I was talking with the columnist David Brooks recently and he said that he asks his students each year do you think people are generally good or bad? And he said that over the last ten to fifteen years, the proportion of students who say, yeah, I think people are generally bad has skyrocketed.
Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is doctor Jamil Zaki, a professor of psychology at Stanford University and the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab. Jamil trained at Columbia and Harvard studying empathy and kindness in the
human brain. He's interested in how we can learn to connect better. Today, Jamil and Eric discuss his book, Hope for Cynics.
Hi, Jamil, Welcome to the show.
Thanks so much for having me.
I'm excited to have you on. We're going to be discussing your latest book, which is called Hope for Cynics, The Surprising Science of Human Goodness. But before we get into that, we'll start, like we always do, with the parable. And in the Parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always a battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf,
which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandshot stops. They think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.
I love that parable. I think about it all the time, and to me, it speaks to something that is deeply true about people, based on not just my personal experience, but also my experience as a behavioral scientist and research psychologist, which is that our beliefs about the world are realities. Our inner realities are self fulfilling prophecies that change the
lives we live and the relationships that we build. So if you have the belief that in general, fear will win out, that in general people are selfish and greedy and dishonest, well then you'll treat people that way and they'll treat you accordingly. That, I suppose would be feeding the bad wolf. And if you instead choose to hope and to be more driven by the data, you will put faith in people and they will bring their best out for you. I suppose that would be feeding the
good wolf. I think that, well, I love this idea in general, and I love that this is how you start your conversations because I don't think we focus on this enough. I don't think that we understand as a culture how much power we have, through our habits of mind to change the reality that we reside. And it really speaks to one of the most profound insights from all of psychology.
Wow, that's really powerful. Now, I'd like to turn this to our listeners. What part of that message struck a chord with you as you think about nourishing your good wolf. What specific ideas or actions come to mind for me this month? It's relationships. Relationships are the cornerstone of our well being. When they thrive, we flourish, and when they struggle, we suffer. Many of us face relationship challenges, feeling lost and frustrated, but there is hope. Strong relationships aren't just
about fate. They're built on learnable skills. By developing these abilities, you can transform your connections and in turn, your life. So relationships are this month's theme and our weekly Bite of Wisdom for a Wiser, Happier You newsletter, and I'd love to send them your way. Each week, we send a menu of a few small exercises you can put in practice to feed your good wolf, along with a reflection and a related podcast episode on the topic. At the end of this episode, I will be giving you
a tip from this week's newsletter. But in the meantime, if you'd like to join thousands of others who are already benefiting from these tips. Go to Goodwolf dot me slash relationships. That's good Wolf dot me slash relationships. There's something you talk about in the book. I'm jumping ahead a little bit here, but you say that Maya Angelou once advised when you show people who they are, believe them. But what people show you depends on who you are.
And then you go on to quote a psychologist Vanessa Bones, maybe something called influence neglect. Say more about.
That, Yeah, Vanessa, Vanessa Bonds is a great Yeah, it's a great psychologist who studies again, this idea of influence neglect, which I think people should really try to internalize if they can. She has a great book about this called You Have More Influence Than You Think. And in general, the idea is that we imagine that other people are just who they are, and that when we observe them do something, we'll learn about their true colors. This is
wrong in at least two ways. First, people are totally different in different circumstances.
Right.
If you put somebody at a high stakes poker table and then put them with somebody they disagree with about a political issue, and then put them with their child, you will see three completely different people. They might be in the same body, but the different situations draw out different versions of who they are. So that's Number one, is that when you see somebody, you're only seeing one
version of them inside. Number two, which comes from Vanessa's work, is that the version that you see has a lot to do with you. You know, I think a lot about Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, right that when you try to observe the physical world, the mere fact that you're observing it at a quantum level causes it to change. And I often think, you know, Heisenberg applies to sub atomic particles, but we also have Heisenberg's friends in Heisenberg's colleagues and
family members. Right when we observe somebody, the fact that we are part of their situation changes who they become in that moment. And so I think that we have a lot of responsibility and a lot of opportunity. I write and think a lot about trust, for instance, and we tend to imagine that trust is a risk that we are taking on. We worry about being betrayed, and
that's a fair worry. But what I don't think we realize enough is that when you trust somebody, they often become more trustworthy, right, because human beings reciprocate what others give to them, and when you distrust somebody, they often become less trustworthy because we retaliate the harms that other
people do to us. So when we make decisions around other people, I think it's critical to remember we're choosing not just to learn about the person, but how we want to influence them, which version of them we want to bring out.
Right, it's completely obvious on one level that how we treat other people has to do with how they treat us. If I had gotten on this call with you and been like, yeah, thanks for coming on, sucks, but I can't wait to talk about it, right, Like, it's obvious you and I would be having a different conversation right now. So it's really obvious, and yet, like you said, most
of us don't actually think of it that way. It makes me think about one of my favorite things that you know, listeners are probably like, he's going to bring up the fundamental attribution error again, but I am because it's such a great example. Right in the fundamental attribution error, as I understand it is that like if I saw you acting in an angry way. I assume you're an angry person, but when I act angrily, there's a very good reason for it. Right, Circumstances apply in my case,
but in your case it's who you are. As if circumstances aren't playing an equally sized role in exactly how you are behaving.
You're singing my song, Eric. I mean, I could talk about the fundamental attribution error all day.
The Kindred's Spirit.
Finally, you know, the fae as it's called in my nerdy corner of the world, is most associated with one of my colleagues, the late great psychologist Lee Ross. Lee was a brilliant and very kind person who thought a lot about how we think about each other, and I actually want to share with you that later in his career, Lee said that there's the fundamental attribution error, where we type cast people based on their behavior. We don't realize
how malleable other people are. But Lie said, there's also the truly fundamental attribution error, which is our sense that when we perceive something, we're doing so objectively. This is what's often known as naive realism. Right that if I think a song is good, it's because it's good. If I think that that dress is black and blue and you think it's white and gold. The question is not whether I'm wrong, The question is why are you wrong? What's wrong with your visual system?
Right? Right?
And this sense of the truly fundamental attribution era, the illusion of objectivity, is at least as damaging to our relationships and our ability to connect with others as the regular fundamental attribution error.
I love that because indeed that is the true fundamental attribution error, that we actually see the world in some kind of way. It actually is versus very much a reflection of our conditioning.
That's right, And that's part of why I love the two Wolves parable because it speaks to the idea that there is no single reality. And I think about this all the time. You know, a lot of my work these days centers around the question of are people fundamentally kind or cruel, compassionate or callous? Good or bad? And these are philosophical questions that will never be answered, I think, in a clear scientific way. But the way you answer the question matters enormously, and the way that we answer
these questions has been changing. I was talking with the columnist David Brooks recently, and he said he asks his students each year, do you think people are generally good or bad? And he said that over the last ten to fifteen years, the proportion of students who say, yeah, I think people are generally bad has skyrocketed. Wow, and
data bear this out right. So, as I write about in the book, in nineteen seventy two, about half of Americans believed most people can be trusted, and by twenty eighteen that had fallen to a third of Americans, a drop as big as the stock market took in the financial collapse of two thousand and eight. So we are living through a deficit in trust and in our faith in each other. And you might just say, well, that sounds like it feels bad, but hey, maybe people are
just right. But I think the point again to this idea of the truly fundamental attribution error, is that when you perceive that, it changes how you act in the world. And if a lot of us lose faith in each other all at once, it literally changes the world that we create together. Yep.
Makes me think of some of the research start to see about loneliness, which is that if you're lonely, you begin to think more suspiciously of other people. Which of course makes you more lonely. It's this negative spiral that you get into that is a feedback loop that is
not headed in the right direction. There's something that you say in the book, though, about this idea that when you ask people, they will say that people are not good to the extent that we used to believe maybe that people are good, but that if you then ask people, are the people that you know in your life better or worse than they used to be, they'll say they're about the same. So it's like, on one level, we are saying out there, you know, beyond what we actually
can see with our own eyes, it's all bad. But when I look with my own eyes at the people around me, well, actually people seem pretty good.
Yeah, brilliantly put, and I appreciate you picking that out. I think that this speaks to both the nature of the problem and to some potential solutions, or at least treatments for the problem. Cynicism, this idea that people are generally self interested and untrustworthy and rotten, is very prevalent on our screens, on TV, on our computers, on our doom scrolling, endless feed phones. There is a vast perception that people in general are pretty terrible, and that's for
a bunch of reasons. One is that these media companies that give us this information have learned that human beings have a natural instinct to pay lots of attention to negative information, So they feed us more and more negative information, and we feed the wolf that is based on fear and judgment from that information. And by contrast, when we go off of our screens and interact with actual human beings,
things go much much better. The way that I think about it is that there is a neighborhood size hole cut into our cynicism. And as you put it beautifully, when we think about abstractly what people are like, we're terribly judgmental, we're quite hopeless. But when we think about the people we know, or even just the people we
see on a regular basis, we feel completely different. And that to me is really sad because it suggests that there are really big misperceptions that are clouding our ability to see each other clearly and to connect with each other.
But it also speaks to a gigantic opportunity, which is that if we can move past those misperceptions and actually pay more attention to the good data that we're taking in, the accurate data that we're taking in from our real lives, there are pleasant surprises everywhere.
Yeah, I love that idea. So let's back up a second and maybe start from the getting a little bit more. You say early in the book that you know, exploring decades of research, I discovered that cynicism is not just harmful but often naive. I think we've talked a little bit about the harmfulness right the way that if we perceive others to be a certain way, we're going to get that back in response to a certain way. So that's one of the ways it's harmful. Are there other ways that it's harmful?
Oh? Yeah, Unfortunately, cynicism seems harmful in basically every way scientists can measure. Cynics tend to be less healthy than non cynics, so they tend to suffer from more depression, loneliness, heart disease. They die younger than non cynics, so all cause mortality greater among cinics. Cynicism does not help us succeed. So if you follow cynics and non cynics over ten years of their careers, cinics earn less money and are
less likely to rise to leadership positions and their work. Cynicism, not surprise, risingly bad for our relationships. It's also bad for our communities. Cynical communities tend to be less civically engaged. People vote less if their trust in each other is low.
They donate to charity less, volunteer less, and even engage in activities like self harm more so really, I mean, the most famous line about cynicism is probably from Thomas Hobbes, the philosopher who in Leviathan said, you know, we need a strict government because, left to our own devices, human life is nasty, brutish and short. Unfortunately, that probably applies
best to cynics themselves, right. It seems that again through self fulfilling prophecies, if you write people off, it's just enormously difficult to be vulnerable, And if you're unwilling to be vulnerable, it's enormously difficult to build the relationships that human beings depend upon for psychological nourishment. And that's a really tragic again, another of these vicious cycles that we see in the psychology of cynicism.
Before we move on to cynicism being potentially naive, I suppose we should define it a little bit, or I would imagine many people listening to this are going and, well, am I a cynic? I don't know, right? I mean some people know, you know, you can sort of tell some people know their cynics. We know some people we can be like their cynics, But for a lot of us we might be like, well, am I I'm not entirely sure. What are we talking about here when we say someone's a cynic?
That's a really important question. I think of cynicism as and I want to be clear, I'm talking about modern cynicism, not the school of cynicism, which was an ancient philosophical school. But modern cynicism is a theory, the theory that in general, people are selfish, greedy, and dishonest, and there are ways to measure that in yourself. For those of your listeners who really want to go deep, you can find online the Cook Medley's Cynical Hostility Scale, which is a questionnaire
developed in the nineteen fifties. It includes questions like the falling do you agree or disagree that most people are honest chiefly through fear of getting caught? Eric, I wonder whether you agree or disagree with that.
In classic fashion for me, I would actually ask about five follow on questions to that I'd be like, well, honest about what you know? Like I mean, I think we can be honest and dishonest about different levels of things, you know, like it might be maybe it's easy to be dishonest about small things, but about big things or how much is the harm that would come from me
and dishonest? So absolutely, I'm terrible at these sort of tests because I'm always like, well, I don't have enough information to answer this question.
You sound just like a social scientist. This is what we do. We love to say. You can't answer that question. You need context. Yeah, but in general, right, there are fifty questions sort of like that. Do you think people are honest chiefly through fear of getting caught? Do you
agree that people generally don't like helping one another? Do you think that most people can be trust These yes are no questions, and they're pretty negative statements, and the more of them you agree with, the higher you would score in cynicism. Another way to think about cynicism is through what that theory does in terms of our behavior. Right, So, if you think that most people are on the take, they're just out for themselves. Well, that's going to change
what you do. Trusting people is a gamble. It's a social gamble. We put faith in somebody and we stand to gain if they show up, and we stand to lose if they don't. And cynics think of that as a sucker's bet, right, they think of it as a terrible gamble, And so they're much less likely to trust people in economic games. They're less likely to trust people in terms of opening up about their struggles or putting
faith in people in any way. So that's another way that you might look to yourself and your own behavior to assess your cynicism. How much are you willing to bet on other people?
Yeah, in that regard, I'm not a cynic. I do think people are general good and can generally be trusted. And yet I believe also in the parable of the wolves, right, we all have good and bad things in all of us. But in general I'm not cynical about people. Where I might tend towards more cynicism, and I wonder if this is a different aspect of it, is cynicism towards the
size of the problems that we might face societally. So I may be hopeful about people in general, believe people are generally good, they want to do the right thing, they're decent people, and not feel hopeful at all about, say, our ability to solve the climate crisis. And so is that cynicism? Is that something different? What is it when it's you know, not applied at an individual level or a personal level, but at a scope of the problems that we face level.
Yeah, that doesn't sound very cynical to me at all, And I should share, by the way, I appreciate you being transparent about where you fall on all of these dimensions. I want to also be open with your listeners because I feel like sometimes when somebody writes a book about something like cynicism, they're saying, oh, it's all it's bad, it hurts us. It sounds like they're calling other people out or judging people. I want to be really open, and you know this from reading the book, Eric, but
I struggle immensely with cynicism. In fact, I would consider myself a cynic at the time that I started writing this book, and now I would consider myself a recovering definitely not recovered, but recovering. Cynic. So for those folks out there who feel this way, I'm right there with you. I'm not standing apart. I think that to your point about well, on the one hand, my faith in people and on the other hand, my faith in our ability to tackle the problem. Here, you're really nicely getting at
some of the dimensions of hope. So maybe we can talk about what hope is and we can try to put these pieces together.
Sure.
Yeah, So hope is different from optimism. Optimism is the idea that things will turn out well, and sometimes it can be a complacent feeling. Right you think, well, I think the climate crisis sounds bad, but I'm sure scientists will figure something out in the next thirty years, so there's nothing really that I have to do here. I think optimism actually is really similar in some ways to
cynical hopelessness, which is, hey, nothing's going to happen. I'm a doomer, So again, I don't have to do anything right because my actions. If you are certain of the outcome, then your actions do not matter one way or the other. And I think sometimes that can be fair and totally uncynical. For instance, if there was a giant meteorite headed to Earth and all the nuclear weapons in the world aren't enough to stop it, and we will be obliterated in
six months. It would in no way be cynical to say I think we're going to be obliterated in six months. That would be realistic. I think with things like solving or even addressing the climate crisis, this is a little bit different because it's a collective action problem, and so our belief in each other now relates to our hope for the future. Right hope is the idea that things could turn out better and that our actions mattered. It's
an empowered and action oriented emotion. And one thing that I write about with respect to climate is that people in the US at least greatly underestimate how much other voters in the US care about the climate crisis. So it could be that I don't think we're going to be able to do anything about it because I think
I'm the only one who cares. If that's where you're coming from, Eric, then I would say, well, maybe let's look a little bit more at the data about what other folks want, and maybe if you realize that other people want the same thing you do, maybe there's a little bit more collective efficacy, a sense of possibility for what we could do together.
Let's go back for a second to the claim that cynicism is not just harmful, which we covered, but often naive. Talk about the naive piece.
This, I think is so important because it counters to my mind what has become a cultural stereotype. When I write about hope and talk about hope, I get made fun of constantly. What is this, Obama two thousand and seven? Come on, you know, it's so try hard. It's cringe, it's naive, sometimes even worse, it's privileged. It's toxic to hope.
It's denying our problems. And by contrast, people say, yes, cynicism, it feels bad, but you know what cynics are, right, And so if it feels bad to know the truth, well then I guess I'll feel bad, to which I would say not so fast. You know, look a little bit more closely at the data, and it turns out that the data here are quite clear at a number of levels. One, people think that cinics are smarter than
non cynics. Right, So if you ask people, if you describe a cynic and a non synic, you say, who will do better at cognitive tests, who will be wiser? Seventy to eighty five percent of people pick the cynic But then if you actually give cynics a nonsenics cognitive and social tests, cynics do worse than non cynics. Now why is that. Well. Cynicism, as we've been talking about, is a blanket theory. It's an assumption about people. And if you move through the world with an assumption about people,
you won't engage in a lot of critical thinking. You will paste that assumption onto every situation in your life. It's actually a very unthinking or in other words, naive way of viewing the world. And it turns out that that makes cynics wrong in a bunch of different ways. In fact, even folks who would not consider themselves cynics tend to underestimate people. There is decades of evidence that people don't realize how trustworthy, generous, open minded, and warm
others are. So cynicism here it's naive in terms of the way that people are thinking, which is resting on assumptions, and it's also demonstrably wrong when you compare our cynical assumptions to the data about what people are really like, yeah.
That makes a lot of sense. And you talk about moving from cynicism to something that you call skepticism or maybe hopeful skepticism. I mean it's not just plain skepticism, but it's a skepticism with a modifier.
That's right. No, you nailed, it's hopeful skepticism. Yeah. Again, I love the opportunity to help people understand when two words that they're using interchangeably mean completely different things. That's like one of my jobs as a research psychologist, and that's true here as well. We often think that cynicism and skepticism are the same, but they're really not at all. So cynicism again a blanket assumption about people that we
use to argue basically for how bad everybody is. A cynic will pick up any evidence that somebody does something negative or harmful and they'll say, Aha, that's who they really are, and they'll explain away evidence about the person's positive qualities. Right, they're thinking like a lawyer in the prosecution against humanity. Skepticism is not a lack of faith in people. It's a lack of faith in our assumptions.
If cynics think like lawyers, skeptics think like scientists, they say, wait a minute, what evidence do I have to support each claim that I'm making, each belief that I'm carrying. And it turns out that skeptics, well, First of all, skepticism and cynicism not correlated with each other in people, right, So being one doesn't mean that you're the other. And second, whereas cynics tend to fall for conspiracy theories more, they tend to do worse at understanding other people, skeptics do
much better. They learn more quickly, and they're more adaptable. And then the hopeful piece to hopeful skepticism is simply an understanding that oftentimes our factory settings, our default mode is too negative. So it's an open mindedness to the evidence that the world and other people bring, plus knowledge that we have a bias, and preparedness to push against that bias.
Yeah, you say in the book that cynics imagine humanity is awful. Skeptics gather information about who they can trust. And then this last part, in particular being less cynical then is simply a matter of noticing more precisely. And I really love that idea of just like you said, set our assumptions aside and let's actually notice and pay closer attention and question our own default settings about the way things are.
Yeah, that's exactly right. And I think that oftentimes, again, skepticism here can actually not be simply different from cynicism. It can be a treatment for cynicism. We think about cognitive behavioral therapy for depression and anxiety. Right, what a therapist will often do is say, you know, a patient will say, Okay, I think that I'm awful or worthless, or I have personally eric some social anxieties. All often think that people are judging me or don't like me.
And when I was in therapy, my therapist to say, okay, well, Jamille, you're a scientist, defend that claim. What evidence do you have that people really don't like you? Has anybody ever acted like they like you? You know? If so, then you're you're maybe not making a complete argument.
Yea.
And that idea of what I call turning our skepticism on our cynicism. Being skeptical about our cynical assumptions is a hindset shift that can allow us to say, well, wait a minute, where is all of this coming from? And you know, I think oftentimes we trust our instincts. People are even proud they say, I've got a lot of intuition. I trust my gut, to which I say, fine, you can do that. But oftentimes our gut instincts are
really awful, you know. Yeah, we have gut instincts that tell us be nicer to people who are your same race than somebody who's a different race, or when you're hungry, judge people more morally, we would never trust those instincts, and the instinct to always look at the worst parts of people's behavior, the worst parts of the world is adaptive in certain ways. Maybe it helped us survive two hundred thousand years ago, but that doesn't mean it's helping us now. So I think that we don't need to
trust our gut when it comes to cynical judgments. We can be skeptical, we can be open minded instead.
Yeah, I'm always a little bit skeptical of the intuition. It's a big thing in personal development, which is just trust intuition, trust your gut, And I'm like, well, kind as sometimes there's plenty of times our gut sense leads us way wrong, and a lot of the research, particularly if you look at some of the stuff about like even Malcolm Gladwell's that's kind of in thinking fast and slow.
But this idea of intuition, people who are trusting their intuition in those stories he's telling are people who have thousands of hours of experience in that very thing to the point where they've internalized vast amounts of information. And so it's not that I'm totally against intuition, but I'm just not a believer that, like you said, like it's always right, I think it's used right. It is an input into a system that should have multiple inputs.
This is brilliantly put. This is a really nuanced and important point. You're saying that, Hey, wait a minute, intuition is more useful if you have expertise because you have a crude experience that feeds into that intuition. I do want to complicate.
That even more, Eric, if I may, at least, I love complication.
I can tell your game for this, which is which is awesome. So a lot of people would say, yeah, in fact, my cynicism counts as expertise because I've been around people. You know, I feel hope or you trust people. That's because you're naive. I am not naive. I've been around the block and I've learned through tough one lessons,
through betrayals, through disappointments, that people can't be trusted. And I think that that's actually the illusion of expertise more than it's real expertise, because, as you said, expertise means you've got a lot of information that's going into your intuitions. But one thing about cynicism is that it causes us to take information in in an uneven way. Yes, I'll give you an example. Right, So when you trust somebody and that was the wrong choice, oh, you get feedback, right,
you learn that that was a mistake. You maybe think about that mistake for months or years or decades. But when you don't trust somebody and that is a mistake, when you miss an opportunity for a friendship or the love of your life, or the greatest business partnership you would ever have, you don't know that betrayals are visible. Missed opportunities are invisible. And that means that the information that we're taking in is only really half of the
information that we could take in. And in that way, our experiences don't always lead to expertise. If we're taking in information in a way that's biasing us more. As we gain more experience.
Absolutely, and because those experiences that are negative like that, we weigh far higher also, right, Yes, it's an example of a trauma perpetrated on somebody, they obviously and rightfully so weigh that very very highly. But it's not indicative of the reality out there. And I love that idea of saying that. It's that we're not taking an information
in a balanced way. And I think that's why what you're saying about our experiences of people, right, because the news is unquestionably and always going to point out the negative. It's the person who went into Starbucks today refused to wear a mask and threw their coffee at the barista. Yep, right, yep, And that's what you hear. But simple paying attention will tell me that I've been into thousands of Starbucks thousands of times and I've never once seen a bit of
behavior like that. And it just is this sort of not fully bringing things in. And one of my favorite sort of counters to cynicism is I think about there's uncertainly people behaving poorly right at this very minute. Of course, there are, and there are also so many people behaving kindly and decently and nobly or just fine decently. You
drive down the road and that's the case. It's like we are all somehow hurtling down the road at seventy miles an hour, largely obeying the rules and getting along, and the occasional person that counters that is the exception, not the rule. But it's the one that we then say people are idiots. Like you said, can we take in more information and keep the negative information from assuming
too big of a role. It's like we weigh it with like ten points of preference for every good thing we see, but it's probably even way worse than that though the ratio, if we were to give it a ratio.
The person who cuts me off in traffic is the star of my day's story. The nine hundred and fifty people who follow traffic laws all around me on that same drive float into the landfill of my lost memories.
Right.
I agree, that's true of so many things. Plane crashes is a major news story, and it should be. It's a tragedy. Of course, sixty thousand planes land without crashing is a non story. In some ways. The exceptions are what we focus on. Rather than the rules that make those exceptions exceptional.
Precisely. Yeah, if you know a thousand planes crashed today, we would cease to pay much attention to it. We just be like, well, planes crash all the time. I mean, it wouldn't make the news anymore. It's the same thing. I always think, Like, we talk about things that are dangerous, and I'm like, I think, statistically, the most dangerous thing that we do, and we all do it every day is get in a car.
Is drive. Absolutely, It's far.
More dangerous than all these other things that we worry about, and we do it every day with barely thinking about it, which shows you that we're not actually adding up the reality in a coherent way.
Exactly. Last year, I surveyed one thousand Americans and I asked them, in general, do you think that the pandemic so twenty twenty to early pandemic twenty twenty, twenty one, and twenty two. Do you think that people around the world during those years became kinder less kind or did they stay just as kind as they had in the years before the pandemic? And sixty percent of my sample believed that the world had become less kind during the pandemic,
barely twenty percent thought that it had become kinder. But the data from this massive project called the World Happiness Report are clear and go in the exact opposite direction. Volunteering, donating to charity, and helping strangers all increased enormously over the pandemic. So there's two pieces of news there. One the good news. When push came to shove during one of the hardest times, the worst disasters most living people have experienced, we showed up for each other. That says
a lot. The second thing, most people don't know that that happened, which I think is a tragedy. And again, whenever I talk about this stuff, people will say, wait a minute, you can't discount people who commit murder or assault or do awful things like you said right Saying that plane crashes almost never happened would be a disservice to people who really are devastated by those events. And of course, I in no way want to diminish the real harm that is going on all around the world.
Right now, The question for me is not is everybody good? Is everybody helpful? Is everybody kind? But rather, can we correctly understand the average person and I would say that it's very clear that the average person underestimates the average person, and that is a both really sad state of affairs and again an opportunity because if we recalibrate, not only will we know each other better, there will be much more reason to have hope for the future that we can build as a community.
Yeah, I love that idea. Let's talk about two neighborhoods in a Japanese city. I don't know how to pronounce Jeff Kobe, Kobe, thank you, And I'm not even going to pronounce the two neighborhoods.
I'll let you.
I'll let you. Going to stay out of this sort of let you do that.
Yeah. So we were talking earlier about how cynicism hurts individuals and trust and vulnerability can help individuals, and how that's also true at the community level, and I was telling you that trusting versus less trust in communities tend to be more civically engaged, more economically prosperous. But it's also true that trust, the bonds between people in a
community strengthen that community, especially during difficult times. And one amazing example of that that I write about and learned a lot about for the book is this disaster, this earthquake that occurred in the Japanese city of Kobe in nineteen ninety five, and it was a horrible disaster. You know, thousands of people died and hundreds of thousands of buildings
were destroyed. There are two neighborhoods in the general Kobe area that are not that far apart, Mano and Mikura, and they're similar in socio economic status, population size, et cetera. But they were different in a key way, which is that Mono had this history of organizing together as a community to advocate for environmental protection. The details matter less, but what you need to know is that these people counted on one another, They had been through struggles together.
The level of interconnection in this neighborhood was high. Mikura had less of that history, and when the earthquake struck. There were fires that followed the earthquake, massive fires, and the trust that folks in Mono had made a huge difference. So people in Mikura kind of waited for the fire department to arrive, and many of them lost their homes and sadly, many lost their lives. People in Mono did
not wait. They organized kind of in a grassroots way, came up with a bucket brigade and pulled hoses from factories and were taking water from the rivers around there. You know, the tragedy was still a tragedy in both neighborhood of but the number of homes lost in Mono was a quarter of what it was in Mikura. The number of lives lost in Mono was one tenth of
what it was in Mikura. So we think about trust as great when things are good, but trust is probably even more powerful when things are going terribly and it's one of the fundamental needs that we have in times of adversity is to be able to count on one another.
There's another story in the book about actually I'm just going to tee it up and let you tell it, but it's about two villages.
Yeah. Absolutely. It's funny, you know, because we've been talking about the parable of the wolf you feed, and I think that's often a parable at the individual level, like about personal development. I think of the Brazilian fishing village example as actually one version of when we feed a different wolf as a community than another community does. So in southeastern Brazil, there are two villages separated by about thirty forty miles. Again similar in a lot of ways, religion,
socioeconomic status. They're both fishing villages, right, and one village is by the ocean. And it turns out that in order to fish on the ocean you need heavy equipment and large boats because the waves are large, and it's just it's pretty dangerous, and so that type of work is fundamentally cooperative. Fishermen work in teams on the lake
because there's no waves of the fish are smaller. People work independently, and actually they often run into each other on their small boats only when they're competing for the best fishing spots. And about ten years ago, economists, including a friend of mine Andrea's, went to those villages and they gave the fishermen in those villages different social games to play, assessing how trustworthy they were and how generous
they were. And it turned out that when fishermen started their career, it didn't matter which village they were in. They were equally trusting, equally trustworthy, and equally generous. But over time the environment shaped these people. If you were in a cutthroat, competitive workplace, you became less trusting and less trustworthy over time. And if you were in a cooperative, positive some workplace, you became more trusting and more generous over time. Yeah.
It gets back to what we talked about earlier, which is where your view of other people will shape the behavior you get back from them, exactly.
Yeah. And I think it's also not just your view of other people, but the structures that you are in. You know, I think that one thing about today is culture is just how unequal we are. You know, times of great economic inequality tend to be less trusting times, and places that are more unequal tend to be less trusting as well. And that's not because people have a
bad attitude. It's because structurally, when things are very unequal, people often feel like they have to compete, like their lives are a zero sum struggle to meet their basic necessities.
There was something that you said in the book. You say that it didn't matter who they were, rural and urban, liberal and conservative. Baby boomers and gen Z may not agree on much, but they all believe humanity is in a state of vicious decline and that we yearn for a gentler, friendlier past that never was. Is this just a feature of human beings as we age.
It's an interesting question. So this is work by Adam Mastrioni and Dan Gilbert who look at this illusion of moral decline. They look at ser over a seventy year period, hundreds of thousands of people, and at all times people say things were great twenty years ago, but they're terrible now in terms of morality. Right, People were great twenty years ago and not so much now. And the irony, of course is that some of the people in these
surveys there now other people's twenty years ago. Right. So people in nineteen seventy think that nineteen seventies America is very untrustworthy and unkind compared to the nineteen fifties, But people in the nineteen nineties think that nineteen seventies America was great, right, right, exactly. Yeah, And so I do think that there is a little bit of nostalgia here, you know. I think that because we have this negativity bias, we when we're thinking about what's happening now, we're so
hyper focused on the threats in our environment. There is also something known as the psychological immune system, which is the idea that over time we acclimate to our circumstances and even block out some negative things that have happened in the past. So Dan and Adams think that it's a combination of these two effects that we're seeing that one I'm so focused on everything bad that's happening now,
and two I tend to sugarcoat the past. And you put those together and you get this illusion that things are getting worse, even when they're demonstrably in some cases getting much better.
Yeah. I always think of it as a sure sign of getting old, and I'm exaggerating a little bit, but when I look at like the sort of ways in which we ossify potentially as we get older, it's one of the big ones on my internal checking, Like, am I starting to say things like it was better? When as like a sign that tells me that, like I need to keep like you say, keep taking in more data.
I feel the same way about being confused by younger generations, And yeah, I think the worst version of that is being judgmental of younger generations. I hear all the time because a lot of my work focuses on empathy and kindness. Aren't young people just jerks? They self centered, narcissistic influencers and I think no, And I also want to know how many of these folks do you know? I teach
college students every day. I think I have a lot of experience with young adults, and they are some of the least selfish, most globally conscious people I've ever known, much more than I was at their age. So I think when we start stereotyping people who are younger than us, that's a red flag that maybe we're getting older than we realize exactly.
Talk to me about what solutions journalists are.
Solutions journalism is an attempt to provide an antidote, or at least counter programming to many of the things we've been talking about. As we've been talking about, generally, journalists and news organizations focus on the negative because that's what will keep us clicking and scrolling and watching. But that gives us a biased sense of the world. Right we're basically only being shown the worst half of humanity by
news organizations. Solution journalists try to do the opposite. Now, I should say that when I say do the opposite, I do not mean puff pieces about a dog that was stuck in a tree but is rescued, you know, or even great stories like a veteran comes home to their family who doesn't know that they're there. Right, I mean, there's all these beautiful stories that we call human interests sores, right, are just lovely anecdotes. That's really great, and that's completely fine.
But solutions journalism is not that. It's instead using journalism and storytelling to teach people about folks who are really trying to address big problems that we're facing. So, for instance, young people engaged in activism to combat the climate crisis, or to roll back jerrymandering and re empower voters in the Midwest, or people who have been in prison advocating
for their rights to vote. Right. This is news about positive trends that are directly related to the negative news that we hear all the time, not kind of disembodied or apart from news.
Right.
I mean, oftentimes I think the old stereotype is you hear four days and fifty five minutes of bad news, and then the last five minutes on Friday is a human interest story that's supposed to basically be an escape from reality. Solutions journalism is not an escape. It's a confrontation with negative journalism by saying, yeah, these same issues there are positive developments on those fronts.
Yeah. I loved the story about jerry mandering in Michigan that you tell. Do you want to walk us through that very briefly, sure, because I think it's a great example of this and the sort of example of something positive happening around an issue that often seems intractable.
Yeah. This is the story of Katie Fahey, twenty six year old Michigander who worked in a recycling plant. I mean really not somebody who was high up in politics involved at all, although she was engaged, and after the twenty sixteen election, she wanted to find a non partisan issue, something that people generally agreed on that she could make movement on. And it was jerrymandering, right, that kind of anti democratic splitting of districts such that votes don't count
as much. And she created this grassroots campaign and people laughed her out of every meeting that she had. At first. She's again this young woman, you know, not taken seriously, but she did it. She collected three hundred thousand signatures from around Michigan and got a ballot initiative passed, and now Michigan is one of the most democratic states in the nation, meaning that people's votes are relatively counted compared
to more gerrymandered states. I think it's such a great example of how not being willing to lose faith in each other can actually create positive change.
Yeah, it's a really great story and to hear about how she did it and the different people who came together, and it is an example of this solution's journalism that is really useful. And you talk about your couple of hot button issues. One is, you know, democratic institutions crumbling, and this is a great piece of solutions journalism to that. And you're also you said I've become a climate doomer. I also think there is good news on the climate
front along with all the bad news. It's not that they replace each other, but I've spent more time looking for stories that highlight some of the good things that are happening. Again, not as a way of becoming optimistic necessarily, but as a way of seeing a more full picture.
That's right, And I think it's important this point you raise. Finding and seeking out positive news is not a matter of putting rose colored glasses on and being complacent. Finding good news a makes us more accurate because having only bad news in our feeds is like wearing mud colored glasses, right, So trying to balance the information that we get is not putting on a pair of rose color glasses. It's taking off the bias that we're already wearing, or at
least most of us are. And second, it's not complacent. You know, when we read when we learn that other people support climate action. In many cases of social movements, that empowers us. People with hope are more likely to agitate, to take part in protests to pressure lawmakers to make change. So being hopeful is not being complacent. In fact, it's the opposite.
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goodwolf dot me slash relationships. Thousands are already benefiting from these tips. Join us in fostering stronger relationships at goodwolf dot me slash relationships. There's a book you're probably familiar with it Hans ros Lane, and it's called Possibilism. Is that the no, what's the name factfulness? But he talks about He says in the book, I'm not an optimist or a pessimist. I'm a possibilist. I love that idea because you know, what he's saying is that like both
the positive and the negative, they're both true. There are negative things in the world, there are positive things in the world, but that he's focused on possiblism, and he basically says that recognizing the good things that are happening does not make him naive. It makes him somebody who can believe in positive action happening. And you sort of say this somewhere else also that when we don't believe that good things can happen, you say, it forecloses on
the possibility of anything better. And I love that idea of you know, cynicism becomes again, as we've mentioned in different ways, self fulfilling prophecy to a certain extent, because if you don't believe that things can get better or have gotten better in certain ways, you won't do anything different.
And I want to be really clear, that's helpful to a certain group of people. That's helpful to elites or others who want the status quo to remain right. I mean autocrats, authoritarians, They use cynicism, They cultivate cynicism in their people, because a population that doesn't trust itself is much easier to control. So I think we often confuse cynicism with a radical emotion, and actually it's the opposite. It's often a tool of people in power to remain
in power. Yeah, I love, of course factfulness. I've often, even when I was writing Hope for Cynics, felt like I was in conversation with Hans and he's a public health scholar and focuses on trends in the world that are positive. And I think that as a psychologist, I'm very focused on our view of each other, and I think that those are really bound up with one another because to the extent that we believe in each other now, we can also believe that those positive trends can continue,
that we can continue them. To the extent that we lose faith in each other, we also lose faith in the future that we can build well.
I think that is a beautiful place to wrap up. Thank you so much, Jamille. I've really enjoyed this conversation. I really enjoyed the book. It's called Hope for Cynics, The Surprising Science of Human Goodness. We'll have links in the show notes to where people can get the book and find other parts of your work.
Thanks so much, Eric, this has been totally delightful.
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