Cynicism, Part 2

other people are selfish, untrustworthy, and immoral. In Part one, we talked about what cynicism means in its modern usage, and we contrasted that with similar but distinct concepts like pessimism, and also with cynic philosophy, the latter being a school of philosophy born in ancient Greece that emphasized moral integrity, self sufficiency, and virtue, and achieved in part by shedding pretensions, like ignoring the pressure to conform and living in accordance

with our nature. The word cynic comes from the Greek word for, and so a cynic philosopher in the ancient sense might say that we can all learn something from watching the honest way that a dog lives according to its nature. This, of course, is quite different from what we mean by cynicism today in common language, which is a disposition of low social trust, the tendency to believe, as we put it, last time, that people are bad, people are selfish, and morals are fake. Yeah.

is deceitful above all things. There is none that doeth good, No, not one, that sort of thing. We also discussed medical, psychological, and sociological research on the correlates of cynicism, with the overwhelming conclusion being that holding cynical beliefs about human nature and low trust in others is quite harmful to us in many different ways. It appears to be bad for our health, mental and physical health. It is correlated with

all kinds of undesirable outcomes, including early death. We didn't really get into this research last time, but you probably won't be surprised to learn it is associated with low quality social relationships, and despite the archetype of the ruthless, cynical striver and achiever, it also tends, on average to make it harder for us to reach even our material goals like making money and attaining positions of leadership, at least in part because cynical people waste a lot of

time and resources trying to avoid being made a sucker and miss out on opportunities to cooperate with others for mutual benefit. So I think it's safe to say that believing everyone is just in it for themselves and cannot be trusted is in so many ways bad, bad, bad for us. It's bad for our lives. But of course, the somewhat heartwarming implied inverse of all this is the evidence that it really does us good to cooperate and trust people.

or if we're striking just the most reasonable balance. And also, given that it comes with so many clear downsides, what if anything, is the benefit of cynicism.

might help us out. So one category is insider cynics, So the cynicism of contemporary professionals who believe that people are ultimately selfish, and these individuals do their best to survive in their organizations by dealing with their colleagues on those terms. So we might think of it as a you know, I'm not here to make friends approach, but you know, only to work or specifically to work, with the idea being that maybe outside of that work environment they are less cynical.

doubting of people. Maybe if you are, I don't know, investigating murders or something like that, like you you really need to not just like trust people.

values and beliefs of people they hold power over. In a weird sense, system's kind of kind of a puzzle because a person who's really cynical about politics would no doubt assume that every politician is a master cynic, that they're just when they're glad handing and so forth, they're just pretending to take on these values where deep down they know the truth, like I know that people are just selfish and they're exploiting everyone as well.

for personal gain, but for the greater good. And that one, you know, made me think a little bit more and maybe gives us a little more room to play when considering the effectiveness or possible effectiveness of cynicism. I was thinking, like, let's say you wanted to encourage a certain behavior in the general public, and you're presented with two messaging options, one that works based on a cynical view of human motivations, you know, greed and self interest, while the other appeals

to the higher angels of their nature. Well, which is more likely to work. It's going to depend on the messaging, of course, and the exact details of the target audience, you know, general audience versus you know, some narrow or audience. But yeah, which worldview is a better starting place? I feel like this might work as a good sort of practical thought experiment because it entails making a choice about how you're going to model the motivations of a given population.

But on the other hand, we kind of come back to that sliding scale of cynicism. If one is cynical enough about the intended audience, then would any messaging seem like it would work, like why are you even bothering? If you're just assuming that everyone out there is just selfish, you might not be able to get them to stop littering, or to recycle or to I don't know where seat belts.

of that sort you're sort of blowing off steam. And of course this can be true even for people who are not especially cynical on average, having these little moments of situational cynicism. But I was thinking more about the Catharsis element, and I wonder if this association of cynicism with cathartic relief also tells us something about how people

can acquire generalized dispositional cynicism. Like what if the person who is very cynical on average gets to be that way by creating by like habituating themselves to a desire for that momentary catharsis that you get from saying people suck? Does that make any sense?

But I was just thinking about, Okay, if one's really cynical regarding one's employers, one's corporate overlords, you might excuse any amount of inaction or slacking based on the view that, well, they don't really care about me, they're not invested in me, they're not paying me enough, and so forth, all any grievance you might imagine. And maybe, just maybe in small doses, this gives you space to let things glide in ways that ease your work burden or create space for something

else you want to do. And yeah, maybe it's a situation where if you stick your hand into that cookie jar too often, it does become your default view, at least of your work situation. And maybe it bleeds over into other areas as well.

personality is. Yeah, I don't have research to back up that interpretation of where cynicism comes from, but I think that is an interesting possibility or if it ever sets in that way.

up applying to certain heads of that company. But then it could potentially trickle down and then where does it stop? Like who stops being the face of the company. I guess they have to be cynical enough. They have to share your cynicism in order to be like your your brothers in arms against the company, that sort of thing.

or different levels of cynicism. And so there can be very like cynicism positive organizations, like if you are within a company that is very cruel and in which you know you don't do very well by placing trust in people, it can be quite reasonable to end up responding with the generalized cynicism about interactions within that company. Organizational culture

is a thing. So anyway, So I want to turn to a concept in psychological research on cynicism that I found really interesting, and that is the so called cynical genius illusion. So I was reading about this in a paper by a couple of researchers that I cited in part one of the series. These scientists are Olga Stavrova, a professor of psychology at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, and Daniel Illbracht at the University of Cologne in Germany.

These two published a paper in the year twenty eighteen in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, and the paper was called the Cynical Genius Illusion, Exploring and Debunking lay beliefs about cynicism and competence. Now they begin by acknowledging a lot of the things we talked about in the last episode. They define cynicism as you know, the

main cognitive component of hostility. They're talking about it pretty much in the same terms we are a belief that other people you know, you should be suspicious of their motives, that they that they are primarily motivated by self interest, that they can't be trusted and will harm you. And then they run through the long list of ways that cynicism appears to be bad for us, bad for our lives in health, in relationships, and ability to attain goals

and so forth. However, the authors complicate that picture by noting that if you just look at popular culture and literature and folk wisdom, cynicism does not not seem to have and on the whole negative reputation. To read from their introduction here quote, Among nineteenth and twentieth century writers in popular figures, cynicism has often been seen as a sign of intelligence and wit. American writers Ambrose Bierce and Lillian Hellman praised cynicism as an art of seeing the

true nature of things. Bernard Shaw referred to cynicism as a quote power of accurate observation, and John Stuart Mill noticed that quote it is thought essential to a man who has any knowledge of the world to have an extremely bad opinion of it. And as for the other authors they named, I looked up some of the cynical quotes. I can't believe I didn't think of Ambrose Bierce as a good source of literary cynicism in the last episode.

But in The Devil's Dictionary, Bierce defines a cynic as someone quote whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. They all so cided Lillian Hellman. Her version of this was, quote, cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth. And I do think there's something interesting in Hellman's phrasing here, because of the emphasis on tone. It is an unpleasant way of saying what is true. So what is the difference between

somebody just quote being real and somebody being cynical. It might be in the substance of what they say and how they think. It might be like you know, material substantive differences. But I think sometimes we make that distinction based on whether there is negative emotion in their expression, Like if they are counseling us against trust, did they

deliver that council with anger or contempt? But anyway, so you've got all this literature that equates cynicism with the kind of wisdom and you know, like the power to see what is really going on. Also, the authors here point out that if you draw up a list of like cynical characters in popular culture, they don't tend to be pitiable wretches dealing with setbacks imposed by their lack of faith in humankind. More often, cynicism in fictional characters

is presented as gruff hard one realism and wisdom. The cynical character has knowledge, insights, and powers of deduction not available to their more trusting peers. So think of Sherlock Holmes or the authors give the example of House from how simd. I'm not a watcher of House, but I'm familiar with the character.

the good fight. He is on the side of the good guy, and will sometimes even you know, break the rules a little bit or bend them in order to make sure that justice is served. But on the other hand, I think if you, if you look closely enough at Sherlock, I mean he's also a character who at times admits that he's never loved anyone or has certainly never had a romantic love in his life. He also struggles horribly with addiction at one point. You know, so you know,

he's he's not an angel. But again, I guess this part of his presentation, he's he's hard boiled. It's it's it's it's hard one cynicism that he uses in order to solve the crimes that he's presented with.

Do cynics actually seem smarter? And are they actually smarter and more competent than the rest of us?

in trust or low in cynicism. The findings were that high trust, individuals are seen as moral and seen as sociable, but also seen as less competent. And this kind of makes sense as a familiar personality archetype, right like, Johnny is so trusting, he's a good guy, he's friendly, but he doesn't know what he's doing. So, if showing generalized trust makes people think we're less competent, does that imply

that showing generalized distrust makes people think we're more competent. Perhaps? However, the authors also found here that people see you as more competent if you display what they call discriminate ability, which is the ability to tell the difference between a situation in which you should trust and situations in which you should not. And this takes us back to the

question we mentioned in part one. Obviously, nobody either trusts or distrusts in every situation, So how do you determine how cynical it is reasonable to be in this situation? And how do we know if we're off balance?

that someone is untrustworthy when they really are trustworthy. Over human evolutionary history, making the cognitive system of modern humans biased toward false alarms, which is hard to argue with, right, Like, Yeah, in this series, we are showing lots of evidence that it is bad for you to be highly chronically cynical, and yet it's true that more often if you distrust a trustworthy person, the immediate consequences are fairly limited, but

if you trust an untrustworthy person, the consequences can be disastrous.

But you know, the way our brains work and the way we're hardwired, it's like we know that that's one sort of risk I'm going to lose some time, and I might you know, feel horrible the whole way versus getting eaten by a tiger. Yeah, like one of those is like a mutt like looms far larger in our short term threat analysis.

what their relative competence level actually is. And this, I guess comes back to another question we brought up in Part one. Do cynics or nonsnics have a better predictive model of the world. And one very interesting way of studying this is the so called trust game. So here's an example of a type of trust game. This was described in a paper called why so cynical asymmetric feedback

underlies misguided skepticism regarding the trustworthiness of others. This was by Debt Left, Fetchenhawer, and David Dunning in the journal Psychological Science in twenty ten and it describes this what is sometimes called an investing game. They call it a trust game, and it goes like this quote. In the game, the trust is given money that can be kept or handed to a completely random and anonymous stranger, the trustee.

If the trust hands his or her money over, the amount of money is quadrupled eg. Five dollars becomes twenty dollars, and trustees have two options. They can either split the money evenly between themselves and the truster, eg. Give ten dollars back and keep ten dollars for themselves, or they can keep all the money for themselves. So the way the game works is I'm the truster. I'm the person who gets to make the first decision. If I trust you and you are trustworthy, we both benefit and I

double my money. If I trust you and you are not trustworthy, I get nothing. So the authors did this experiment lots of times and some interesting patterns came out. They found that trusters estimate the rate of trustworthiness of anonymous strangers in the game. They estimate it will be between four forty five and sixty percent. So it seems that most people think it's a little better than a coin flip chance that the other person will honor their

trust and split the money for mutual benefit. In reality, the trustees honored the trust and split the money around eighty to ninety percent of the time. So people in this game massively underestimated how trustworthy random strangers would be. At least in the context of this game, anonymous strangers were something like twenty to fifty percent more trustworthy and cooperative than people expected them to be. Isn't that interesting? That's crazy?

This is a different thing because the trustee in this game is not somebody who is coming out of nowhere to offer you money if you just give them some first. They're a random stranger who is who has been pulled into this experiment designed by somebody else. And so I think what this shows is most of the time, if given the opportunity to be trustworthy and cooperate, most people will. But also it makes sense to be wary of people who are claiming they're trying to help you cooperate, you know,

from mutual benefit. If they're coming out of nowhere with this, you know, that's often going to be a scam. Does that make sense?

from what they call asymmetric feedback. And the way that works is this, when you trust somebody and you get betrayed, you get very clear feedback that it was wrong to trust. The downside of granting your trust is very apparent to you. They walk away with the money, you get nothing, and you know it's clear to you happened. But when you refrain from trusting people, the downsides are often invisible to you because you don't actually see the lost opportunity as

a scenario that plays out in front of you. You have to like imagine it as a counterfactual. It's not concrete and in your face, like being betrayed is, so you don't really get conditioned by feedback from instances where you harmed yourself by withholding trust. Does that make sense?

in this way. But if you're if you're just overly pedantic when it comes to the bills, eventually people might stop asking you to join them for dinner. Yeah, And that might be very invisible to you that that's happening.

it tended to reduce the subject's cynicism. So, like, let's say you play the trust game, symmetric feedback would be rob whether or not you decide to hand somebody the

five dollars and try to cooperate to quadruple it. You get to find out what they would have done either way, so you know, you get to keep playing the game that way, And it turns out if you play it that way, where people keep seeing, oh, I kept the money, but they I saw that they would have doubled my money if I just trusted them, and you get to

see that happen over and over. That actually does decrease people's cynicism, which also is interesting and that it gives you at least a little bit of an idea where some elements of cynicism could be coming from. It could be related in part to this asymmetric build up of information. We get to see where trust fails very clearly, but the opportunities we lose out on by not granting trust are often just like, we don't even realize what's happened.

We don't even realize anything. We don't even know what we're missing. Yeah, so this research does not give us a complete picture. But I think some evidence is starting to accumulate that the cynic does not have a highly accurate internal model of the world. They might in some scenarios, but generalized cynicism is not like as some of these

writers were saying, seeing things as they really are. In fact, cynicism often causes us to incorrectly predict the behavior of other people, assuming they will be more selfish and treacherous than they really are. Now coming back to the main paper I was talking about, but Stavrova and elibract they

note some other research on the link between cynicism and competence. Again, contrary to the cynical genius archetype, the authors are able to cite a long list of studies looking at links between cynicism and various types of cognitive performance and ability, and they find it's exactly the opposite of what you might guess from the Sherlock Holmes example. Higher performance on various types of cognitive academic and IQ tests is negatively

correlated with cynicism. It is instead positively correlated with increased tendency to trust. There are a few confounding results here. It's not like every single study has found this, but the vast majority have. Some of the confounding results are For example, they cite a twenty thirteen study that found that higher IQ does not, on average improve a person's ability to correctly predict who will be trustworthy and who

will not. So like you do better on cognitive tests, that doesn't mean that if we pair you up with, you know, Johnny and Billy in the in the Trust Game experiment, you can predict whether Johnny or Billy you'll be more likely to help you out. It just it doesn't help us in that regard.

by these sorts of tests. So the authors begin to develop a possible hypothetical model to explain what's going on here. They say, what if intelligence, knowledge and competence don't really help you very much in identifying who to trust in a given scenario. They don't tell you really if Johnny or Billy, both of whom you've just met, is more trustworthy, But instead they help you evaluate the scenario itself to decide whether to deploy a more cynical or a more

trusting framework given the environment and the circumstances. The authors rit quote high levels of competence might allow individuals to correctly identify the corruptness of their environment and adjust their level of cynicism to match it. Following this reasoning, high competence individuals might hold adapt attitudes and recur to cynicism only when it seems warranted, while they're less competent. Counterparts might show more cognitive rigidity and relying on the better

safe than sorry heuristic tend to endorse cynicism indiscriminately. So if this model is correct, they're saying it can be efficient to just remain in better safe than sorry mode when you lack the ability to tell whether you're dealing with a corrupt, untrustworthy environment or not.

and numbers and stuff. They're more likely to assign you important cognitive tasks like doing mathematical calculations and logical analysis of documents if they think you're cynical. And on the other hand, the authors found in their experiments no, on average, cynicism is not associated with cognitive superiority or greater competence.

They had three studies based on data from about two hundred thousand subjects across thirty different countries and showed that on average, cynicism was negatively correlated with tests of cognitive ability and tests of academic nolede and competency. So this included all kinds of things like reading, comprehension, mathematical skills,

scientific literacy, technological literacy, and so forth. And this negative association between cynicism and cognitive tests was true even after controlling for confounding variables like age, gender, household income, wealth, test, language proficiency, and Big five personality traits. Now, one major distinction here is that they found that people who tested

higher incompetence tended to have attitudes of contingent trust. They might be trusting by default, but we're not rigid in that regard and would become more cynical if it was warranted situationally or based on the environment and cultural context, whereas people scoring lower incompetence tended to accept an unconditionally

cynical worldview. In the words of the authors quote suggesting that at low leane levels of competence, holding a cynical worldview might represent an adaptive default strategy to avoid the potential costs of falling prey to others cunning. Now, I wanted to expand on these findings with a few notes. One of the things about the early tests of people's perceptions of cynicism a control they had here, is that

the authors didn't just ask about cognitive competence. They also asked about social and moral competence, and quite along the lines you might expect. People tended to think that low trust individuals would be better at cognitive things like math, logic, and critical thinking, but they thought that high trust individuals would be better at social tasks like cheering up a depressed friend or taking care of a stray animal. So it wasn't just like across the board we think cynics

are great. We think cynics are better at everything. It's that people tend to think cynics are better at certain types of intelligence based skills, things like math and logic and so forth.

doctor smoking a cigarette. I have questions. Maybe this is not the doctor for me, but private detective smoking a cigarette, Well, obviously that's the guy I want looking after my interests.

talking about. I can just smoke it's fine. Or there's the version that's like I don't care what happens to me, which I think is a little bit different than cynicism. Maybe though could go along with cynicism.

positive about human nature. It's always funny how just changing the swapping a word out can have some effects there. They also replicated these findings in different samples, so they did some online surveys, international online surveys, and they did some in person tests of university students in Germany. They did some with British adults, and the cynical genius effect

appeared to varying degrees in all the groups tested here. However, in some of these experiments, respondents got to rate essentially how cynical they would like a person assigned to a cognitive task to be, and the breakdown, to be clear, was not toward a preference for extreme cynicism, but for

higher than average cynicism. So one example here is that in a group of British adults selecting between hypothetical candidates to solve intellectual problems, participants quote desired mix of cynical and non cynical tendencies was fifty six percent cynical to forty four percent non cynical. So on average, the group they thought, we need somebody smart. We want somebody who is a little bit more cynical than the median.

and environment. The author's tested levels of cynicism cross referenced with these cognitive tests in subjects across thirty different countries, and they found that in countries that scored low in corruption and high in rule of law according to an international database called the World Governance Indicators, the effect we've been talking about did hold true, but in countries with high corruption and eroded rule of law, the effect was greatly diminished.

learned directly from personal experience. Despite the fact that they tried to control for the influence of variables like age, gender, and wealth, it's still possible that quote higher levels of cognitive ability, academic competence, and education might protect from adverse life experiences, not only as they allow discovering potential fraud, but also as they increase the chances of living in a safe and friendly environment, providing more evidence for a

positive than for a negative view of human nature, and consequently preventing cynicism development. So that's talking about the idea that, like that education and cognitive skills, they might not just be about how accurately you're seeing the world around you. They might actually, over time, influence what the world around

you is like. On the other hand, since cynicism entails generalized distrust quote cynical versus less cynical, individuals might be more distrustful of the opinions and knowledge of others, a behavior that can eventually prevent them from expanding their knowledge and understanding.

I was looking through the inventory, and a lot of these tasks involved screwy of details, like crunching numbers, following complex logic, analyzing scientific results, things like that, And I wonder if the same pattern would hold for cognitive tasks that people associate less with scrutiny of details and instead with things like creativity and imagination. And to be clear, the cynical genius effect would be an illusion even if

it were only applied to scrutinizing cognition. But I wonder if the illusion is actually more specific to certain kinds of cognition.

understanding of how your environment operates. Number Two, even if you're not in a more corrupt, untrustworthy environment, if you don't understand your environment and you're basically out of your depth, cynicism may protect you from catastrophic outcomes. It's like, I don't really know what's going on here, don't know if I can trust or not, so by default I'm not going to trust. That's better safe than sorry. And then third, I think this is going to be mainly related to

the cynical genius illusion. Having a reputation for cynicism may have the effect of convincing people around you that you are very smart and intellectually savvy, even though on average the opposite is more likely to be true. So there's a kind of social premium incentive to appear to be cynical. It's in a lot of cases it's going to make people think that you know something they don't, and you're a wise and world weary and intelligent person.

you no, no, not all politicians. Some are great, and they're going to look like the person who's naive where you've already you know, mounted your cynicism high horse.

Statements of cynicism often come with this a priori tech mixture of factuality just feels self evidently true with it, even when it's obviously wrong, when it would be absurd for it.

and loss aversion. Negativity bias is the observation that we are more psychologically affected by negative things than we are by positive things of equal intensity and loss a version is very similar. It's the finding that we're more strong motivated to avoid a loss than we are to achieve a gain of the same value. So here's an example. I find a five dollar bill on the sidewalk. Oh, that's nice, quickly forget about it, Versus I drop a five dollar bill down a storm drain or you know

why me, ah, I hate this. You know, it's like the dollar value is exactly the same, but the loss is more memorable, it's more salient and will cause a greater emotional reaction. And I think for those reasons, like we are more likely to learn something from it, to try to draw a general inference that we will take and apply to the rest of life from these moments of loss than from gains of the exact same value.

original act of trust. And this is back to the mental cherry picking that you mentioned last time.

and smart. Another explanation comes back to that study from the background section that we talked about briefly about the the invisibility of consequences in situations where we refrain from from giving trust to our detriment. So again you get to see what happens when you trust and that trust is betrayed. But when you withhold trust and you just miss out on an opportunity to gain, you don't really get to see that loss made concrete. It's just like

it's another path you could have taken. You can even go without thinking about it.

Fictional stories need to be entertaining. Stories are usually more entertaining if danger and conflict are heightened, if villains are meaner and more dangerous, if the stakes are high, if no one can be trusted, you can you can hear all these phrases in the Don la Fontaine movie trailer voice, can't you you know? It's like that's what stories are

made out of. Fictional storytelling selects for narratives about the dangers of trust and the risk of betrayal because stories like that are captivating to our attention and we want to know what happens next. So hostile and treacherous worlds may be more entertaining and narrative. But it's possible that we draw incorrect inferences from those fictional worlds. We learn too much about how life works from unrealities that are specifically crafted to hack our attention. And who are the smart,

savvy characters in these worlds. I think very often they are cynics who are very reluctant to trust.

more episode on cynicism. Again, this is a huge topic. In the next episode, I believe we're going to get into cynicism, politics, and social media, so that should be fun discussion either way. Tune in. We're looking forward to getting into it. In the meantime, I'd like to remind everyone that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

We have a short form episode on Wednesdays, and on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.