragua people just kind of left their homes if they were lucky enough to to get out of them and watch them burn in Mano. People didn’t wait for the authorities. They banded together. They grabbed hoses from factories and made pop up bucket brigades to put out the flames. And the number of buildings that were lost in Mano, for instance, was one quarter the number of buildings lost in Macau by proportion. So it’s a remarkable piece of evidence that trust helps us be resilient, both as individuals and as communities.
Krys Boyd [00:21:19] What is the operative difference between hope and optimism?
Jamil Zaki [00:21:23] This is such an important question. So because I think people get them confused a lot. Optimism is the belief that things will go well in the future and it can make people feel happy when they’re optimistic. But it can also be somewhat of a complacent emotion and it can be a little bit brittle or fragile. If you’re sure that everything is going to turn out well, well, there’s no need for you to do anything. And if things don’t turn out well, you can become disappointed really quickly and end up even becoming a cynic. Hope, by contrast, is the idea that things could go well and in the uncertainty of that future, our actions matter. So where optimism might make us complacent. Hope springs us into action. It makes it much more likely that we will try and strive for the goals that we want, the future that we want. And in so doing, pull that future magnetically closer to us.
Krys Boyd [00:22:25] So if what we need is not blind optimism, it is what you call hopeful skepticism. How do hopeful skeptics train themselves to see the world and everyone in it?
Jamil Zaki [00:22:36] Thank you. Yeah. So I think let’s break down the two pieces of hopeful skepticism. The first is skepticism, which we haven’t talked about yet. And since we’re dividing our linguistic peas and carrots, let me also separate skepticism from cynicism. They’re often confused for one another, but they’re actually quite different. Cynicism, as we’ve talked about, is this blanket assumption about people. And when you are cynical, you look for all sorts of evidence that people are the worst and you try to confirm your assumptions. You think like a lawyer in the prosecution against humanity. Skepticism is instead a desire for more information before you draw conclusions. If cynics think like lawyers, skeptics think like scientists, and because of that, they’re able to adapt and learn from the world around them and from other people. So skepticism is the first part of what I advocate people to try out in lieu of cynicism. If you find yourself rushing to judgment, ask yourself, What data do I have to support this claim? The second piece of hopeful skepticism, of course, is hope, and that is applying to our open mindedness, curiosity about the world. A second idea, which is that our default assumption about others tends to skew too negatively. And because of that, when we pay closer attention, it’s likely that people will be better than we think in many cases. And pleasant surprises will be everywhere.
Krys Boyd [00:24:10] If skeptics look for evidence before they embrace entrenched beliefs, what do they do when they encounter information that seems to challenge whatever it is they do believe? I mean, we all find it jarring, right, when we realize that maybe something we believed isn’t true.
Jamil Zaki [00:24:26] Yes, that’s exactly right. But I think that the true skeptic, instead of dismissing evidence that counters their expectations, updates their expectations. Right. That’s what a scientist would do. In my own lab, we constantly receive data that counteract or contradict our hypotheses. And if we’re sure that we ran the study well, we say, well, maybe we should rethink our predictions. It’s hard to do this. It is hard work. It’s comforting to be right, even if what we’re right about is something terrible. And I think that’s the cold comfort of cynicism. You can kind of wrap yourself up in it like a blanket. Even if it’s a wet blanket or even if you’re a wet blanket, I suppose. But but at least you don’t have to challenge yourself. Skepticism requires more of us. It requires us to be lifelong learners. But I think that that challenge is worthwhile because on the other side of it is not just a more accurate view of who people are, but often a more positive view, one that allows us to strengthen, for instance, our relationships and our communities.
Krys Boyd [00:25:35] Why would people who are insecurely attached in their relationships be more susceptible to conspiracy theory?
Jamil Zaki [00:25:45] Again here. And speaking from experience, I think that attachment style for listeners who don’t know is our assumptions about the world that we form often in the first year of life. And those assumptions are. Am I safe? Am I cared for? Can I count on people? And so securely attached kids are ones where through usually experiences with their caregivers feel like they’re safe in the world so they can explore and and and and count on people. Insecurely attached folks, by contrast, have this ambient sense that they’re not safe, that something is wrong. And oftentimes, if you have that sense, you look for explanations. You look for evidence. Again, in a cynical and sometimes biased way to confirm your inner sense, this kind of discomfort that something’s wrong, somebody is trying to hurt me. I don’t feel safe. And conspiracy theories offer just that evidence. And so, you know, again, going back to the distinction between skeptics and cynics, it turns out that cynical people, more than non cynics, tend to fall for conspiracy theories because, again, they’re trying to find evidence that comports with this feeling that they have that people are terrible. Skeptics, by contrast, are less likely to fall for conspiracy theories because, of course, many of these theories under closer scrutiny fall apart.
Krys Boyd [00:27:14] Jamil, another concern you have is the commodification of our relationships. We don’t just have friends now. We have online friends who we count based on likes and shares and streaks. How does this cause us to see human connection as another kind of marketplace?
Jamil Zaki [00:27:31] Yeah. So I think that there are many interactions where counting is a good thing, right? I mean, if you’re working on a group project for your class or a product team for your company, you should make sure that everybody is contributing. We should all add value to our working relationships. Marketplaces, of course, are. We are environments where we should count. We should pay one another for goods and services. That’s a perfectly fine trans active philosophy. Where we don’t want that same philosophy is in our personal relationships. So psychologists talk about the difference between transactional and communal relationships and communal relationships. Friends and family are places where we definitely don’t want to count. You know, I don’t want to I don’t want to try to figure out in our 13 years of marriage how many times I’ve paid for dinner and how many times my wife has and send her, you know, an invoice. But but and, you know, that’s why they say that money ruins oftentimes personal relationships. The problem is that we’ve started to count other aspects of our lives the same way that we naturally count money. So, you know, the steps that we walk, the minutes that we meditate, the quality of our sleep and, as you mentioned, decrease the amount of approval that we receive from each other is all quantified and tabulated. That, of course, is of great value to many technically tech companies, but it also changes how we relate to one another. I think especially for young people, social media has turned social life into a type of competition, even a zero sum competition where somebody else receiving a lot of approval on a post means that maybe you’re inferior to them. And that can turn what should be communal relationships where we are just simply there for one another into transactions or can even turn our friends into competitors that can naturally raise our level of cynicism and mistrust in the in the exact place where we should have at least.
Krys Boyd [00:29:43] Can we train ourselves to stop counting?
Jamil Zaki [00:29:46] Yes. I mean, I think that in some ways a lot of contemplative and spiritual practices are that form of training. I mean, meditation in its various forms tries to get us to unthank really, and to to stop the regular patterns that that our minds engage in, which often are comparative patterns. But I think the other way to do that is to simply turn off the devices that are counting for us, or at least step away from them momentarily. There is what I call quantification creep in our lives, and I would challenge listeners to ask yourself how many things, different things are you counting on a given day? If you wear an Apple, watch this probably or another sort of motion tracker, you’re probably counting a lot of things about your physical health or activity. Are you counting, you know, again, social approval. What else are you counting? What in what ways is that counting helping you? And are there ways in which it’s not helping you?
Krys Boyd [00:30:50] Jamil, you describe most modern media as a kind of cynicism machine. Why does the news in particular have a negativity bias?
Jamil Zaki [00:31:00] Well, let’s start by stipulating that it’s not only the news that has a negativity bias. Negativity. Bias is a term for an ancient quirk in our brains and minds, which is that we pay more attention to threatening as opposed to positive information. So visually, we pay more attention to, for instance, angry faces than happy ones. We remember negative events, more than positive ones, and we make decisions more based on what we don’t want to lose as opposed to what we do want to gain. And you can see how that bias might have helped us survive 200,000 years ago. Somebody who was worried about a predator on the horizon might do better than their friend who was blissed out by the sunset on the other horizon. But that ancient bias is maybe not helping us as much now. And that’s especially because it’s been combined with a hyper modern media ecosystem which feeds us whatever it takes to keep us clicking or scrolling or watching, which is often not the information that makes us happy. Not even the information that makes us right, but rather the most negative information that the news can give us. You know, we all have heard the term if it bleeds, it leads. But I think that there is a real reason for that. That’s because of the structure of our minds and the structure of the companies that give us news which are matched to whatever we pay the most attention to.
Krys Boyd [00:32:30] So before long, it feels so overwhelming that we choose anger and anxiety rather than action. When we hear about something that upsets us.
Jamil Zaki [00:32:39] That’s right. And that seems to also be rewarded in our social media ecosystems. There’s a bunch of research on the site formerly known as Twitter that finds that when people express outrage, often outrage towards people who are different from themselves, for instance, ideologically, they are rewarded with likes and retweets from people who agree with them. And those little bursts of social reward reinforce us and make it more likely for us to express that same outrage, hatred and disappointment that you’re describing and actually amplify it even more in our social media communities.
Krys Boyd [00:33:21] Can local news offer more affirming information than a diet of only national news?
Jamil Zaki [00:33:28] I think that local news can and I also think national news can. I don’t think there’s any reason fundamentally that news organizations have to give us negatively biased information. There are terrific organizations that are doing just that. One is known as the Solutions Journalism Network. So these are people who report not on. And I want to be clear here. When you think of positive news, you often think about, you know, I don’t know, a kitten is saved from a tree or, you know, where a veteran surprises their child who doesn’t know that they’re home. These and especially the second category, are beautiful. I mean, I love watching those videos and hearing those stories. But there’s sort of supposed to be feel good in a way that doesn’t interact with the big news, which is all the bad stuff. Solutions Journalism Network instead focuses on the big bad problems in our world, but on people who are trying to make a difference to address those problems. For instance, a 27 year old in Michigan who took on and eventually defeated gerrymandering in that state. Or people who were formerly imprisoned in Florida fighting for voting rights. And so these stories are about real problems, but about the everyday folks who are trying to make things better. And they serve as a challenge. You know, if one town or county can lower inequality or improve public services, the question because, well, why can’t the rest of us. So this is a type of news that is positive but not positive in a way that turns us away from real problems, but rather shows us hope in the face of those problems.
Krys Boyd [00:35:13] Yeah. So we get some sense of agency.
Jamil Zaki [00:35:16] That’s exactly right. Yes.
Krys Boyd [00:35:18] I want to talk about interactions with total strangers. I think we mostly assume many of us are raised to assume they not only have no interest in helping us, but that they will press any advantage they have even when they didn’t, like go into an interaction planning to do so. So in contrast to that, talk about these full wallet experiments that were conducted.
Jamil Zaki [00:35:42] Yeah. This is a social experiment that was run first in Toronto in 2009. The Toronto Star placed wallets all around the city, and these wallets had cash in them and an ID. So if you wanted to, you could return them to their rightful owner. And they asked Torontonians, what percent of these wallets do you think will come back? Now, you and I, Chris, you know, being in the U.S., we might stereotype Canadians as really nice, but Canadians didn’t think so. Torontonians believed that only 25% of their peers would return these wallets. In fact, the number was 80%. And you might again say, well, yeah, that’s Canada. But researchers then replicated this study with about 17,000 wallets all around the world and found that in many nations, more than half of people returned these wallets or more than half of the wallets were returned, rather.
Krys Boyd [00:36:40] And I have to imagine the more people experience decency and generosity, the more likely they are to show those behaviors themselves.
Jamil Zaki [00:36:52] That’s true to an extent. But if I can push back a little on this, I think one reason that cynicism is so catchy and so poisonous is because it’s easy to ignore positive evidence even when it’s right in front of us. You know, if I’m driving my kids to school or if I’m driving to work, I will ignore the thousand people who are following traffic laws. But the one person who cuts me off will live rent free in my head for the following week. Right. A lot of us give one star Yelp reviews to humanity based not on the actual data about what people are like, even our own experiences with people. But because of negativity, bias based on the 1 or 2 negative interactions we have. So we just talked about not counting as much. And I think that’s useful in communal relationships. But there are other places that I think we should count more. I think that when people act in ways that are kind or friendly or open minded, we should make sure to pay attention to, again, as a skeptic, would take that evidence in and let it challenge our cynical assumptions. Because otherwise those positive experiences tend to float into the landfill of lost memories.
Krys Boyd [00:38:10] One way to pay attention is to deliberately talk to other people. What did you learn when you took a work trip but left your noise canceling headphones at home on purpose?
Jamil Zaki [00:38:21] The very headphones I’m wearing now to talk with you. So one of the ways that that I feel somewhat cynical, I suppose, is that I really imagine that conversations with strangers will be maybe unpleasant, awkward, cringe, because I just don’t expect that people want to talk to me, that they’re that friendly and whether they would find anything that I have to say interesting. But there’s tons of research that finds that I’m not alone, that we that many people think that conversations with strangers and even deep conversations with our friends expressing gratitude, asking for favors, that all of these social risks let’s let’s call them going out on a limb, all of these social risks will will blow up in our face that that if we have these conversations, they’ll be negative, unpleasant and awkward. The data also show that when you force people to have those conversations, they’re way better than we expect them to be. So I know about these. Did I teach them in my class? But I still have never put myself to the test until last year when, as you were saying, I went on a business trip and decided to try and talk with every stranger where there was a reasonable sort of shot at talking with them. Right. It wasn’t like interrupting a conversation. And I was terrified, as you said, without my headphones on a plane, I felt like I was going into battle wearing my pajamas, you know, is very is very frightening. And immediately, the first person, you know, is on this five hour flight from San Francisco to Washington, D.C. And the first person who sat next to me, I said, well, let’s do it, you know, And I started talking with him. And it was an incredible, meaningful conversation. This person was a refugee who had come to this country as a. Teenager. He told me these parts of his story and his life that were absolutely fascinating. He showed real curiosity in me as well. And I remember thinking, this is so shocking how well this is going. I had eight more conversations during the trip. They weren’t all that good, but none of them were bad. And I thought, it’s shocking, but it’s also shocking that it’s shocking to me because I know the data. But sometimes just knowing about the science doesn’t change your instincts. That requires real world experience. And that’s what I try to encourage people to do to treat your life a little bit more like an experiment. Take chances on people, you know, not reckless chances where you’re going to lose your life savings or post your deepest secrets online. But little leaps of faith on others. And quite often when we do that, what comes back is much more positive than we think and can help us update scientifically our assumptions about others.
Krys Boyd [00:41:15] Some of the people to whom our society extends the least trust are, ironically, the ones who might need the most from us. You note that Americans who rely on things like food stamps and Medicare often have to wait in these long lines and answer invasive questions that might not even directly relate to what it is they’re needing. Why are we so unwilling to extend trust to people who are suffering?
Jamil Zaki [00:41:40] Well, I mean, we talked about how cynicism is a tool of the status quo. And I think that in the case of people in this country and others who are lower in socioeconomic status, I’m afraid that cynicism has been wielded as a as a weapon against them. I think about the the Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaigns where he talked about this woman, Lynda Carter. Lynda Carter was the person in Chicago who he said had taken advantage of public services, had claimed that she had 15 different IDs. And, you know, she claimed lots and lots of children and dead spouses and so forth in order to get as much money from the system as possible. This was turned into the stereotype of the welfare queen, which of course is a racist and misogynistic term, but it’s one that was extremely effective. Now, after Reagan came to power, the amount of money that the government put into investigating people who wanted public services or were trying to get them increased enormously, they caught almost nobody because welfare fraud and other forms of misuse is extremely rare. But that stereotype that poor people just are takers, if you will, is very useful for people who don’t want to redistribute wealth, who don’t want to provide social services or expand a social safety net. So I think that frankly, this is a utilitarian thing. I think that we use these stereotypes in order to withhold services from people who need them. But if you look at the data, those stereotypes are almost often always wrong.
Krys Boyd [00:43:27] It would be so nice if we could all hear your insights and then just flip a switch in our brains to go from cynicism to hopeful skepticism. It doesn’t usually work quite that simply for people. What can influence us to change the way we tend to look at the world?
Jamil Zaki [00:43:43] I think that there’s a number of places to start. The first is to look at the science. I mean, I think that knowledge in this case is power, because it turns out that these extremely prevalent ways of viewing the world are simply not just hurtful, but they’re simply wrong. You know, I’m not saying, of course, that there aren’t real problems out there, that there isn’t horrible harm being done every second of every day. Of course there is. Of course, there are people who do terrible things. But it is also clearly true that the average person underestimates the average person. So to me, just looking at the data, I mean, surprisingly marinating myself in the science of mistrust and suspicion and hopelessness has made me a much more positive person because I’ve read because I’ve realized how much we’re all leaving on the table when we choose to withdraw from social life based on our bleak assumptions. You know, the idea of hope is often that we’re wearing rose colored glasses, ignoring problems. In fact, I would argue that most of us are wearing mud colored glasses all the time. And to hope is not to ignore the world and people, but rather to take off that filter and notice one another more systematically. So I think knowledge is the first step. The second step to me is practice. And in the book I offer all sorts of practical steps that one can take to build a habit of hopeful skepticism.
Krys Boyd [00:45:14] Jamil Zaki is professor of psychology at Stanford University and director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab. His latest book is “Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness.” Jamil, thanks so much for spending this time with us.
Jamil Zaki [00:45:28] It’s been delightful. Thank you so much, Krys.
Krys Boyd [00:45:30] Think is distributed by PRX, the public radio exchange. You can find us on Facebook and Instagram. Just search for Kera Think. Subscribe to our podcast for free wherever you get podcasts or listen at our Web site where you can sign up for our free weekly newsletter. Once again, I’m Krys Boyd. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.
