From the Vault: Cynicism, Part 1

It's a suspicion of other people's motives and a tendency to believe that people are primarily self interested and untrustworthy. So there are a variety of kind of inventories or tests that psychological studies will do to evaluate how cynical you are as a person. They'll often give you like a list of statements to see how much you agree or disagree with them. A cynical person is going to be more likely to agree with statements like altruism and

compassion are just for show. When it comes down to it, people are in it for themselves. Everybody lies and cheats when they can get away with it, Cliches like no good deed goes unpunished, it's a dog eat dog world, the idea that people are not sincere. They'll just tell you what you want to hear. And I think the core idea of it really is that you can't trust anybody.

We're all on our own. And before we started today, I had been digging around trying to find good examples of the cynical worldview presented in works of English literature. And while you can find some pretty good examples, I think particularly for some reason in like seventeenth and eighteenth century English literature, with writers like Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift. Is some really hardcore cynical stuff there. I actually think the most cynical canon of great literature is in the Bible.

So many books of the Bible, especially like the later books of the Tanakh, like the Prophets, have awesomely cynical passages. Can I offer you a few examples, rob, Yes, let's hear it. Okay. Here's Micah chapter seven, verses two to six. This is the King James translation. The good man is perished out of the earth, and there is none upright among men. They all lie in wait for blood. They hunt every man his brother with a net, that they

may do evil with both hands earnestly. The prince asketh, and the judge asketh for a reward, and the great man he uttereth his mischievous desire. So they wrap it up. The best of them is as a brier. The most upright is sharper than a thorn hedge. The day of thy watchman and thy visitation cometh Now shall be their perplexity. Trust ye not in a friend, put ye not confidence in a guide. Keep the doors of thy mouth from

her that lieth in thy bosom. For the son dishonoereth the father, the daughter riseth up against her mother, the daughter in law against her mother in law. A man's enemies are the men of his own house.

Book of Jeremiah. Jeremiah's like great, great writing, but it contains the famous statement from Jeremiah seventeen the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked. Who can know it? And these passages really emphasized something for me. I think I am not an especially cynical person. I think I'm not the least cynical person in the world, but I'm very far from the most.

with that statement. When it's phrased in that way, it possesses what feels like an a priori factuality. If you don't force yourself to stop and think about it, it just kind of hits you as self evidently true, and you feel like you'd have to be naive to doubt it. And yet that it's not really what I think. So I don't know if you have a similar experience, rob maybe not, but I wonder, at least for myself, and

I think this is probably pretty common. Why do cynical condemnations, and especially when they're elegantly phrased, Why do they like walk into my mind with a perfectly forged hall pass. Why does it take such effortful, deliberate scrutiny to repel them.

support this. I think these statements can also feel rather cathartic because whatever's going on in your life, in your world, in the like the media that you're consuming, you know, there are going to be perceptions of this sort of thing going on, and it can feel empowering to hold up something that this is sort of like an elegant takedown of what's going on and say, yeah, yeah, this

is exactly what I see in the world. This is exactly what people's hearts are about, and you know, it may not even be something that you believe all the time, but it's kind of like, you know, sometimes you got to go there. And in the same sense that you might not listen to sad breakup songs all the time, but there are times when you definitely need to listen to a sad breakup song. Rob.

future will be bad. I think we should just note for our purposes, these are different concepts. Pessimism is more of an outlook on reality and all of life, all future prospects. So this would include, you know, low expectations for random events so called acts of God, and for our own ability to do as we would hope. You know, that's pessimism, whereas you might think of cynicism as pessimism applied specifically to other people. Other people will always let

you down, they'll stab you in the back. They're only in it for themselves.

you live, or other people in the room. And then, on the other hand, while there's no objective cutoff point, somebody who's like seven foot three is pretty much always going to be considered tall no matter what context they're in. And I think being cynical is like that. It's a comparative idea. There's no threshold score of social trust, and

if you fall below that score, you're objectively cynical. But there are some people who are so cynical that basically everybody's going to think of them as a cynical person.

about this. You know, in those usages, acknowledge the fact that it's not necessarily a constant. It's maybe something that we dip into in response to different circumstances, different stimuli and so forth.

them as cynical. But then there's a second metric that I think people use, and that is how cynical a person is compared to how cynical we, the people judging, think it is reasonable to be.

You should not walk into a car lot expecting that the salesperson and the finance manager are trying to help you out and get you the best deal they can. Maybe in some scenarios you'll find an extraordinarily unusually altruistic car dealer, but a lot of the time what they're trying to do is make as much money off of you as possible, which is not in your interest. And that's not to suggest that people selling cars are like evil. It's just it's their job to try to make money

selling cars. If they can make more on a sale and you, you know, get you to buy at a higher price, or you know, or to take a less favorable financing option, they usually will. And I think this is true. And yet I think I'm not a very cynical person to make that judgment about what happens at car lots. There are just specific situations where it is reasonable, based on evidence and on our background knowledge, to withhold

trust from people. And this is different, I think, from a generalized cynical distrust that is not related to the specific situation. Now, of course, what I think I just said is pretty uncontroversial in principle, but we actually spend a lot of mental energy trying to tell the difference between these two things, like the situation where it's reasonable to be suspicious and the situation where you're just expressing

a bias towards cynicism. Like if a friend comes to you and expresses distrust of something or someone that you personally put a lot of faith in. What's the most common defensive reaction for us to have. I think it's like,

don't be so cynical or you're just being cynical. Saying you're just being cynical downplays the possibility that your doubting friend has a good insight, you know, maybe that I have misplaced my faith and trust in something, and instead it reframes the doubting friends' skepticism as part of a general dispositional bias that they have. So dealing with the balance between cynicism and reasonable suspicion is just a really difficult thing that I think we all have to deal

with in our lives. We're asking the question, like, in general, how suspicious should we be of other people's motives? And let's say you take generally cynical people and generally trusting people, which groups model of the world makes more accurate predictions, which group's model of the world is more useful in life, and in which context does each model thrive the most. I think we'll have to revisit that question and as we go along.

a loss or some other action. And therefore I think the analogy made was like, you know, entombing yourself, you know, putting yourself in a casket of loneliness, and I think some of that applies here.

Even because they are not wrong about many generalities about our world and human nature, they tend to put others on the defensive, forcing them to make non cynical counter arguments, you know, essentially prove the righteousness of their fellow human beings. Yeah, and at the same time, in making those counter arguments. You don't want to go so far as to dismiss the perceived threats or threats entirely, because then they're going to come back at you with while you're being naive.

that doesn't actually mean you should always withhold trust. It's just like it's very captivating those specific examples of when it went wrong for you.

I was doing a bit of driving, and driving is sort of a you know, it's a limited, sort of artificial in some ways, like social scenario, and it's probably a scenario where like I'm more cynical when I'm driving, but in that I am less trusting of the other drivers, And I'm not that I'm necessarily believing that they're out to hurt me, but I maybe am more inclined to believe that they are not looking out for me, and they're maybe being a little greedy there and they might

not see me and so forth. But I guess the danger would be taking cynicism from an environment like that, where it is maybe you know, low risk to engage in such cynicism. To take that feeling off the road and into the real world, I could see where that could be kind of hurtful.

a worldview in which no progress is possible. So again, not just talking about engaging in little feelings of cynicism now and then, like if the cynicism really piles up, and if you really double down on your cynicism, then there's no reason to try for or aspire for anything, you know, because like if people are all bad, essentially, if people are all just in it for themselves, they're just greedy, there's no caring. Then what can we do

as a society, What is it all possible? And you just kind of become fossilized in the mud of your own distrust.

to skip opportunities to cooperate to achieve goals. It tends to people high in cynicism tend to hold back from involvement in the political process, not voting, not protesting, not signing a petition, even if they care about an issue. And it just seems like if you're higher in cynicism, you are less likely to try to make things better and more likely to give up.

to the level of its own diminished outlook. It assumes that all human motives are basically selfish and denies the possibility of a better world. Yeah.

cynics for the most part. And he cites common sayings like I hate to be cynical, but and so forth, like we were talking, but you know, points out that cynicism is pretty much in all of us festering to various degrees and very much takes on the form of an affliction. It may dominate, it may go into remission, it may flare up due to various and environmental factors.

two completely different things. There is a school of classical Greek philosophy called cynicism, which is not merely social distrust. It's a whole school of thought that entails different things. Rob, I think you're about to get to it in the second. But these two cynicisms are totally different, and it was a kind of an interesting question to me to wonder how the same word came to be used for these two different things.

more connective tissue here. But but it is I think also completely correct to say you're dealing with two different things. They don't line up on a lot of their principles, even if there is ultimately some shared history there.

standards anyway. But while the modern cynic is a person under the influence again of this kind of infection of distrust, the ancient cynics were a different matter. I have to stress that the ancient cynics were totally punk, like abrasively punk. Yes, And to really get into this we have to look at the most famous of these ancient punks, and that of course is Diogeny, the cynic or Diogenes of synop

We have talked about Diogenes on the show before. I think in episodes we were talking about solitary hermits and so forth, because one of the more famous aspects of him that you often see illustrated and rendered as the subject in various you know, Renaissance paintings and so forth, is the fact that he lived in a jar in public.

conquering King. Can I give you anything? And Diogenes is like, I would like you to get out of my light.

fictional and a little more you know, legendary. But we are definitely dealing with an historic person thought to have lived four thirteen or four three BCE through three twenty one or three twenty four BCE, and he did write. None of his own writings survive, though I apparently wrote dialogues, letters and tragedies. We mostly know of him through the writings of others. Oh well, I should correct that we

know about him exclusively through the writings of others. Again, his own writings did not survive.

certainly it does seem like it was about shocking people. Again, these guys were very punk, very in everyone's faces, with how they viewed human nature and how they viewed society. But essentially we'll get into more of what this meant to them. But they were living the animal life, they were rooting the human experience in the body, and so they were they were saying, Hey, this is what we are. Why should we deny what we are?

connected to the cunning intelligence of the gods. And I did find it interesting that that Heracles was referenced here because it seems like a good name to invoke, even indirectly, because, as we've discussed in the show before, the son of Zeus wasn't just raw muscle, you know, throwing stones at monsters and so forth. He was also clever and cunning. He used his I guess, his high wisdom scores and

overcoming the various obstacles. So they had kind of kind of barbarian wisdom that you see in some of these examples. You know, a figure from outside the system that is opposed to the system, and in Heracles' case, you know, often opposing mortal tyrants. And Alan points out that this idea likely does extend pretty far back in Greek thought as a kind of lifting up of an outsider figure as a critic of society.

music and film. But the ancient cynics, again exemplified in the figure of Diogenes, absolutely rejected conventional values and societal norms. They absolutely did not care about your society, your obsession

with fame and wealth. They saw the absolute hypocrisy of it all, and they openly dragged it like they they were gonna you were gonna know they were a cynic on site, and they were going to let you know they were a cynic because they would, they would preach to you about it, they would tell you about it. They lived simple, self sufficient lives while also seeking to expose the folly of the mainstream world.

date with a cynic. It wouldn't be like halfway through. Oh, and then I realized that they were, you know, you know, a nihilist, you know, came up in conversation like, No, it would be very apparent in your face. So again absolutely in your face anti establishment vibes here. But it would be a mistake to assume that this was just about young yucking the world and seeking to drag everyone down into sort of a miserable nihilistic existence, which I think is an easy mistake to make when you look

at some of these factors. But in reality, the ancient cynics praised virtue above all else. They believe that true happiness and peace could only be achieved by following a virtuous path close to nature, an authentic, natural human life full of truth that also exposed the lies of others.

I don't know. I would. I would imagine that a modern lower case C cynic who is thinking about themselves as a citizen in the world is also thinking of it in a very dreary sense.

though gradually declining after the third century BCE. And this of course leads to a question that I think we may come back to a little bit more as well, But what sort of transformation takes place from capital c cynicism to lowercase cynicism from the ancient world and the modern And to put it very briefly, to summarize some of what Alan gets into, First of all, the transformation involves a radical engage in an even joyful philosophy becoming

this more corrosive, passive, and miserable way of looking at the world. So again, you had to you really be engaged to be a capital C cynic You were making definite life choices, going out in the streets and doing it. Whereas lowercase C cynicism that we have today, it's in everybody. It's ambient. It's just at what level is it going

to manifest in our worldview and our speech and our actions. Yeah, okay, yeah, So it went from something that was very on activated and optimistic to something that just kind of festers and they're like a number I guess, sort of blips and points you can single out. The stoics later took elements of cynic ideas and tempered there are more radical elements. Then much later on, during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, cynic ideas were reinterpreted and utilized in ways that often

eroded their critical edge. And then in modern times you have to also factor in the perceived complexities and failures of modern systems, and this further squeezes some of these

ideas into the current ambient form. Though at the same time, again, the energy of ancient cynicism continues to thrive in other areas of rebellious thought, so you could again, you know, I can think of numerous examples, certainly from media, but also from the real world people who are you speaking out against societal norms and engaging sometimes in speech that may feel at least like its lowercase cynicism, But.

your physical or mental health. It's not good for your ability to attain goals. It's just like across the board, pretty bad for you to be highly cynical. Now, since we're about to look at some psychological and medical research, I think it's worth a check in on how cynicism is defined in this literature. It's usually tree as what a couple of authors Stavrova and Elibroct I'll come back to them in a bit, call a quote cognitive component

of hostility. So, in other words, when a person displays the character trait of hostility, cynicism is the main cognitive part of that. It's the thought patterns and belief structures underlying hostility. So in these papers, cynicism is often called cynical hostility. And I would say, based on my reading, there seem to be three core beliefs defining cynical hostility. Number One, other people have bad moral character and harmful intentions.

Number Two, people are motivated primarily by self interest. And number three, people will ignore their moral values if given the opportunity. So the very short way to paraphrase cynical hostility is people are bad, people are selfish, and morals are fake. So what effects do these beliefs have on our lives and our bodies? Well, I'm going to run through some commonly cited items. One is the well established

link between cynicism and various health outcomes. So, for example, studies have repeatedly found links between high cynicism and poor cardiovascular health. In fact, I even found one study arguing for a particular causal link between cynical hostility and cardiovascular disease. That paper was by Tyra at All in the journal Psychophysiology from the year twenty twenty, and it's called cynical hostility relates to a lack of habituation of the cardiovascular

response to repeated acute stress. So once I read this, I thought this was really interesting. The study built on a general finding that had been in the research for years that if a person exhibits hostility to others, they will be at an increased risk of heart disease over time, and the authors here decided to probe more specifically into what kinds of hostility or what elements of hostility were the most damaging, and they looked at emotional hostility, behavioral hostility,

and cognitive hostility. Emotional hostility is it's affective in nature, and it's characterized by things like chronic anger, when you feel the emotion of anger a lot. Behavioral hostility is a tendency to react to situations with expressions of aggression, and cognitive hostility is about beliefs, meaning it is essentially synonymous with cynicism. In the words of the lead author here, Alexandra Tyra, it is quote negative beliefs, thoughts, and attitudes

about other people's motives, intentions, and trustworthiness. Hostility tends to come along with a physiological stress response, including things like increased blood pressure that can damage the cardiovascular system when chronic Now, normally, when we have a stressful experience, the body tends to acclimate to that stressful experience by desensitizing

us to the stressful stimulus. So what really freaked us out the first time is old news by the seventeenth time, and we just don't have the same stress response anymore. You can think about this a common example used in these experiments is like public speaking tends to be really stressful the first time, but if you do it again and again you get used to it, it becomes less

stressful each time, apparently, except when cynicism comes into play. Somehow, cognitive cynicism this lack of trust in others, a belief that other people are bad, that they're self interested, and that their morals are fake. Cognitive cynicism seems to prevent the body from chilling out about stressors upon repeat exposure. And here I'm going to quote from the lead author, Alexandra Tige. She's quoted in a Baylor University press release

about this research. Quote. Essentially, when you're exposed to the same thing multiple times, the novelty of that situation wears off, and then you don't have as big of a response as you did the first time. This is a healthy response, but our study demonstrates that a higher tendency for cynical hostility may prevent or inhibit this decrease in response over time. In other words, the cardiovascular system responds similarly to a

second stressor as it did to the first. So a really interesting question is, like, why is this like when you believe everybody's in it for themselves, and people can't be trusted, and everybody lies and cheats to get ahead. It is apparently just harder for people to relax about the things that are causing them distress upon repeat exposure, even harder than it might be for people who have other other kinds of issues, like emotional issues with chronic anger,

though of course those things can and do overlap. But yeah, really fascinating to me, Like, why would that link be there? What exactly is the causal connection? But apparently it's not just heart disease. Another commonly studied example is depression. Cynicism

is perhaps unsurprisingly associated with increased risk of depression. One paper on this subject is by Nabi at All from twenty ten in the journal Psychological Medicine called Hostility and Depressive Mood Results from the Whitehall two perspective cohort study and so this was a longitudinal study of data collected by a survey of a large group of civil servants in London beginning in the nineteen eighties and then following

up with the same participants many years later. In this particular study found that people with the most cynical hostility at ages thirty five to fifty five, as measured by a couple of common inventories such as the Cook Medley hostility scale, also had the greatest likelihood of depressive mood teen years later, even after controlling for socio demographic variables and the presence of baseline mental health struggles and so the authors conclude that cynicism on its own is a

strong and robust predictor of later depression, and the negative effects don't stop there. There's also there are multiple studies going at least as far back as the nineteen nineties, maybe even earlier, that have found a link between cynicism and all cause mortality, so on average, cynical people tend to have earlier deaths. One example of this research is a study by Susan Everson and co authors in the

American Journal of Epidemiology in nineteen ninety seven. This investigated a group of twenty one hundred and twenty five men between the ages of forty two and sixty over a period of nine years, and it found that men in the top quartile, so the top twenty five percent of cynical hostility scores, were more than twice as likely to die in the next nine years as men in the bottom quartile, the lowest twenty five percent of cynicism scores.

And in this case, the authors found that the correlation with all cause mortality disappeared when the analysis factored in behavioral risk factors things like smoking and levels of alcohol consumption and some other risk factors, which suggests that at least within this sample the way they looked at it here, it might not necessarily be that cynicism kills you directly, but that cynicism is associated with behaviors and lifestyle and

conditioned responses that worsen health outcomes and lead to earlier deaths. And so of course you could factor in things like the later finding that cynicism does appear to be bad for your cardiovascular health. Now here's another question. There appears to be a wide consensus among experts cynicism it comes with bad health outcomes, But are we sure which way the effect goes? Like does poor health make people more

cynical or does cynicism lead to poor health? Well, I found a paper looking into that, and it seems like the effect probably goes both ways, creating a vicious cycle. So this paper was by Olgas Stavrova and Daniel Elibracht called Broken Bodies, Broken Spirits How poor health contributes to a cynical worldview in the European Journal of Personality from twenty nineteen. A note that we'll encounter these author names repeatedly in the series. That seems like they've done a

lot of research on cynicism. Olgus Stavrova is a professor of psychology at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, and Daniel Elibracht is at the University of Cologne in Germany. Now this one I thought was pretty interesting. This paper opens with a little historical anecdote that I don't think I'd ever come across before. It's talking about King Henry aka

Robert Barathian. Yeah, Henry so. On January twenty fourth, fifteen thirty six, the English King Henry the Eighth was knocked off of his horse during a jousting event at a tournament, and he lost consciousness for a few hours. And as a result of this fall, he sustained a number of injuries which essentially led to pain and various downstream health problems for the rest of his life. I think he

lived another ten or eleven years after this. And what's interesting is that around this time, records and chronicles of Henry's reign note a shift in the king's personality. It seems that sometime around here Henry really started to become more paranoid and suspicious and increasingly tyrannical. Now there are multiple historical hypotheses to explain what was going on with Henry.

only possible explanation. But the authors discussed the idea that what if Henry's injuries and the pursuant health problem prob in the years that followed made him into that type of person, made him into a person who quote believed everyone, including his court members and close ones, were untrustworthy and mean spirited. So coming to the actual experiment here, we already have evidence that cynicism tends in multiple ways to

lead to poor health. But to read from the author's abstract quote, the present research proposes that poor health might represent both a consequence and a source of cynicism. Using cross lagged path analyzes. We documented bi directional associations between health and cynicism in a nationally representative sample of Germans study one and a large example of the American elderly

study two. Cynical individuals were more likely to develop health problems and poor health promoted the development of a cynical worldview over time. And so these health status evaluations were done bo with self report surveys and with objective physical measures by third party administrators, and they found the effect was robust even when the author is controlled the for the effects of depression. So in their analysis, the authors actually propose a mechanism by which cynicism and poor health

ratchet one another up in a vicious cycle. So cynicism tends to lead to your health getting worse. When your health gets worse, it imposes constraints on your life. You know, this is a I think a lot of people probably like when you've had a medical condition or something. It's not just like the direct pain caused by the condition, it's also the way it limits your freedom to do what you want to do. That can be so frustrating

and so painful. So you know, medical medical problems can directly limit your freedom, they can take away your sense of control over your own fate. They can make you more dependent on others, and this con drained status, the authors think, may in turn activate quote self protection strategies, including suspiciousness and hostility, contributing to the endorsement of a

cynical worldview. So, in this model, health problems make you feel constrained and vulnerable, which makes you defensive, which in some cases makes people cynical. And of course the increased cynicism will tend, on balance to make health outcomes even worse.

life outcomes. So here's a kind of irony. If you were to ask me, is there any realm in which cynicism is correlated with better outcomes for a person? Does cynicism ever like help you? I might have guessed without reading anything, maybe in like material success in career and business.

You know, because there's like an archetype character we all have in our heads, the cynical materialist shark, like a business leader or career ladder climber who trusts no one, has a dark view of human nature, and who will do anything to succeed.

the research I was reading. Nope, not at all. So one study by Stavrova, Ileibracht, and Dungning Wren called cynical people desire power but rarely acquire it, exploring the role of cynicism in leadership attainment. This was in the British Journal of Psychology twenty twenty four. This found that cynical people have a greater desire for power than non cynical

people do. They tend to seek dominance, however, quote a study of virtual teams showed that more cynical individuals were less likely to emerge as group leaders, and a perspective study of about nine thousand employees followed for up to ten years showed that cynicism predicted a lower likelihood of attaining a leadership position in organizations. So in these experiments, cynicism means you want power more than the average person,

but you're actually less likely to acquire it. Okay, that's power. How about money? Money and power, that's all anybody cares about? Maybe in the cynical worldview. But Stavrova and Alebracht found in a study called Cynical Beliefs about Human Nature and Income, Longitudinal and Cross cultural Analyzes in the Journal of Personality

and Social Psychology in twenty sixteen. This looked at surveys that were conducted over time, and the authors here found that Americans who endorsed cynical beliefs about human nature think you can't trust anybody, They're all going to stab you in the back. These people actually made less money over time, measured at intervals of two years and at nine years. And then research on German workers also found cynicism undermined income potential over a period of nine years. Now, why

would cynicism cut into a person's earning potential? You have this idea that like the cynical person, will you know that they're not here to make friends and so they'll get the raise and all that. The authors here say that it seems to be because cynicism, of course, is characterized by low trust. So people high in cynicism miss out on opportunities to cooperate, you know, they miss out on opportunities to achieve mutual benefit by working together with

other people. And they also, I thought this was interesting quote over invest in monitoring, control and other means of protection from potential exploitation. So when you're very cynical, you not only miss out on chances to work together for mutual benefit. You also waste a lot of your resources, your time and energy and money on excessive efforts to avoid being a sucker.

and high overall societal cynicism levels. Holding cynical beliefs about others has negative economic outcomes unless such beliefs hold true. And so this connects to something that we may have to explore as we go on. But I think there's some t truth to this idea. Cynicism is harmful to the individual to the cynical individual in a cultural environment

that is less cynical. But cynicism appears to be more or less harmful or maybe even helpful to the cynical individual in a cultural environment that is more cynical, which should obviously trouble us if we like, since increasing cynicism within the culture that's bad in itself for lots of reasons, but it also puts real pressure on each individual person to be more cynical to adapt to the cynical environment. So trust just ratchets down and down in one direction.

very cynical and maybe very nihilistic in their vision. But a lot of times, like ultimately, I mean, you've got to invest the viewer, the listener, the reader in some way, and so therefore they often involve a cynical figure coming out of their cynicism a little bit, you know, like maybe it's a noir, you know, hard boiled detective story.

You have a very like world weary, cynical detective. Like there's there's often got to be something, some light that is bringing them out of that darkness, at least for a little bit.

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