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Man, Welcome back to Coast to Coast. George Nori with you. Doctor Jamil Zaki with us for the first time. Professor of psychology at Stanford University and the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab. He trained at Columbia and Harvard, studying empathy and kindness in the human brain. He is interested in how we can learn to connect better. His book is called Hope for Cynics. Hey, doctor Jamiel, welcome to the program.
Thanks George, it's a pleasure to be with you.
How did you get involved in this kind of psychology. It's fascinating, you know.
It's a long story. In psychology, they say that research is research. That is, we start studying stuff that is personally relevant to us, and for me, that comes from my family. My parents are immigrants, my father from Pakistan and my mother from Peru, and as far as I can remember, I don't think they ever got along that way.
So a lot of my childhood was navigating the very different realities of two people totally different parts of the world who saw life in really different ways, which a made me super interested in how we connect and especially how we can connect with people who are different from us, and B made it a little hard for me to trust people because of the chaos in the home where
I grew up. So both my interests in empathy and kindness and then my secret interest in cynicism and mistrust, I think came from that early life experience.
I was watching the debates last week with former President Trump and Kamala Harris a couple of weeks ago, and a argument broke out with two people who were watching the debate there too, And I watched this while they were shouting at each other, not talking, not discussing, but shouting at each other because of the different views of the candidates. What's happening to people.
Doctor Well, I think that we are shouting a lot more where in part because we're more threatened. One of the things that can raise our internal alarm systems and put us in fight or flight mode is just the sense that other people are endangering us. And that sense, to me, seems to be more pervasive in our everyday experience. You know, forty fifty years ago, Americans disagreed with one another, but we didn't let those disagreements become as personal as
they've become now. So In nineteen eighty, for instance, Republicans and Democrats said that they liked members of their own party and they felt neutral about members of the of the other party. By twenty twenty, that pattern had shifted completely. We now disliked people we disagreed with more than we liked the people on our own side. I think a lot of this also comes from the way that we
interact or don't interact with one another. We have fallen there are fewer conversations with people we disagree with in the course of our everyday lives. We've sorted such that we don't get to talk about another weather or sports, or our dreams and hopes with people who are different
from us. Where we do see those people is through social media and the news, where we are given a representation of the other side that is way more extreme, hateful, anti democratic, and even violent than people on the other side truly are. So we end up fighting phantoms. We end up fearing that other people on the other side don't just disagree with us, but want to kill us. And if you feel that way, then it makes perfect sense to yell and scream instead of having a conversation.
I'm in Saint Louis right now, doctor, and they arrested a young youngster today with a gun who was threatening to go into a school to do some harm. He was arrested because his friends picked up on social media that this kid was about to do something bad. How important has social media been plus or minus to what you've just talked about.
I mean, I think that there's the obvious benefit of having information travel quickly is that we can do things like stop people who are about to commit violence the right. So in that case, social media was a was a force that saved likely saved lives, and that's that's wonderful. Now, it's also true that many people are radicalized and induced to commit violence through communication that occurs on social media.
So I think that there's more information, which in a vacuum sounds like a good thing, but we have to ask ourselves how good is the information that we're getting, What is it doing to us? And the way I see it, online platforms are not built to make people happy or healthy or in formed, and this is I think really important. They're created to keep us online by feeding us whatever will keep us engaged, and oftentimes that's feeding us the things that make us frightened and outraged.
And so there's a lot of evidence that people who spend, for instance, a lot of time on social media more than usual, they think that in general, people are worse than people who than if you spend less time on social media. In other words, when we are online, we receive this systematically negative information about other people, and that can induce us again to feel more fear, more, hatred, and even induce us to behaviors like violence.
The title of your book is called Hope for Cynics. Tell us about the title and tell us what exactly a cynic might be.
Yeah, So, as you mentioned, George, I've been studying empathy and kindness my entire career for twenty years now, and this has made me a sort of ambassador for humanity is better Angels. People like to ask me to speak or write for them when they want to feel better about our species. But this whole time I've had a secret, which is that in private, I'm a pretty cynical person.
So Hope for Cynics is actually began as a journey to see if I could understand and maybe try to treat my own cynical worldview, and through that I gained a deep understanding of what cynicism is. So you asked for a definition, and I think that we need to separate. When I talk about cynicism. I'm not talking about the ancient Greek school of philosophy headed by Antistines and Diogenes, although I'm happy to chat about that just as a
philosophy nerd. But I mean the modern psychological definition of cynicism, which is the belief that in general, people are selfish, greedy, and dishonest. Now this is not to say that a cynic would be shocked if somebody donated to charity or helped the stranger, but they would wonder about that person's motive. They would say, well, maybe they're looking for a tax break, where they're trying to look good in front of others.
Icism is not a theory about what we do. It's a theory about who we are.
Is it negativity?
I mean, I think it certainly trades in negativity. You might be cynical and not feel that negative. You might say, hey, we're just a selfish species and that's fine with me. But in general, cynicism is accompanied by a great deal of contempt and hostility towards other people.
Does the cynics say it's partly cloudy as opposed to partly sunny.
It's partly cloudy, the glasses half empty. In general, they reinterpret things more negatively, but it's not things not everything right. So we should separate cynicism from pessimism. Pessimism is the idea of the future is going to turn out poorly. Is not a view about the future or the natural world.
It's really a view about other people. Now, it stands to reason if you don't have any faith in other people, you probably don't think the future is going to turn out very well either, because the future, of course, is what we collectively decide to make it.
Now, the subtitle of your book, Hope FORENX is the surprising science of human goodness that fascinates me. Tell me about that.
Yeah, it fascinates me too, And I think that so. As I said, I started this book as a journey to see if I could understand my own cynicism. And I spent years marinating myself in the science of mistrust, suspicion, and hopelessness. And you might think that would have made for a gloomy twenty twenties. The fact was it was incredibly uplifting. I've learned over the course of these years that in general, people don't realize how trustworthy, generous, open minded,
and warm other people are. Now, this is not to say that there aren't jerks out there or people who do terrible things every day, but the average person underestimates the average person. And what that means is that when you pay closer attention, when you look at the data instead of relying on our negative assumptions about other people,
pleasant surprises are everywhere. And so what I try to argue for in the book is a data driven, skeptical type of hope, not being a Pollyanna, not trusting people unthinkingly, but also not mistrusting people unthinkingly, instead trying to treat our lives more like a scientific experiment. And when we do that, there's a lot of hope to be found.
Is the cynic internally unhappy?
Oh?
Yes, there is decades of evidence that point out and find that cynics and to live really diminished lives compared to less cynical people, so they are more prone to depression, loneliness, but also things like substance abuse, heart disease and even early mortality. So it turns out that cynics die younger than non cynics, and it's to me really sad and ironic.
You know.
One of the most famous descriptions of cynicism comes from Thomas Hobbes, the philosopher who said, we need government to restrict us because, left to our own defight devices, human life is nasty, brutish, and short. But ironically that might best describe the lives of cynics themselves, right, And I say this not in a judgmental way. I want to remind you that I myself identified as a cynic for a long time, so these are experiences that I am
deeply familiar with. But the evidence is pretty clear that cynical thinking hurts us at almost every level that scientists can measure.
We turn around the cynic.
I sure, hope, though for my own sake, But no, it turns out that you can. Cynicism is not a It's partially genetic, but really that's a minority share. Most of our cynicism comes from our experiences, and by changing our experiences and the way that we interact with the world, we can systematically try to overturn our cynicism again, not by being a Pollyanna, not by becoming naive, but rather by trying to pay closer attention to the evidence.
Well, Doctor jamil Zaki's book is called Hope for Cynics, The Surprising Science of Human Goodness. After the break, we'll come back and talk about skepticism and how you can change that. But there is hope, you believe for these kinds of folks, Doctor.
Of course, I think there is, Otherwise I would not have written this book. I think that a lot of the hope here comes from the idea that we can change our minds. We have a lot of control over who we become, much more than most people realize. And I'm really thrilled to talk more about that as well. But were when you look at the psychology of the human mind, you've realized that we can be empowered because a lot of who we are and who we become is actually up to us.
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