Pushkin.
Cynics might see injustice just like the rest of us do, but cynicism suggests that there's nothing really to be done about it, because if a broken system reflects our broken nature, if the worst of us is who we really are, then any change, any attempt to improve the world or the systems that we live in, is doomed from the outset.
Psychologist Jimil Zaki studies the science of human connection, and he believes that cynicism is holding us back. It's not just harmful for health, it's also misguided. The alternative, he says, is a mindset called full skepticism.
And the reason that I call it hopeful skepticism is because our default tends to be negative. When you adopt a skeptical perspective, you do tend to move towards a slightly more hopeful and positive place because you're correcting for
the biases that we already have. People always say, what you want me to put on a pair of rose colored glasses, and I say, no, you're probably already wearing a pair of glasses that's like mud colored, So just take those off right, so that I'm actually not asking people to pay less attention, but to pay more attention to the folks around them.
On today's episode, the Life Changing Benefits of being a Hopeful Skeptic, I'm Maya Shunker and this is a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become in the face of a big change. Jamil Zaki is a professor of psychology at Stanford University and the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab. You might remember him from his first appearance on this show, when he talked about the power of empathy. Jamil has spent the last twenty years studying the sunny side of
human nature, things like compassion, kindness, and togetherness. He says he's widely known as a kind of ambassador for humanity's better angels. But in his new book Hope for Cynics, The Surprising Science of Human Goodness, Jamil talks about struggling with this image. He begins the book with a confession.
This entire time that I've been advocating for and talking about human goodness, I myself have been pretty cynical. I tend to suspect people and look at the worst sides of lots of situations, becoming anxious, neurotic pessimistic, and I feel like that split between my outer persona on the one hand and my deepest experiences on the other has been a problem for me and did something that I wanted to bring out into the light and address.
I'm curious if you can tell me a bit more about that disconnect. Do you remember a story in which you met with someone who were giving a group council and then you went home and you were kind of like, oh, darn, I don't actually think I'm buying what I'm saying. I'm not internalizing this, oh one hundred percent.
One of the most intense moments came after TED, the global conference that has a lot of great speakers, asked me to come and give a talk on optimism as a path to positive social change. I pulled out my notebook and I said, I'm going to start drafting this talk on the first I think Wednesday of the year
in twenty twenty one, which happened to be January. And I remember I started drafting this talk about how you know optimism is so important, and my friend texted me and said, you have to turn on the television right now, and I saw what the rest of the nation and world saw with the insurrection at the Capitol Building, and I thought, to myself, am I full of shit? Is
everything that I talk about a lie? I know it's not because I do the research, I see the data, but there's sometimes such a huge distance between your head and your heart, you know, And like I just couldn't believe deeper inside myself that people were good as I watched this tragedy unfold.
Yeah, what were the personal costs to being cynical for you? I'm curious to hear how that played out.
During that lockdown period late twenty twenty early twenty twenty one, I really probably had the rock bottom of my own personal cynicism, and it was extremely apparent to me that entire time that it was not helping me, that it was hurting me emotionally, it was diminishing my relationships. It was it felt like a form of social depression, right, depression kind of casts this gray light over everything, and especially over your sense of self and the world at large.
I felt like cynicism was doing that for my vision of other people, you know, sort of it made it extremely difficult for me to see people in a positive light. And I started exploring the science of cynicism because I wanted to figure out what was happening inside me and whether there was anything that I could do for myself to dig out of this trap that I felt my
mind was in. And it's only then that I discovered how common this sense of hopelessness, exhaustion, and cynicism really is, which first of all made me feel better because I was like, well, at least I'm not alone, but then made me feel as I learned more and more about how harmful cynicism is, and not only how harmful, but how unnecessary it is, I thought, Wow, this could actually help a lot of people who feel like I.
Do you know when you say the word cynicism, Jimille, so many images come to mind. What is your definition of cynicism?
Cynicism can be defined as a theory about the world and about people in particular. It's the theory that humanity in general is selfish, greedy, and dishonest. Okay, that is not to say that a cynic will doubt that anybody will ever do a kind thing in their lives. They just think that at our core, who we are is defined by self interest. Now, if you have that theory, you might notice a bunch of things happening inside you
and a bunch of things in your behavior. Right first, you might find self suspecting other people's motives, even when they do things that appear positive. You might find yourself very quick to judge others based on the harms that they produce, not on the best things that they do. It might also change what you do and what you don't do. One place that we see cynicism play out very strongly is in trust. Trust is our willingness to be vulnerable to other people on the belief that they
have our best interest in mind. Loaning somebody money, letting somebody babysit your kid, giving somebody more responsibility at work, on your team. All of these are types of trust, and trust is a social gamble. We can't know what the outcome will be. We need to count on other people. And if you're cynical, that gamble feels like it's for suckers. It feels like a losing bet. So cynics tend to trust a lot less often than non cynics.
You have a very people focused definition. So is that intentional and does it exclude those who just think irrespective of a human involvement you know, an asteroid might hit us, Like, how do you bucket those folks?
Yeah? I think that what you're describing is pessimism, the idea that the future will unfold in ways that we don't want. And I think that pessimism and cynicism are quite related because a lot of what we expect about the future has to do with who's around us right now. But I do think of cynicism as generally a social theory.
Okay, okay, that's very helpful. Would you call cynicism the default state of the human or like, is that what you see in the data or do you think that it's somewhat acquired. I'm just curious to know what we're running up against.
So there are some defaults in the human brain and mind that tip us towards cynicism. Psychologists talk about negativity bias, the idea that it's often much easier to pay attention to, to remember, and much more tempting to talk about negative events and people than positive events in people. And you can see why that would be evolutionarily adaptive, right. You know, if you're thinking back one hundred thousand years, the people who paid lots of attention to threats in their environment
might be more likely to survive. And so that's I think one thing that makes fighting cynicism an uphill battle.
You've already alluded to some of the negative impacts of cynicism on our well being and relationships. Are there any other studies or research that you would want to share?
Yeah, I mean so. One is that cinics unfortunately live far less healthy lives, even at a physical level, so they tend to show greater signs of cellular aging and inflammation. They tend to develop heart disease more than nonsnics and even die younger than non cynics. And I think this comes from the fact that cynics have a harder time tapping into one of the things that de stresses and
it nourishes us the most connection to other people. There's one really fascinating study where researchers brought people in the lab and asked them to give an extemporaneous speech on a topic they didn't know very well, which of course is not pleasant for anybody. And in some cases people had a cheerleader, a friendly stranger who was with them while they prepared and said, you've got this. I believe
in you. And in other cases they were alone. Now, for noncnics, their blood pressure went up when they were preparing this speech, that would happen for any of us. But when they had a supportive stranger there, their blood pressure went up a lot less. For cynics, having a supportive person there didn't make a difference at all. So their blood pressure increased just as much if they were alone or if somebody was there to help them. That
is so telling to me. It almost strikes me that if you're cynical, if you don't believe in people, then you kind of can't digest or metabolize the social nourishment of connection. And I think that that's just such a tragic way to live.
Yeah, so much of your book I see as mythbusting cynicism. And so what are some common misconceptions that people have about cynicism.
Yeah, this was one of the things that was most surprising for me when I started doing this research, because I thought to myself, Wow, cynicism feels terrible. It's awful for our health and relationships, it's not very good for our communities. Why are so many people adopting this as a view of life and as a view of humanity. And there are three myths that I realized our culture
propagates about cynicism. The first is that it's wise. Now, over the last three years since starting this project, I've talked to so many self proclaimed cynics, and one thing that they have in common, besides hostility and a little bit of contempt, is a sort of bitter pride. A lot of cynics will say, I'm actually a realist. You know that if you don't think in cynical terms, you're a naive roub or a chump. That if you pay close enough attention and become wise enough, then you will
realize that people are really terrible. And in fact, it's not just cynics who think this. Surveys find that seventy percent of people think that cynics are smarter than non cynics, and eighty five percent of people think that cynics are more socially smart, for instance, that they'll be better at picking out liars than nonsnics. It turns out that that's not true. So there's data from hundreds of thousands of people, lots of national surveys that finds that cnics actually perform
less well on cognitive tests. Than non cynics, and there is other research that finds that cynics are worse at spotting liars than non cynics. So it's important to know that that perception of cynicism as a type of intelligence is clearly at odds with the data.
Let's talk a bit more about some of the other misconceptions we have about cynicism.
Yeah, I think that another misconception that I think people have about cynicism is that it's safe. You know, I think a lot of us who feel cynical about others feel that way because we've been hurt, betrayed, disappointed, you know. I know for me, my cynicism comes from a lot of early parts of my life where I didn't feel like I could really count on people. And so it's not saying that I feel because I think I'm superior to others or because I want to have a negative attitude.
It's sort of a response to pain. And one response that we might have to pain is to put our guard up to feel like, well, I never want to experience that again. I don't want to be betrayed or hurt again. And the only way I can guarantee my own safety moving forward is to shut off any type of social risk. And that's why I think you often see cynics not willing to trust people because they don't want to risk betrayal, They don't want to risk being taken advantage of.
No. I totally appreciate that. Why don't we cover genial The third misconception that people have when it comes to cynicism.
Yeah, the third misconception around cynicism is the idea that cynicism is moral, that that really it's so important to be aware of injustice, corruption and harm, and that cynics are the only ones who are adequately responsive to all the terrible things that happen in the world, and as a result, that being hopeful or positive is kind of an abandonment of our species and our problems, that it's
a pair of rose colored glasses. You know, when I talk about hope and overcoming cynicism, a lot of people say, well, that's rich coming from you, an ultra privileged professor at an elite university. You know, a lot of us don't have the luxury of feeling good about humanity. We have
to speak truth to power and challenge injustice. And first of all, I think cynics might see injustice just like the rest of us do, but cynicism suggests that there's nothing really to be done about it, because if a broken system reflects our broken nature, if the worst of us is who we really are, than any change, any attempt to improve the world or the systems that we
live in, is doomed from the outset. And so you actually see more cynical people are less likely to take part in social movements, they're less likely to vote, they're more willing to do things like spread conspiracy theories. And in fact, I think that autocrats and authoritarians often benefit from cynicism and use it as a way of promoting the status quo. I mean, a population that doesn't trust itself is an easy one to manipulate.
Yeah, yeah, Do you think there's an element of guilt? Do people feel guilty when they express optimism? Because it just feels jarring when you see all the pain and suffering around you.
This is such a deep question, and I do want to separate optimism from hope here. Yeah, Optimism is the idea that things will turn out well. Hope is the idea that they could turn out well. And I think that's a huge distinction, because optimism can lead a little bit to complacency. You know, if things are going to go great, then I don't really have to do anything to make a difference. And in fact, I think that what you could call toxic optimism is not that different
from cynicism. If cynics think, well, things are going to go terribly no matter what I do, they can also be complacent.
Yeah, an optimists are like, things are going to go great no matter what I do, so I'm not going to do anything.
So you've got two groups of people who have fundamentally different beliefs, but neither one of them might be inspired to do much. Hope takes the deep uncertainty that we have about the future as the place where our actions matter, and so hopeful people tend to focus on their agency and they think, well, there's a vision of the world
where things could be better. I'm not saying that's what will happen, but it's a possibility, and in order for that possibility to become more likely, I need to take action. Hopeful individuals, for instance, tend to be more resilient during adversity. Lower socio economic and underrepresented minority students who have hope, are more likely to pursue their academic goals, and socially as well, Hopeful people are more willing to engage in protests.
A protest is not a complacent, rose colored glasses type of thing to do. It's taking major problems head on. But why do we take those problems head on? Because we think that there's a difference to be made.
You advocate in your book for quote, Unlearning Cynicism, and you introduce this concept of hopeful skepticism. You've already explained how hope is different from optimism. Can you explain what you mean by hopeful skepticism.
One of the most important things that I learned in doing research for this project was the difference between cynicism and skepticism. You know, as we've talked about, cynicism is a theory about the world. Well as you know as a scientist, once you have a theory, you start to kind of see it everywhere and even want to support it, and so there can be some confirmation bias around theories, and cynics often have a biased way of looking at the world. They almost look at it like lawyers, right,
and the prosecution against humanity. They really pay lots of attention to the terrible things that people do, or they might explain away the others' kindness and trustworthiness. Skepticism is not thinking like a lawyer, but thinking like a scientist. Skeptics don't necessarily have some huge, huge assumption or theory about what people are like. Instead, they look for evidence.
They're unwilling to rest on early and easy judgments, and because of that, skepticism is really different from cynicism, and skeptics, unlike cinics, can learn really quickly, can adapt to new situations, and become much more accurate about people than cinics do.
One of the quotes that I really enjoyed from your book, and I thought articulated the point well, is that hope is not a naive way of approaching the world. It's an accurate response to the best data available.
It's really a point I want to drive home because a lot of people when they hear hope, they think of somebody with their head in the sand. They think of somebody ignoring data as opposed to approaching data. One of the important points, though, and the reason that I call it hopeful skepticism, is because our default tends to
be negative. When you adopt a skeptical perspective, you do tend to move towards a slightly more hopeful and positive place because you're correcting for the biases that we already have. People always say, what you want me to put on a pair of rose colored glasses, and I say, no, you're probably already wearing a pair of glasses that's like mud colored, So just take those off right, so that I'm actually not asking people to pay less attention, but to pay more attention to the folks around them.
After the break, Jamil teaches us how to practice hopeful skepticism. We'll be back in a moment with a slight change of plans, Jimil. The hopeful part of all this is that hopeful skepticism is in fact a skill that we can build. So why don't we talk a bit about how it is that we can build that muscle. In your book, you have this wonderful practical guide, and I'm hoping that we can share with listeners a few examples of some of these overarching strategies. The first you say
is to connect with your core values. Tell me what that looks like.
Yeah, you know, it's interesting. It turns out that although cynics have a lot of judgment and contempt for other people. They also tend to say that they rely on other people more for their sense of self worth the non cynics. So there's a sense that when we can't trust ourselves very deeply, it's hard to trust others. Yeah, it turns out that one of the best ways to start overcoming cynicism is to connect in new ways to ourselves. My colleague at Stanford, Jeff Cohen, has a lot of work
on this through what he calls values affirmation. So values affirmation is where you so consider what matters most to you in life. You'll see a list of, for instance, twenty things that people often say they care a lot about, and you'll be asked, well, what are your top three or what's your top one, And then you're asked to write about, well, why does it matter to you and what are some ways that you express that value in
your life. And it turns out that this simple exercise, just ten fifteen minutes of writing about what really matters to you and how you live your values, instills a kind of deep confidence in people. I'm not talking about braggadocious arrogance, but rather a sense of sturdiness, a sense of solid foundation, and when we have that sense of sturdiness internally, we're more willing to be open to others.
Jeff finds that when people affirm their own values, they feel less threatened by information that conflicts with their beliefs and more open minded. And that's why I think it might tap us in also to a sense of skepticism and hopeful skepticism about other people.
You talk about this in terms of, you know, better connecting to ourselves, and I wonder I'm just thinking out loud. I mean, here's one way in which I think increasing self compassion could be a vehicle through which we have more hope. So when we do fail or we make some sort of mistake, we can overconclude from that incident. Right, So rather than saying I made a mistake, it's I'm a mistake. There's no redemption.
Yeah.
And if I have more self compassion and I believe, okay, well I made a mistake, I myself not a mistake, I might be more willing to assume that posture with other people in my life, like, oh, that person hurt me, but they might not be like a hurtful person, like someone who loves hurting others. They might just have aired in a particular way.
That's beautifully put. I love that. And I think there's a lot of evidence that when we judge people in a trait based way, we see an action that they take and we decide that action defines them. That closes us off not just to compassion for that person, but it makes it very easy for us to think cynically about that individual. In fact, cynicism is a sort of fixed view of humanity.
Right, exactly. That's what I'm trying to get at. It's like, yeah, yeah, there is actually hope for this person to change, because I think I can change. I love that.
Yeah, No, I think that's right.
Let's go to the second strategy for building hopeful skepticism, and you say that is to be skeptical of your cynicism. So tell me a bit more about what that process can look like.
This is something that I drew in trying to overcome my own cynicism from tools in cognitive behavioral therapy or CBT. Right, So, when I started CBT in my twenties, my therapist told me, Okay, what are your beliefs about yourself and about the world. Write them down and then try to think about them scientifically. What evidence do you have to support them? And I wrote down some of my very negative beliefs at the time. At the time, I really felt like if I am
not positive all the time, people won't like me. That I need to entertain or provide people with good vibes in order for them to stay in my life. I felt like expressing that true self when my true self was unattractive or gloomy, would lead people to flee. But I had no evidence for it because I had never really tried. I had never been open with other people about what I was going through or feeling. And so my therapist then said, Okay, you've got this belief, you
don't have any evidence for it. Why don't you collect some data, Why don't you try to test your hypotheses? And both of these steps understanding what our beliefs are and whether we have evidence for them and then testing them could be tools for being skeptical of our own cynicism.
Yeah, I wonder how that played out for you, because I own your book. You said people used to call you Guy Smiley, so you were definitely battling a pretty strong reputation so what steps did you take to test out this theory that you had to be a certain way in order to be liked.
One example from more recently, a few years ago now, a couple of new faculty members joined my department and we went out for drinks and they said, well, what's it like to be a professor here at Stanford? And you know, I had my guy smiley response already, you know, it's the best job in the world. I can't believe it. But instead I decided to answer honestly, and I said, it's terrifying. You know, you you never feel like you
deserved this job, because nobody really deserves it. You have to be so lucky to get here, and it's incredibly easy to feel like an impostor and to feel like any mistake you make is just proof that the university made a mistake in hiring you. And I still remember the seconds of silence that followed this, you know, rant that these people had not asked for and our first time hanging out, and they felt like ours to me. And I also remember the relief that poured out of
these new faculty members. They said, Wow, it means so much to hear somebody who we see as succeeding open up about this, and we ended up becoming really fast friends. And even now years later, we get together about once a quarter and we have something called beer and wine where we drink beer and wine, but with an h you know, we complain and vent and open up and again. So for me, being positive was inauthentic. Sometimes it was a defense mechanism, and being honest about my struggles showed
that I believed in the people around me. I believed that they would have my back, and more often than not they did. So the experiments that I did in my life, the data came back shockingly positive.
Yeah. So the final strategy is to practice what you call social saving. Tell me more.
Yeah. Savoring is generally the practice of appreciating good things as they happen, and it's related to, but distinct from gratitude, which is generally appreciating the good things that have happened. So I practice savoring a lot with my kids. We will do things like ice cream eating class or sunset watching class, where we will enjoy something, but we'll enjoy it very carefully. I'll say, well, what do you like about how this tastes or the texture of the ice cream.
What do you want to remember about this moment? Just pointing our awareness towards the good things in our lives. And social savoring is in essence, taking that same general strategy, but pointing it towards other people. And so for me, social saving has two parts. One is paying attention to and looking for examples of people doing good in the world. And I'm not talking about heroics that you see in
the news. I'm talking about walking around a city and seeing people pick up litter or helping somebody who's in need, for instance. The second part of social savoring is not just to notice the goodness that's all around us all the time, but to share it. When you socially savor
with others, you help fight their cynicism. But you also in changing what you say, change the way that you think, your habits of speech become habits of mind, and help kind of pop up in antenna in your own mind for the goodness of others, which of course is not that hard to find once you start to look for it. Yeah.
Yeah. One lesson I internalized early for my mom is, especially when engaging with people in the service industries, they're always hearing complaints and so her goal is always to counteract that by every time she has a really positive experience, making sure she calls in the manager and says, you know, so and so is so amazing and so excellent and so just the other day flying back from New York, and our flight attendant was just so kind, and I just called her over and I was like, Hey, I
just need you to know you are such a kind, cheerful presence. And it's made my day and it's made this flight so much better. And I thought in that moment about the impact that sharing that with her would have on her. But I didn't think in that moment about what you're sharing with me now, which is what impact it probably had on me and my view of humanity.
I love that. It's a lot. I mean, our culture is so full of people giving life one star reviews on Yelcha you and I'm giving all the people around them one star reviews. But if that's all we do, if the loudest conversations we have are about the worst things that happen, yeah, then we will end up with a skewed view of the world and of each other.
I'm curious to know how writing this book and engaging with the research on hope and cynicism has transformed your own outlook on life. Right, So you came into this saying, Okay, I'm going to confess that I am a cynic. How has it changed the way that you live your life? How has it changed your relationship with some of your big fears? Yeah, share with me any reflections you have.
I don't consider myself an ex cynic. I consider myself a recovering cynic.
Yeah.
Right. In that I work on this all the time, I still have the same defaults. I still have the same instincts. I think that one of the things that this project has changed in me is that I'm more aware that when I'm thinking in gloomy or cynical terms, that that doesn't mean that I'm right. So I guess I trust my cynicism less. I'm more skeptical of it. That is something that I can say I've achieved. And
then this project has changed how I parent. I'm much more aware of how even if I'm taking risks, even if I'm trusting people, my default is to stop my kids from taking any risks and to protect them from all sorts of harm, and especially from harmful people. I stand by that instinct one thousand percent, but I think oftentimes as a parent, my default has been protection over freedom, protection over exploration, and protection over learning, and so I've
been trying to balance that. And so one of our daughters is eight years old and we live in the middle of a big city here in San Francisco, and she really wants to be able to go buy something on her own, right. She wants to be able to go a couple of blocks and pick something up. And we've gone back and forth on this for over a year now, and I won't say that she's done it yet, but we're on the cusp of doing it. I got her some walkie talkies so that she can be in
contact if she needs us. But you know, before working on this project, I would have thought, no way, I'm letting her go even two blocks. You know, there's just too many people out there who could try to harm her. And of course, I want, above and beyond anything in the world for my daughter to be safe. But I also think now that her going a block or two
is actually a pretty safe thing to do. It's something that children have done for generations, and that keeping her from doing that isn't actually keeping her safe, it's in fact keeping her from learning about the world and how to interact with it.
Jimille can feel like a huge shift to move from cynicisms to hopeful skepticism, especially during the time we live in. I mean, I'm thinking about areas of life that I'm very cynical about, and it seems like a herculean effort to do that, And so I do wonder you can talk just a bit about that.
This is a process of small steps, right, I mean, nobody changes fundamentally how they view the world overnight, really change fundamental deep change is a process of building new habits, little things that we do slightly differently each day. Another thing that I'll say is that cynicism is really most powerful in the abstract. If you ask people what are people like, they're pretty gloomy. But if you ask them
what are the people in your life like? And I'm not saying your friends and family, but the strangers you interact with, your grosser, your neighbor, the person you sit next to on the bus. If you ask people about
their actual communities, they're much more bullish. They think that those people are very trustworthy, are kind, They think that those communities are generally pretty good, and so I think it's important to remember that hope oftentimes isn't out there in the ether, it's right here all around us, in the communities that we live in.
Hey, thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed this conversation with Jamil, we on the Slight Change team would be so grateful if you could share the episode with someone you know, it helps us get the word out so we can keep making more episodes for you. And if you're looking for more stories of change later this month, I'm sharing one of my all time favorite episodes from the archives, and we've got some great new episodes coming later this fall. And as always, I highly recommend checking
out the back catalog. That's where you can find Jamil's first episode called how to Build Empathy and Avoid Burnout. Thanks so much and see you soon. A Slight Change of Plans is created, written, and executive produced by me Maya Schunker. The Slight Change family includes our showrunner Tyler Green, our senior editor Kate Parkinson Morgan, our senior producer Trisha Bobida, and our engineer Eric o'huang. Luis Scara wrote our delightful
theme song and Ginger Smith helped arrange the vocals. A Slight Change of Plans is a production of Pushkin Industries, so a big thanks to everyone there, and of course a very special thanks to Jimmy Lee. You can follow a Slight Change of Plans on Instagram at doctor Maya Schunker. See you next week.