Cynicism, Part 4: Overcoming Cynicism
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Check out USPS Ground Advantage service at USPS.com slash in the know. Because if you know, you know. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb. And I am Joe McCormick. And we're back with the fourth and final part in our series on cynicism. There's been a light at the end of the tunnel and we finally reached it.

So in part one, we defined cynicism as the tendency to believe that people are bad, selfish and untrustworthy. And we distinguished this modern definition from other concepts like the cynic philosophy of ancient Greece, which is a whole different thing.

and from similar but distinct concepts like pessimism. We also looked at research on the correlates of cynicism across a bunch of domains of life, from health to career and all kinds of things, and discovered that being highly cynical tends to have overwhelmingly negative effects on a person's life. In part two, we focused primarily on the so-called cynical genius illusion. The short version of this is that

While people might not necessarily like highly cynical people, for whatever reason, we tend to assume that they are smart and competent in cognitive domains, conforming to the Sherlock Holmes archetype.

However, experiments showed that this is not actually the case on average. Highly cynical people are not smarter than everybody else. And if anything, the correlation usually goes the other way. And so we talked about possible reasons for this effect and also talked about the question of what, if anything, is the actual benefit of generalized cynicism. It seems like one answer is that if you are not very skilled at

telling the difference between a trustworthy situation and an untrustworthy one, generalized cynicism may protect you from catastrophic misplacements of trust, but again, at great cost to your well-being and at the price of many lost opportunities to benefit from trust and cooperation.

In part three, we talked about the role of cynicism in politics, including the idea that cynicism has been on the rise in many democracies around the world for a possible number of reasons. One influence maybe being the use of social media. We also talked about research on the phenomenon of political cynicism in particular as distinct from just general social cynicism or from simple distrust or skepticism of politicians.

And we got into some observed characteristics of how cynicism manifests in political participation. We also talked about how people may use a mask of cynical rhetoric about politics in order to influence how they're perceived by others, maybe to sort of cover up the fact that you maybe don't know a lot about what you're talking about. And we discussed the link between cynicism and a preference for conspiracy-based explanations.

Another thing we discussed that ties into this episode a little bit is the idea that escape from cynicism in the modern sense, one way to escape from it would be to push through to a point of true disenchantment and essentially become an ancient cynic, a capital C cynic in the philosophical sense. Now, we'll see how well that idea pans out with what we have to talk about today. But to be clear, I'm,

We're not recommending this is a standard solution to any cynicism you're wrestling with in your life. It's more interesting from the standpoint of understanding what lowercase cynicism and capital C cynicism is. So I think it's an interesting take in that regard, but not necessarily something you want to try for yourself. Like the answer is not to. I think we can pretty much

We can state pretty clearly here, don't try to become more cynical about life in order to reach some point of equilibrium.

Yeah, I think maybe I see what the author you were citing when you brought this up is getting at with the idea of a sort of total disenchantment leading to a freedom to once again embrace virtue. I mean, that almost seems kind of Buddhist in a way, like losing your love for the things of the world, allowing you to find different higher levels of appreciation. Yeah.

But I question to what extent that kind of enlightened disenchantment, capital C cynicism, can actually be reached just by increasing your lowercase c cynicism along the standard dimension, you know, like becoming even less and less trustful. I don't know if that eventually gets you to capital C cynicism. Yeah, I think its primary purpose is to help us understand the connections between ancient cynicism and modern cynicism rather than give us a...

an approach for fixing our own lives. Now, given everything that we've talked about so far, one of the things, the main things we wanted to talk about today was the question of why

where cynicism comes from. What can we understand about its origins within a culture and within a person, how it grows and spreads, and thus how can it be counteracted? Is there anything we really know about how to stop the growth of cynicism? I think this is a field where we don't have really strong conclusions yet, but there are some good starting points based on research.

And one paper that I came across that addresses this question pretty directly was published in 2023 in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences by a pair of researchers from the Stanford Psychology Department named Eric Neumann and Jamil Zaki. And this paper is called Toward a Social Psychology of Cynicism.

So the authors begin this paper by addressing what they call the cynicism paradox. Cynicism, quote, tracks numerous negative outcomes, and yet many people are cynical.

And so this is really something we've already been talking about this series, but kind of with a different framing. We've been asking the question, if cynicism is clearly so bad for our lives, is there any compensating benefit? Because if it's harmful and lots of people are highly cynical anyway, shouldn't you think there's probably some kind of trade-off that makes it worth the cost?

We've already mentioned several specific ways or scenarios in which it might be adaptive, but then again, it might just be one of those things that is just plain bad for us, but happens anyway. Like, for example, depression.

You might be able to explain how depression grows out of biological mechanisms that are evolved in order to be adaptive for us. But you don't have to assume that depression itself has benefits overall. It's just like something's gone wrong and it's bad for us. It's possible cynicism is usually the same way.

But the authors here sort of take the same idea and they frame it as this paradox. Cynicism hurts the cynic, and yet cynicism seems to spread and bloom anew year after year. And so the authors say, given the observation of the cynicism paradox, research within social psychology should focus on a couple of questions. Where cynicism comes from and how it spreads, and how can it be countered dominantly?

diminished or alleviated. So first the question, what explains cynicism? Where does it come from? First, they address the possibility, what if the cynic is right? We've talked about this from a number of angles. Maybe cynicism is just an accurate assessment based on observations of the world. In the words of the authors, quote, perhaps it reflects a realistic perception of the suffering caused by human self-interest.

But we've already explored research casting serious doubt on this. For example, the various experiments showing that people tend to grossly overestimate the selfishness and treachery of strangers. Most people in most types of situations are actually pretty trustworthy.

And the authors seem to agree with this conclusion. And so instead, they identify three ways that they think cynicism arises. It's not necessarily that it is an accurate model of the world, but instead, quote, we will argue that people often overestimate self-interest, create it through their expectations, or overstate their own to not appear naive.

Now, the authors here acknowledge that, of course, cynicism can be and often is responsive to observations of the real world. For example, this is an experimental finding. We become more cynical when we witness people behaving selfishly. If you do an experiment where you stage people catching somebody doing something selfish and unkind,

untrustworthy, that actually makes us less likely to trust. So we've witnessed an example that trust, you know, did not turn out well and it affects our baseline in a way, at least within the situation, we become less trusting.

But jumping off of this, they say that we can easily, because of various psychological phenomena, biases and so forth, become kind of trapped in an unrealistically cynical mindset that is not a good model of how the world usually works and brings with it all the harms we've talked about. And, you know, you can think about this in a number of different psychological domains. You're

Your initial tendency is based on an observation, like you do see a betrayal or an example of somebody acting selfishly, but then you form an inaccurate totalizing worldview based on that one salient example. Yeah, there's this really insightful table that they cite here that I found very interesting with these different categories of cynicism.

group cynicism, institutional cynicism, and general cynicism.

And this kind of model for how things might intensify. So like one example they include is a young colleague betrays an older one in a team project. What does the older colleague conclude? And so the initial cynicism is, well, young people are self-interested. And then that's the group cynicism. Then the institutional cynicism is people in the workplace are self-interested. And then the general cynicism is people are self-interested.

And so you can you can imagine like a blossoming of cynicism more or less along these these routes, you know, from being highly specific to a particular encounter to being increasing generalities about the way the world works.

That's an interesting point. Yeah. And in fact, though, the cynicism may be inaccurate at every single stage in this progression. So like, let's say I observe Johnny doing something selfish in one instance, and I start by saying Johnny is an untrustworthy person. That may not actually be true about Johnny. Maybe I just caught him at his worst moment, but it might be true about Johnny.

Then I abstract it to some group Johnny belongs to. For some reason, his membership in a particular group is meaningful to me. And so I see him as representative of that group and apply the untrustworthiness to the whole group. And then I could branch out even further to some institution in which Johnny exists and then possibly to all of humankind. But at every single level, it's possible you are actually not drawing a good generalization from observing one instance of behavior.

This made me think about cynicism on The Simpsons, particularly as it relates to Homer Simpson. There's a famous episode from the golden age of Simpsons episodes in which we kind of get an origin story for Homer's cynicism. It's the city of New York versus Homer, in which a young and optimistic Homer Simpson experiences a number of betrayals and hostilities upon visiting the Big Apple. We talked about this episode in our

Weird House Cinema on the face behind the mask because Peter Lorre has the exact same experience. Yes, the exact same experience. And in this episode, we see how it leads to an extremely cynical view of New York and New Yorkers.

But you could also argue that it perhaps underlines the general anger and cynicism that comes to define Homer, at least in these early classic seasons of the show. Yeah, though it is interesting how malleable Homer's character is, and yet he still feels like a cohesive character. Like, sometimes Homer is very, very trusting, and other times he's very cynical. Yeah, he's changed a lot over the years. I mean, not in a character development way, but just in...

The realities of a show being on television this long with this many different writers over over the years various commentators have discussed how in the early Simpsons or certainly the golden age of the Simpsons you you have this mix of cynicism and heart that kind of balances everything out But the cynicism and melancholy have been observed to be particularly strong during that first season and

And then they move away from that. And then eventually they kind of move away from Homer's cynicism and anger in general and double down on his frankness and his stupidity. So he becomes, you know, it's more about like the dumb jokes and gullible Homer as we proceed. But if you look at the New York episode and you look at some of these episodes from the 1990s,

You can easily fill out a chart watching how we have a situation where Homer encounters selfish people in New York. And then this fosters into a worldview that, well, all New Yorkers are selfish. And then maybe all people are selfish as well. Like you can you can imagine it being like the thing that blossoms out into Homer's general cynicism.

Right. This is a great comparison. So, yeah, it begins as the observation of an individual action or behavior and then generalizing to the person who did that, then the group to whom that person belongs, and then to the society at large, and then to all of humankind. Yeah, until you're the type of person who's like, of course I'm going to steal roadside sugar because anyone else would do the same thing. Yes. ♪

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So anyway, in this paper, the authors try to formulate a model of how cynicism can spread at three different levels of social interaction. So one is through interactions at the interpersonal level between two people. The next is at the intra group level within groups. And then finally, at the inter group level between groups. So regarding the interpersonal level of cynicism formation,

The authors raise the question, what if at the interpersonal level, cynicism is a self-fulfilling prophecy?

In other words, an initially false belief, or at least a belief not based on evidence, whether true or false, an initially false belief that influences the behavior of the believer in such a way that they make the world conform to the way they believe it is. And psychological research has identified a bunch of dynamics like this. Self-fulfilling prophecies show up in all kinds of ways in our behavior. For example,

Some experiments have found that if you treat somebody in a way that indicates you have high expectations of their competence, it can actually make them more competent.

Uh, and obviously there would be limits to effects like this. You know, you can't just, you know, like hand somebody who knows nothing about medicine, a scalpel and say, I believe in you go do the surgery. You know, they, they're probably not going to know what to do, but within certain limits of, of, uh, plausible knowledge and behavior. Uh, you can imagine how having somebody else show confidence in you can make you more confident in yourself. Maybe make you less nervous, increase your performance, certain types of jobs, uh,

Or maybe having somebody treat you as competent makes you more conscientious, more careful to do a good job so as not to disappoint them and so forth. And so then the authors say, quote, just like expectations about competence, cynical expectations of moral character can become self-fulfilling. So examples of this. Remember the trust-based investing game that we talked about in previous episodes in the series where I am given some money.

And then I have the option to either keep the money or hand it over to a stranger, at which point the money gets quadrupled. So maybe I initially get $5. If I hand it to the stranger, it becomes $20. And then the stranger has the option to either keep all of the money for themselves or split the money and give me back $10. So we both get $10 and I double my initial investment.

This was one of the experiments that found strangers almost always honor the investor's trust and give half the money back. But people greatly underestimated how often that would happen. We we we overestimate the selfishness and treachery of strangers. Anyway, the authors mentioned that in trust based games of this sort, maybe not exactly this game, but something like it.

If one player treats the other with cynicism, the other player actually becomes measurably less trustworthy in how they play the game. In other words, if you treat me like you expect me to be selfish, I actually become more selfish than I would have been otherwise. And this dynamic has been found in laboratory experiments, of course, but also found in the wild in real life scenarios. For example, studies of workplaces that find when

And when management treats workers with suspicion, like they expect them to break the rules and they're trying to, you know, make sure to really crack down and make sure you don't break the rules. It actually makes workers more likely to break the rules. Quote, when cynical supervisors expect low compliance and tighten supervision, they actually lower compliance.

Uh, this of course might not be the case in every workplace all the time, but it has been observed and it intuitively makes sense to me. You know, when a person is treated with trust, they may feel incentivized to rise to meet that trust. And when they're treated with cynical suspicion, the mind rebels and says, no, go to hell. Yeah.

Yeah, like if you actually put a sign up, no stealing pins or no printing out of Dungeons & Dragons supplements on the work printer. You know, we're going to

We're going to be like, well, why not? Why shouldn't I have pins? Why shouldn't I have color printouts of my D&D manuals? Come on. Or just more generally, I mean, I think a lot of people will know the feeling of it does not inspire you to be the best kind of worker if you have the boss constantly looking over your shoulder. That just kind of makes you feel like, well, OK, well, why do I give a damn about this?

I wasn't going to mention too much about Diogenes in this episode because I don't want to confuse things too much. But there are some stories of Diogenes where people expect him to act like a dog in the street.

And then they would like throw food to him to feed him like a dog. But then he kind of ups the ante and out dogs them by then peeing on them like a dog, which we could maybe apply to this scenario. It's like, yeah, if you think I'm a dog, watch how much of a dog I can be. Okay. Another self-fulfilling prophecy dynamic at the interpersonal level. This one's actually even simpler. Person to person respect.

Quote, more generally, cynics assume the worst in others and accordingly treat them with less respect. A recent paper uses lab experiments and daily diary methods to show that cynics often disrespect others. Since people dislike being disrespected, they often return the disrespect. That's pretty straightforward. That makes sense to me.

So these self-fulfilling prophecy dynamics both trap the cynic in their cynical worldview by making those around them less trustworthy and more unpleasant, thus increasing evidence for the cynics view of humankind. It's like if you're acting, if you're already cynical, you make the your environment more.

better evidence for a cynical worldview. And then also they spread cynicism like an infectious disease, causing those who have dealings with the cynic to themselves become more cynical. All right, so that's the interpersonal level. But the next level of analysis is the intra-group level within groups. And here the authors bring up an idea that I thought was really interesting. That is the idea of pluralistic ignorance.

Pluralistic ignorance is a group psychology effect that emerges when people mistakenly believe that everybody else thinks differently than they do.

A classic illustration of pluralistic ignorance is the story The Emperor's New Clothes. Yeah, most people are probably familiar with the Hans Christian Andersen telling of this from 1837, though I'm to understand this was based in part on older tales, and you can also connect it to related stories in various cultures. Yeah.

But the simplified version is some con artists go to the emperor and they say, we've got some beautiful new garments for you. In fact, a magical outfit that can only be seen by people who are intelligent. It's invisible to the dim-witted.

And the con artists provide the emperor, in fact, with no clothes at all. But nobody, including the emperor, wants to admit that they can't see the clothes and thus be thought a fool. So everybody pretends the king has clothes on while he's actually just walking around naked. And nobody is able to speak up about this until finally a child points out the nudity and finally everybody realizes they've been tricked.

This story illustrates pluralistic ignorance because actually everybody privately thinks the emperor is naked, but they are afraid to say so because they think they're the only one and nobody else is saying it. Uh,

And the story does slightly complicated by by adding the detail that they're afraid of being thought unintelligent. And that's not necessarily part of pluralistic ignorance, but it is pluralistic ignorance because everybody in the story just goes along pretending to believe something that none of them actually privately believes.

There was a great treatment of this on the television series Arrested Development with the film project The Ocean Walker, where all the studio people surrounding it just continue to talk about how great it was. But no one actually understood it. But nobody wanted to be seen as as the dummy who doesn't get this amazing project. Great example. And you can think of examples like this all throughout. You know, it happens all the time. So how could this actually be a factor in the propagation of cynicism?

The authors write, quote,

So what if most people in a group actually just want to be trustworthy and cooperative, but there is a let's say a prominent voice within the group saying it's a dog eat dog world. Everybody's just looking out for number one. The speaker could manage to convince the group that everyone else in the group thinks this way, too.

And the person who is not very selfish and would prefer mutual trust and cooperation, that person feels like they can't really admit how they feel publicly because they would be the only one and they would seem naive or silly, or they would fear that

people might think they were misrepresenting themselves you know like your virtue signaling we've heard that kind of thing and the authors point to a study that looks into this i was published in 2001 by ratner and miller uh which uh this paper did several experiments looking into this phenomenon i looked it up and one of the more persuasive experiments went like this okay

If you anonymously, privately ask people about whether they would like to take money away from a research project funded through the National Institutes of Health, most people did not want to take the money away from medical research when asked in private.

However, when it was made clear that the research in question could not directly benefit certain participants personally, for example, it's like to cure a disease that only affects a group you do not belong to.

People became hesitant to speak up publicly in the group about their opposition to cutting the grant, even though they privately still supported the grant. So to paraphrase, lots of people wanted to protect medical research that could not benefit them personally, but they were hesitant to publicly speak up about protecting the research unless it could benefit them personally.

Like this hurts me, gives me confidence to speak in public, but I want to, I just want to help other people. That might be a genuine private motivation, but people were afraid to say that in public. And there could be a number of explanations for this, but based on a few characteristics of the findings, it was interpreted by the, by the researchers as the participants assuming a group notion.

norm of cynicism and fearing being judged by cynical third parties. So if you fear that the people watching you are cynical, you become sheepish about publicly supporting something that doesn't benefit you personally, even if you secretly believe it is good. And I thought this was so interesting because it's sort of counterintuitive. You know, we often think in public, we want to come off as good people. And so, you know, you would want to be seen as

doing something that would help other people. But I absolutely think this phenomenon, it checks out for me. I've observed this kind of dynamic before and assuming it is real, it's obviously not the only psychological pressure on us in this kind of domain. Like there will be counter pressures pushing in the opposite direction as well, because obviously sometimes people do speak up publicly in support of causes they have no personal stake in.

whether that's simply because of the strength of their desire to support that cause. Maybe it's just strong enough to overcome this fear, the fear of social pressure of pluralistic ignorance, or maybe there's just some other social psychological pressure sometimes pushing in the opposite direction. Maybe again, like the desire to appeal to appear selfless and moral, but I can absolutely identify the feeling of,

the fear of social disapproval based on the assumption of cynical group norms. Sometimes something is happening that feels really wrong. And I have an urge to, to point that out, to say something about it, but nobody else around me is saying anything. And I have the feeling like, well, this is none of my business and maybe I just don't understand it well enough. And I'll look naive if I say something, but,

But actually, maybe lots of people are secretly feeling this way because they falsely believe everybody else endorses a cynical mind your own business mentality. I mean, it's very akin to the bystander phenomena in some respects. The idea that, oh, well, I'm not the one to jump in and help. There's someone else who's either more closely aligned with the situation or has the expertise that I don't. And then therefore nobody does anything.

Exactly right. But in the case of cynicism, pluralistic ignorance creating a false belief in group cynicism is...

has the pernicious effect of actually creating real, genuine cynicism over time. The authors write, quote, As cynicism rises in a group, it can make non-cynics act in more self-interested ways, which further reinforces group members' level of cynicism. It's a feedback loop. Wow, yeah. As folks just essentially become more and more cynical just to fit in with the group,

And this has a potentially transformative effect over time. Yeah. But trying to fit in with the group, even if they miss, they're mistaken about how cynical the group is. We're like overestimating the cynicism of the group and trying to fit in with that false perception. Yeah.

And then finally, the authors look at the intergroup level cynicism between different groups. And this section involves meta perceptions, essentially what you believe about how other people perceive you. Some research has found that across many different cultures, groups within each culture that maybe have antagonistic orientations like opposite political parties or, you know, just different groups that have some antagonism.

tend to have false, overly negative intergroup meta-perceptions. People believe that the out-group is more hostile to their in-group than the out-group actually is. And this perception gap can lead to actual intergroup cynicism and hostility via the familiar mechanisms. If you think people hate you, you treat them with distrust, and treating people with distrust actually makes them like you less and trust you less. Quote,

False meta-perceptions illustrate how people can become more cynical in part because they overestimate how polarized their fellow citizens are. All right, so those are the mechanisms the authors identify for how cynicism grows and spreads. But they say from these observations...

we can actually offer some tentative suggestions for how cynicism can be beaten back. I don't think they're presenting this as like the ultimate remedy, like we know everything about how to defeat cynicism, but there's some good starting places here. So at the interpersonal level, they say,

Studies show that people appreciate being trusted and seem to actually become less self-interested and less cynical on average when simply granted trust. So we have an interaction in which you trust me with something. If you do that, I, on average, will actually become a little bit less cynical and a little bit less selfish.

And the cool thing about this is that it's transferable. So somebody trusts me, I actually tend to become not only more likely to trust that person back, but to trust an unrelated third person. Therefore, the same way that acts and displays of cynicism can create this toxic negative feedback loop that increases cynicism for all parties involved,

acts and displays of trust can probably create a positive feedback loop that contagiously undermines cynicism within the culture at large. So this is the real purpose of the leave a penny, take a penny trait, right? I mean, it's building a better world. You joke, but I think little things like that may indeed make a difference. You know, I don't have evidence of that in particular, but I think the little moments of trust

probably do not have to be huge. Like you don't have to go out so far on a limb, just going out a little bit to grant people trust, I think actually surprises them often and has this effect of undermining cynicism. Yeah. I think that might be the case. So if you can undermine cynicism by creating these little moments of, you know, just lots of pervasive little moments of granting trust, um,

You know, that's a good thing to know. But I guess the question is, like, how do you actually implement this? Because you want to affect you want to primarily affect people who are high in cynicism or at least moderate in cynicism.

If you are a person who realizes that you are more cynical than you would like to be and you have like the level of self-consciousness and willpower to go out on a limb and engage in little exercises of trading trust to seed the ground for a better life. Obviously, that's great. If you have that self-awareness, go for it.

But a lot of highly cynical people are probably not going to do this on their own. So it probably helps for less cynical people to kind of deliberately contrive situations of friendly cooperation to infect people suffering from cynicism with opportunities to be trusted and to see examples of trust rewarded. I don't know exactly the best way to do this. Obviously, you can't like

you know, for cynical strangers to do trust falls with you in the grocery store parking lot. But surely there are ways to stage parts of your life so as to create little points of, of trading off of trust and positive social contagion. Yeah. Uh, we're going to get into some possible examples of this in a bit, but I'll go ahead and mention some of it here. These are from some of the ideas of, uh, an author we've already mentioned, uh, Jamil Zaki. Um, uh,

who wrote a book about overcoming cynicism, Hope for Cynics, The Surprising Science of Human Goodness. It came out in 2024. But one of the things that he discusses is essentially the idea of conducting your own behavioral experiments to produce on the whole positive evidence of human goodness. So sort of in a way like leaving the door open for little examples of trust and allowing that trust to wander in.

Again, not leaving the whole door open, you know, not, you know, not like, you know, writing your social security number on your arm and just seeing if anything, anybody does anything bad with it, but smaller acts.

things just sprinkled throughout your daily life. Like, oh, here's a possibility to sprinkle a little trust out there and see that trust returned. And in doing so, giving us more real life evidence of human goodness to counteract this welling up of cynicism inside us. Yeah. And to place emphasis again on what you just said and what we were just talking about, it doesn't have to be huge risks when you make little bids for trust. It can be little things.

Now, coming back to the next level of analysis, it was the intra-group level. Remember, this was the idea that pluralistic ignorance can create within a group a false impression that there is a norm of cynical self-interest, that people are and should be selfish, when really most people in the group don't actually feel that way. They're just afraid to speak up because they think maybe they're the only one.

We might be able to overcome this and other situations of pluralistic ignorance. If we create a culture, we try to personally demonstrate, act out a culture in which people have more courage to disagree with what they assume to be the opinions of the larger group, it

It might turn out that it actually is pluralistic ignorance. Maybe a lot of people already agree with you and they just didn't want to be the only one to say something. And this is especially important if the assumed group norm is something poisonous, something that maybe is coming top down, like it's a dog eat dog world. There's like a really influential person over the group.

shouting this message it's important that like somebody else is saying the opposite otherwise the message shouted from the top can easily become assumed to be the group norm even if it's not

But also the authors point out that normative group pressure can work in the opposite direction. This maybe sounds a little bit grubbier than some of the other ideas because this involves the idea of, well, maybe you should employ peer pressure to positive ends. But the authors write, quote, just as non-cynics can behave cynically under a norm of self-interest, so can cynics become more trusting when they feel normative pressure to do so.

There are experiments showing this. Somebody might have a kind of cynical baseline, but when there's peer pressure around them to be more trusting, it kind of works. It makes them a little bit more trusting. I mean, this is what the trust falls are all about. Yeah, exactly. The trust fall, I don't know, as a particular act might be overly tainted with the aroma of corporate seminars, but things like that. I mean, there is a kind of kernel of wisdom at the at the at the inception of the trust fall.

So I don't know. Do we feel good about trying to intentionally use group peer pressure to influence people? I don't know. Like using it to reduce cynicism seems like one of the better uses of peer pressure than I can imagine. Yeah. Plus, just given how nefarious and how just infectious cynicism is in our lives, like, yes, we should pull every lever we have against it.

And then finally, at the intergroup level, remember, this was the example where groups in society become increasingly distrustful of one another, in part because you imagine that the other group is more hostile to your group than they actually are. And the solution here the authors propose is just give people accurate information, because studies in these situations have shown that

interventions of just like showing people real examples of members of the out group as opposed to leaving it up to their imagination or you know using cherry picked examples from hostile in group media or outright conspiracy theories exactly oftentimes like that's the mode of thinking that is involved in in characterizing the opposing viewpoint yeah just seeing like real accurate representations of who the out group is like

interacting with each other and seeing what they're actually like. These types of interventions have been found to reduce this kind of between group hostility and perceptions of meta perceptions of hostility within the out group. Oh, are they actually as selfish and hostile as I imagined? Now that I see them, it seems maybe not. Yeah. So that's all I've got on this paper by Neumann and Zaki, but I think that is a very interesting place to start. It's got, there's a lot to work with there. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. And I would say in general, for folks who want more information about ways to become less cynical and combat cynical thought and cynicism in your lives, Zaki's work is definitely worth following. And he's out there in a lot of places talking about this stuff, writing about it. Back in 2022, he did a TED Talk on the topic, and you can look that up wherever you get your TED Talks.

There's a great quote in that talk where he says, you might think that cynicism is a system upgrade that allows you to see who we really are. It's not. It traps us in a version of the world we don't want to live in and one we don't have to. That's put very well. And I think that's an important thing to emphasize. It's like a lot of the literature that we talked about, I think in part two of this series, you know, with the cynical genius illusion that like,

it's just framed as wisdom that seeing the world cynically is being realistic and

Exactly. Yeah.

Now, this talk was interesting because I believe it was recorded in 2021. And so, you know, he definitely ties some of it into the global pandemic and talking about the connection between cynicism and disasters, where something disastrous can occur, some sort of widespread scenario like global pandemic, and it can lead to increased cynicism. And he also talks a little bit about the danger of slipping into what he calls a cynicism permafrost.

I suppose on the individual level or even on like a larger societal level, like where if like baseline cynicism grows to a certain level, it's just harder and harder for us to shake it. Yes, cynicism is self-reinforcing and self-perpetuating. To come back to something from that paper, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It makes the world in its image. ♪

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Now, Zaki's 2024 book, again, is Hope for Cynics, A Surprising Science of Human Goodness. And he, of course, in this book, covers the topic at length, goes through a lot of what we've been discussing here. But then there's added information and insight as well. I recommend picking it up if you want to learn more about how to combat cynicism. But I want to go through some of the ideas that he brings forth that essentially gives you sort of a plan of attack.

One of the first things that he points out is that you have to recognize the harm of cynicism. And we've been talking about this. After all, if you don't understand all the mental and physical health as well as social ramifications of a cynical mindset, you might continue to think of it as a path of cool and safe detachment. Like, this is what we are. This is the world we live in. Realizing, first of all, that it's harming you to think this way, that's a good first step.

Yes. Cynicism is not the safe bet. It's not, I don't know, putting your money in CDs or something. It's more kind of like letting it get oily and leaving it next to the fire. Yes. The next thing he brings up is embracing hopeful skepticism and questioning your assumptions. I really like this one because cynicism can, I think, come to feel like it's a comfortable sweater that you wear.

And then if someone comes around and says, get rid of that sweater, you're going to be like, well, this is what I wear. This is basically my skin at this point. And so the idea here is that hopeful skepticism is kind of something that's going to fit you the same as that sweater, but it's not going to constrain your soul.

So assume better of people in general, but also self-analyze your cynical ideas, engage in rational skepticism, which is to say seek actual real-world evidence for your negative opinions and beliefs, and pay closer attention to what you actually observe in the world. Okay.

Oh, yeah. So this is coming back to the distinction we made in the last episode between cynicism and skepticism, whereas cynicism is just a bias toward negativity and distrust. Skepticism is trying to award your trust to things on the basis of whether there's good reason to trust them or not, paying attention to evidence and trying as best you can to ignore your biases, whereas cynicism is itself a bias. And if you want to think about this as trust but confirm, fair enough, however you want to think about it.

It also reminds me a lot of some of the anti-anxiety techniques I've learned about in recent years, such as putting your thoughts on trial and asking yourself questions like, A, what am I afraid will happen? And B, what is likely to happen? Because we can often allow our negative thought patterns to just run around unchecked in our minds. Like it's not at the forefront of our thought. We're trying to do other things. And then it's just in the background like a yapping dog. Right.

But if we stop, if we identify our thoughts, and then we apply reasoning to those thoughts, we put those thoughts on trial and say like, hey, you, stop barking. Now let's talk about why you're barking and what you're barking about. Then you can actually begin to make serious headway towards dismissing these thoughts or at least diminishing their power. Zaki also recommends we conduct, again, our own behavioral experiments to open the door for examples of trust to wander into our lives and

to practice trust. And this is one that's so big that it's going to sound like overly naive just to say it, but focusing on the positive. I mean, how many times have you heard that? It can almost sound like you should smile more.

He recommends engaging in positive gossip as opposed to just negative gossip, to making an effort to finding examples in your life and in the world of people doing good, to counteract the other stories that are going to maybe catch your attention more and certainly drift up towards the top of the news feed more. In a way, this reminds me of that famous Mr. Rogers quote about looking for the helpers, you know.

I believe he said, quote, when I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping. Now, to answer the cynical thought arising in some people's heads, you might think in reaction to that, like, oh, but but isn't that just sort of like turning away from reality? Like, isn't that not being realistic and wanting to live in a happy, happy fantasy land? No, I think a lot of the research we've looked at is like.

this is a strategy for having a more realistic view of the world. What we have a tendency toward is an

an unrealistic view of the world based on the high salience of negative events. So like, you know, 19 positive events and one negative event, the one negative event defines our memory of what happened. And so this is like trying to have a more realistic view based on the actual real world prevalence of trust and positivity. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, it really comes down to like, make sure that you have a balanced diet of information about people in the world.

And that can include a media diet. It can also certainly include a real life diet and how you're interacting with people. Like one example from my own family. Over the past year, we started watching the YouTube videos of Sam Bentley that you can find on wherever you get your videos. But this is a guy who highlights positive social and environmental news from around the world. And these are the kind of stories that are

are generally never the headline. And it's not to say that they should be. And it's not to say that you should be only watching this sort of news stream and not the other news streams. But, you know, their general positivity and hopefulness can provide a very necessary counterbalance to the more cynical darkness that is just going to well out of you in response to the coverage, the rest of the coverage out there. And again, even if the coverage is fair,

and, you know, on the level. I mean, still, it's going to feed that cynicism that is in all of us, that is, you know, going to potentially rise up if we don't keep it in check. Yes, it is very important to be aware

aware of and informed about and have a realistic view of threats and bad things happening. But if you want to be able to respond to those in the best way possible, it's actually important not to let a cynical mindset set in, which just disempowers you.

you. So it is important to be aware of threats and dangers and not like ignore them to like have them front of mind in a way, but be able to respond to them realistically and productively rather than just submitting to cynical surrender. Absolutely. Now, we should be clear that none of this is like a one and done solution. There's not like a check sheet you can go through and be at the end of it, be like, oh, well, there we go. Cynicism defeated.

In fact, Zaki here, the author, in his TED Talk drives home that he still struggles with cynicism himself all the time. And it is a struggle. You can't completely squash the infection of modern cynicism. And that's one of the cruel realities of the whole scenario. Cynicism is just going to well up again and again, potentially gaining foothold each time subconsciously, like it's just in the background growing. And it requires deliberate effort generally to counter its growth.

So, you know, like any kind of maintenance, except it's maintenance on your outlook on the world, on your psyche and your soul. And once again, none of this is a proposed transition from cynicism into naivety or from cynicism into some sort of unhealthy optimism. It's a transition from an unhealthy and ultimately unrealistically bleak outlook on people and the world into something that is more balanced, more reasonably optimistic and healthier for you in multiple regards.

Yeah. See the world as it really is. Trust when you can and use those relationships of mutual trust to make life better. All right. Well, we're going to go ahead and wrap up these episodes on cynicism right here on an up note, on a hopeful note, optimistic note, and then maybe giving you a little homework for ways that you can bring less cynicism into your manifested life.

We want to remind everyone out there that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short-form episodes on Wednesdays, and on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema. Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, J.J. Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com.

Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. ♪♪♪

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