Instant Genius - Why being cynical is harming your health

Episode Date: November 15, 2024

While being cynical can feel safe, and prepared for the worst outcome, it could actually be harming your health. We spoke to Jamil Zaki, author of the new book Hope for Cynics to better understand the dangers of cynicism and how to break out of it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. Hello, I'm Alex Hughes and this is the Instant Genius podcast, a bite-sized masterclass from the BBC Science Focus magazine. It is so easy to start looking at the world negatively. Blaming others and being prepared to be disappointed mean you're always ready for when things go wrong.

But this viewpoint could not just be bad for your mental health, but it could even be making you worse at decisions and causing you to miss out on opportunities. I spoke to Jamil Zaki, the author of the new book, Hope for Cynics, to better understand the world of cynicism and why it is so important that we try to change our perspectives on the world. So I think with any kind of conversation where we're really honing in on one specific thing, it's important to get a good sort of definition, a good beginning for that conversation.

So as basic as it seems, could you kind of give your definition of, cynicism and what you see it as. Yeah, absolutely, Alex. And I think this is a great place to start because defining cynicism is not as basic as you might imagine. There are two ways of defining it. One is that it's an ancient Greek school of philosophy headed by antithynes and diogenes of synope.

That's not what I'm talking about when I describe cynicism. The way that modern psychology thinks of cynicism is as a theory of human nature. the general idea that people are selfish, greedy, and dishonest. Now, that's not to say that a cynic would be surprised if somebody donated to charity, for instance, or did something else kind. But they might impugn or suspect the person's motives. They might say, well, I think that maybe they were just trying to get a break on their taxes or look good in front of other people. So cynics have a theory not about what people do, but about who we are at the deepest level. And in your book, you set up the conversation of cynicism with, well, I think it's a lovely anecdote of your friend Emil.

You know, you dedicated the book to him. And you also talk about the effects that that cynical view started to have on you and how you pushed to change that view. Could you talk us through a little bit about how you came to write the book and I guess why you wanted to change people's view around it? Well, I wrote this book because it's the one that I needed four years ago when I began this project. I've been studying the science of human kindness for 20 years. So things like donating to charity, helping strangers, just the ways that people show up for one another and what drives us to act in generous and cooperative ways. And I think there's an assumption that if you study something, you must live and breathe it all the time. So people for decades have assumed that I must have

a very rosy view of humanity. The truth, which was a secret until this book came out, is that The opposite was often the case. Instead of being very hopeful and positive, secretly in my private life, I tend towards cynicism. And there was a great friend of mine and colleague, Emil Brunot, who was always a sort of counterpoint to this. We both studied the neuroscience of kindness and empathy, but I was secretly this sort of curmudgeon, and secretly he was just as positive as you might imagine. He studied how we can fight hatred and and bring people together across difference. He was always a sort of inspiration for me and a foil as well because we were so different.

He sadly was diagnosed with cancer in 2018 and died in 2020. And his death, along with the lockdown around the COVID pandemic and just so many experiences that year brought me to the low point of my cynicism, this immense rift between what I was studying and teaching, which is the positivity of human nature and what I was feeling, which was really rather hopeless. So I began this project to see if I could bridge that gulf between what I knew to be true and the way that I felt and quickly discovered that it wasn't just me feeling cynicism, that this was a pervasive problem around the world, and that the science here maybe could make a difference, maybe could help, not just me, but all sorts of people struggling with these issues.

And when you were defining cynicism, you talked about, you know, the ancient philosophers. And we're talking now about the pandemic, which is, you know, just a matter of years ago. Are we more cynical now than we were then? Or is this just more that we're more aware of it? I mean, it's hard to know if we're more cynical than we were thousands of years ago because there's not a lot of great data from back then. But I can tell you that, for instance, researchers in the U.S. have been asking people whether they believe that most of humanity can be trusted. They've been asking that question for many decades. And it turns out that if you look at the U.S. in the 1970s or 80s, about half of Americans back

then believed that most people could be trusted by 2018 that had fallen to a third of Americans, a drop as big as the stock exchange experienced during the financial collapse of 2008. So we are going through a real trust deficit, humanity losing faith in humanity. And that's not just a problem in the U.S. There is a 22 survey of 28 nations that found that in 24 of those nations, most people said that their default is not to trust others. So I would say that, yes, we are more cynical, less trusting of each other and our institutions than we were just a few decades ago.

And is there a reason for that as far as we know? It's hard to know because history is not an experiment, right? You can't run it a thousand times and tinker with different factors. There are a few things that we can point to, though. One is the loss of in-person connection. So Robert Putnam and many others have written about how people just congregate less than they used to in bowling leagues, church groups, you name it. We just spend less time together in structured ways.

And it turns out that when we have one-on-one contact with each other, we tend to have more faith in people. when we lose that contact and instead are living through our screens. And especially through cable news and social media, we tend to have extremely high levels of cynicism. So that's one cause, potential cause that scientists point to is a shift in the way that we live our social lives, going from community and in-person connection to online platforms that algorithmically feed us negative information that might. make us less trusting. And is there something particular going on in our brain when we experience this cynicism? Is this a biological reaction to something? You know, that's a really great question. And there is, in my opinion, not a good biology of cynicism, but it is connected to something that

we know much more about, which is negativity bias. I don't know if you've ever heard about this idea, but it's the notion that humanity, human beings and other animals too, pay more attention to threatening information than to the good stuff, right? So given a visual array of positive and threatening information, we will look longer at the threats. We remember negative events more than positive events, and we make decisions more based on what we don't want to lose than what we do want to gain. Our entire sort of brains are tuned towards avoiding threats. And you can understand why that would be helpful from an evolutionary perspective. Imagine 200,000 years ago, a person who was worried about a predator on one horizon might be more likely to survive than their friend who's blist out by the sunset on the opposite horizon and not looking at that saber-toothed tiger or whatever other animal might be on the prowl.

So negativity bias might serve us. It might help us live. But I think the problem arises when that ancient instinct, that ancient bias is combined, again, with this hypermodern media ecosystem, especially online platforms, but legacy media as well are not designed to make people healthier or happier or more informed. These platforms are designed to keep us scrolling and watching and clicking, whatever it takes. And it turns out that the best way to do that is to give us more negative information, to feed the bias that is in our brains already. So we have a potentially useful bias that has just been extended and intensified to the point that, A, we are much less healthy than we used to be, much more cynical, much less connected. But B, we are less informed. I hear a lot of people tell me, well, yeah, I watch a ton of news and I am more cynical because I know the truth.

But it turns out that watching the news might actually make you more wrong. There are some examples, I'll just give one from the U.S., but there are many from around the world. One is that people in the U.S. who watch more cable news believe that violent crime is on the rise in this country. The fact is that violent crime has been decreasing in the U.S. for the better part of four decades. So in this case, watching the news is the opposite of becoming educated. It feeds our cynicism, but doesn't make us more. more informed. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes.

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One of the points you make in your book is you talk about this idea that people who are cynical are often seen as being more intelligent, that they're more aware of what's going on around them and that, you know, they're better prepared because of that. Is that not as true as it might seem on the face of it? Yeah, Alex, I'd love to actually ask what your intuitions were. Before you read the book, if I had presented you with the story of somebody who's really mistrustful and somebody who's very trusting, would you have had an assumption about which one of those people would be wiser versus more naive, say? Yeah, I mean, I think I fell into the same group that I thought of someone who's being more cynical as maybe being more intelligent or better prepared for a situation.

Yeah, I mean, that's exactly what I thought as well. There's so many times in researching this book that I realized how wrong I'm, was about human nature. And one of the ways that I think we are just prevalently wrong is that we equate trust with naivete, with gullibility, with being a chump or a rube. And if somebody mistrusts others, we say, aha, they must be wise. They must have been around the block enough times. So if you present people with a story of a cynical and a non-synical person, 70% will say that the cynic is smarter than the non-synic. 85% of people imagine that cynics will be socially smarter, like better at spotting

liars than non- cynics. So as you're saying, you and me and really most people put our faith in individuals who don't have faith in people. It's a tongue twister, but it's true. And most of us are wrong. It turns out that data are clear that cynics do less well on cognitive tests than non-cinics. they are worse at spotting liars than more trusting people. And you say, well, how would that be? I think it's really critical to remember that even though cynics are very gloomy about other people, they are really confident in their assumptions. And when you have an assumption, a black and white view of what people are like, you actually stop paying attention to the evidence. You kind of rest on the laurels of whatever you believed in the first place and just look for evidence that confirms that

belief. And when you stop actually paying attention, you stop learning. It's actually the opposite of wisdom. It's an interesting point because obviously, as we're saying, a lot of people that are cynical in nature are often deemed more intelligent or more prepared for things. Are we then promoting people or giving these people higher positions based on that when they are maybe the worst people for these situations? Or, you know, if it's a social skill that we're saying, they're probably great at this, but it turns out they're not. Is that happening? Is that an issue? I think it is. So there's a couple of ways of thinking about this question. One is, I do think that we continue to glamorize cynicism in many ways that we shouldn't. And I do think that's harming our culture.

I mean, one of my goals, one of my missions now is to dethrone cynicism, to remove its cultural cachet. But let's face it, for now, we still think as a culture that cynicism is a sign of intelligence, and that changes the way that people behave. There is research that finds that if you tell people to appear as competent as possible, they will act more cynically. They'll stop being as friendly because they're worried that being friendly and trusting will make them look dull. The fact is, though, that I think we do oftentimes lionize or make heroes of very cynical people. I can't tell you the number of times that somebody said, well, what about Steve Jobs? Or what about some other, you know, famous leader?

It wasn't his cynicism what helped him be so great at what he did, to which I would say the plural of anecdote is not data. Telling stories isn't the same as having evidence. And there are data on this question. It turns out that cynical people want power more than non-synical people, but they don't achieve it. In fact, they achieve it less because it turns out that success is not typically a matter of, of stepping on our colleagues, on trying to bruise everybody while we climb to the top, oftentimes making it to the top is a function of being able to cooperate and build coalitions. So cynics think that they can succeed by acting in competitive and sometimes cruel ways,

but it turns out that their view of success is far too narrow. And I'm intrigued, can cynicism have an effect on others around you, if you have a particularly cynical viewpoint, could that then bleed out to others? I don't know how many of your listeners are parents, but it turns out that there's a bunch of really interesting evidence that one reason that cynicism is spreading is because we are instilling it in our children. So research from around the world finds that parents believe that in order to keep their kids safe and help them succeed, they should teach their kids that the world is dangerous and competitive. In other words, we want our kids to live better lives than we

have. I mean, I think that's something that most parents want. And in order to achieve that goal, we teach kids that the world is worse than we think it is. And so now Generation Z, the most cynical on record, at least here in the U.S. And I think that this is a backward strategy. I think that it's understandable again. As a parent, I desperately want to protect my kids, but I realized in the course of doing this research that actually I was spreading cynicism to them inadvertently. So I think that for any parents out there, I hope that you can leverage the advice that I've given, not just for yourself, but also think about how you might apply it in your parenting and with your families. In your book, you described cynicism as an illness,

something that we can diagnose and cure. You know, right now we're kind of talking about some of the symptoms that you could have from it. What is the way to go about curing it and, you know, moving forward with a less cynical worldview? Yeah, I mean, this is the question. I mean, let me just quickly stipulate that we've talked about some of the costs of cynicism, but not all of them. I mean, it's worth saying that for cynical people, not only are you not probably making better, more accurate decisions, but there are many ways that cynicism hurts our health, right? So it makes people less mentally healthy. Cynics suffer for more depression. and loneliness than non-synics. It also worsens our physical health. There are data from

many studies finding that cynics die younger than non- cynics. I think of cynicism is cutting us off from the nourishment of the social world. If you can't be vulnerable to people, if you can't open up, if you can't form connections, you lose so much of what makes life beautiful, first of all, but what makes us healthy as well. So I just wanted to say a little bit about the disease part before we move to the cure. I really do think that this is hurting us. And again, this is no judgment for me for any listeners who are cynical. I was right there with you. And in fact, this cure is something that I've been seeking myself for many years. So how do we go about it? I think that the first thing is, as we've been doing in this conversation, to understand the costs of cynicism and to stop

glamorizing it. Then I think we need an alternative. We need people to realize that if you don't want to be cynical, you don't then have to be naive, right? That there are not just these two options. And so in the book, I introduced this idea of hopeful skepticism. So let me define each of those terms. The first of these is skepticism, which people often confuse with cynicism, but they're actually really different. If cynics have a baseline assumption about all people, a judgment before they even meet somebody, skeptics don't, right? They don't assume that people are terrible. and they don't assume that people are great either. They wait for evidence to decide who and when they can trust.

So if cynics are like lawyers in the trial against humanity, skeptics are like scientists trying to learn as much as they can. Hopeful skepticism is the idea that when we pay attention to the evidence, when we think like scientists, pleasant surprises will be everywhere, right? If because of negativity bias, most of us underestimate other people, We underestimate how generous, how open-minded, how friendly, and cooperative others are. You know, it's not to say there aren't terrible people out there, but the average person underestimates the average person.

So hopeful skepticism is a mindset of trying to pay attention to evidence, being open and curious to what people bring us, and understanding that when we do that, people will often be better than we think they are. And for people who are very entrenched in their own cynicism, and I think for some people might even find a level of comfort in that, that, you know, it's a very cozy worldview to just say, everything is bad, nothing can hurt me because I'm very aware of that. How do you convince someone to come out that shell? Is it just a case of saying, look, you will be healthier, you will be the better version of yourself if you can escape that a little bit? I think that's a big part of it. I want to address something that you mentioned that I think is really wise and certainly something that I felt that cynicism is cozy and it feels safe, right? As you said, a cynic might say, well, sure, I might be gloomy, but at least nobody will

hurt me now. You know, there's this sense that if I never expect anything from anybody, nobody can disappoint me. I think that's a huge source of cynicism is people who have been betrayed and hurt and reasonably don't want to feel that way again. What I would offer to anybody who's feeling that way, though, is to remember that even though being cynical might prevent you from being hurt in any obvious way, in any one instance, it's actually incredibly dangerous and harmful in the long run. I think of it as a suit of armor that suffocates us instead of protecting us. Because, yes,

you might not be hurt as easily, but you'll also be cut off. from connection, friendship, collaboration, love, so much of what makes life fulfilling. So it's sort of like you're not taking big risks in the moment, but you're taking enormous and almost certain losses over time. I think of it as, you know, playing poker by folding every hand before it's dealt, right? I mean, you're not going to lose big, but you will certainly a hundred percent lose over the long term. So I guess that's the kind of health case for a abandoning cynicism is to remember, A, it's probably hurting you more than you realize, and B, it's probably more wrong than you realize. You don't have to feel this way because it's actually not a worldview

that matches the evidence. This is what I always try to tell people is I'm not asking you to put on a pair of rose-colored glasses. I'm not asking you to ignore our problems. But most of us, due to negativity bias, are wearing mud-colored glasses already. And so hopeful skepticism is is a matter of taking those off, of being more empirical, of being more scientific in the way that we live. And do you have, I guess, a few tips for people that are trying to beat this or, you know, change their worldview when it comes to this sort of topic? Yeah, I've got a few strategies that people can use if they want to apply hopeful skepticism. The first is to fact-check your cynical feelings. I do this all the time because I still struggle enormously with cynicism. So I find myself sometimes if I've just met somebody suspecting them or not trusting them.

And I'll ask myself, I'll say, Zaki, come on, you're literally a scientist. If you were making this claim that this person is not trustworthy, what evidence would you use? And oftentimes I realize I have very little evidence. I'm just relying on vibes. And I think that we need as a culture to rely less on vibes and more on evidence when we can. So fact-checking cynical feelings can help us really. that oftentimes our minds are leading us in this direction with no real basis, and that can help us hit the reset button on those instincts. A second step that you can take is what I call

leaps of faith on other people. These are calculated risks, chances that let other people show us who they are. Now, I'm not saying to be reckless with your life to tell all your deepest secrets to a stranger or send your bank information to a prince who's going to wire you $14 million, right? I'm just saying that oftentimes we are too risk averse. We don't realize how much reward there is to putting ourselves out there, to giving people chances, and we overestimate how badly things would go. People are dead wrong, right?

We think that conversations with strangers will be cringe and they're actually fantastic. We think that disclosing our struggles to a friend will be a burden on them. In fact, they love supporting us, right? There are all sorts of ways in which we are wrong, but the only way to know that we're wrong is to give people a chance. So that's a second step. And then the third step I would offer is what I call positive gossip. This is the idea that we tend to think too cynically, but also speak too cynically.

So if I'm driving my kids to school and somebody cuts me off in traffic, my kids will hear about that person all morning, all about their family and their deepest values, but they won't hear anything about the thousand motorists who are obeying traffic laws. So what I try to do, what I offer to listeners, is try to pick one good thing that you see happen in your day, observe one act of kindness or generosity or trustworthiness, and share it with somebody else in your life. So imagine that you have dinner with your family every night, make sure that you, during the course of your day, forage for one positive story that you can share with them. And that can allow you to spread anti- cynicism, but it can also change your habits of mind and

help you notice the good around you. So you've dedicated much of your career to studying happiness. You've now put a lot of that time and effort into cynicism, writing a book on it, studying it to great lengths. What do you think is, both in your personal experience and professional, the, maybe most surprising thing you've found in this sort of search for happiness and a battle against cynicism? You know, I think that one could imagine that spending basically this entire decade of the 2020s, marinating myself in the science of mistrust and suspicion would have made me a gloomier person. The biggest surprise to me was that digging through the evidence for years on this very gloomy topic made me much happier and more hopeful. I really do believe that we are almost entirely backwards

in our understanding of cynicism. We think it's wise and it's naive. We think it's safe and it's quite dangerous. We think it's moral and actually it's often a tool of the status quo. But the reason that that's made me so hopeful is because I realize that this predominant way that people feel now, this very hurtful way that we feel is simply an error. It's not that we feel worse because the world is worse. If anything, the world is often becoming worse because we lose hope in people and in the future, and so we stop trying to make a difference. I really do think, and the data are clear on this, that oftentimes cynicism is simply a cognitive error and that by paying closer attention, we can unearth all sorts of evidence about the goodness of others and not just sit with that and be blist out and stop doing anything.

Use that evidence as a catalyst for living the lives that we want and building the culture that we want. Being hopeful is a huge part of many powerful social movements, the civil rights movement, the anti-apartheid movement, So many powerful changes in our culture, changes for the better, were driven by people who were very upset with the status quo, but deeply hopeful, who had faith in their fellow citizens and knew that most people wanted something better. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius. That was Jamil Zaki, talking about the dangers of cynicism. The Instant Genius podcast is brought to you by the team behind BBC Science Focus magazine, which you can find on sales. now in supermarkets and newsagents, as well as on your preferred app store. Alternatively, you can come and find us online at sciencefocus.com.

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