Plain English with Derek Thompson - The Surprising Science of Cynicism (Plus: The Policy Paradox of the 2024 Election)

Episode Date: September 27, 2024

Derek shares his biggest frustrations about the 2024 election, like the lack of a policy debate and blind spots in news coverage and polling analysis. Then he welcomes Jamil Zaki to the show: a professor of psychology at Stanford University and the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab. Zaki is the author of ‘Hope for Cynics,’ a new book that explores tension at the heart of human affairs. On one hand, social cooperation is the basis of human civilization. And yet cynicism—a baseline aversion to social cooperation and assumption that most people are greedy, selfish, and dishonest—is also core to the human experience. We are constantly violating the secret of our own success by assuming the worst in others, and Professor Zaki explains why. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Jamil Zaki Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello football fans. Shield Capadia here to tell you that the Ringer NFL show is the best place to be for fun and in-depth analysis of all your favorite teams and players throughout the 2024 season. Join me, Stephen Ruiz and Deontale twice a week for an insightful preview of the weekly slate of games every Friday, followed by the Big Monday Recap Show where we delve into our patented hot takes on all the NFL action. And don't forget about Wednesdays, which will feature me a special for a special. QB segment from Stephen, a breakdown of the biggest storylines around the league from our own Nora Princiotti, plus much more. You won't want to miss any of it, so make sure you subscribe to the Ringer NFL show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcast and follow at Ringer NFL on Instagram, TikTok X, and YouTube. Today, the cynicism, trust, and the secret of our success.

But first, a little pit stop on the 2024 election. It's been four weeks, several sex scandals, and one presidential debate since our last election update on plain English. I have to say one of my frustrations from a distance about this election is that the policy stakes of 2024 are extremely high, but the policy substance of the 2024 campaign has been absolutely meager. It's very important to remember and therefore to state up front that the differences between a Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, White House would be absolutely immense. For example, Donald Trump would extend corporate tax cuts that Harris would almost certainly seek to pull back.

On abortion, a Trump-Vance administration would almost certainly seek to curtail access to abortion and abortion pills with administrative policy, while a Harris White House would seek to expand abortion access in several ways. In foreign policy, Trump has all but promised to cut off aid to Ukraine while the Harris administration would likely seek to extend Biden's policy of supporting the war against Russia. A Trump election would likely see a wholesale turnover of career bureaucrats in Washington to overhaul what he considers the deep state, while a Harris administration would again represent something more like a status quo.

On clean energy and health care, Trump has promised to roll back laws signed by Joe Biden and Barack Obama, while Kamala Harris would obviously keep the Affordable Care Act and the Clean Energy Subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act, while probably working to extend both. On trade, Trump has promised a set of import taxes that would take us back 100 years or more in terms of tariff policy, while Harris seems very unlikely to extend tariffs beyond their current levels. Now, that quick rundown had a lot of likelihoods and probabilities in it, not only because legislation depends on congressional majorities in 2025 that we simply don't know yet, but also because we just haven't heard a lot about policy specifics in the last few months that we know to take seriously.

On the one hand, Trump's relationship to policy has always been impressionistic at best. If you recall, he ran in 2015 and 2016 as a populist. He ran on behalf of the forgotten middle class worker, and yet his first and most important legislative achievement in office was a corporate tax cut which delivered the largest savings to the richest business owners. If he wins in November, Donald Trump's coalition will pull at him from both sides. You've got J.D. Vance, his vice presidential candidate, who is deeply, deeply skeptical of old-fashioned Reaganite capitalism, while on the other hand, many of his richest backers are billionaire bankers and venture capitalists who are like patron saints of Adam Smith. Connecting the policies that Trump talks about to the policies that his administration executes is no simple task.

On the Democratic side, Kamala Harris has absolutely outlined a policy agenda that seems designed to appeal to someone like me, with an emphasis on housing supply, which I think would go a long way toward helping with America's affordability crisis. She's evinced a kind of unembarrassed celebration of both innovation and welfare, right? A sort of centrist, Scandinavian position, which says it should be easy to start and grow a business on the one hand, but also we owe a duty to protect the poor, the sick, the old, the disabled. And yet, I have to admit, she has been, for better or worse, very reluctant to directly answer hard questions about her policy ideas. It's important to remember that her campaign, so to speak, is barely two months old. And so maybe like Barack Obama

in the earliest months of his Democratic primary campaign in 2015, she represents an idea of hope, an idea of change, more than she represents a concrete change agenda. In a year where electorates around the world are clamoring for change and voting out incumbents, I guess we'll see in about five weeks whether her message of change without change is one that resonates. But there's one more point that I want to make about the political conversation surrounding this election, namely the conversation that we've been having around polling and polling errors. And if you'll permit me a bit of a windup, there's a particular way that I'd like to contextualize this. So for various reasons that I'll probably get into in the next few weeks when we escape the eclipse of political news, I've been doing some reading and listening to biblical history recently, and I learned that in the field of biblical analysis, there are two competing ideas called exegesis and isegesis.

Exegesis is the slightly more familiar of the two terms. It refers to a critical interpretation of a text, really any text, wrestling with the meaning of, in the case of the Bible, an ancient piece of writing. So, for example, if you want to understand the New Testament, and you say, I'm going to look for the original Greek text of the New Testament, to understand the precise meaning of the words to its original authors, that is exegesis. the meaning of the word is actually right there in the word itself, as often happens, I suppose, with etymology.

X, meaning out of. You are taking the text and drawing meaning out of it. There's another way to read scripture or anything else, and that is to pour your preconceived notions into the text. This is called isogesis, reading the Bible in order to prove that it says what you've already decided is true. That isegesis. In fact, in some derogatory context, issaegesis is sometimes referred to as I see Jesus. Because in everything that people read, they are trying their heart is to see their impression of the divine. So they're reading of passage of Exodus, and they say, oh, well, if you combine the first letter of every third word on this page here, it spells fish. And fish is a symbol for Jesus.

And so the book of Exodus, you see, is actually predicting the coming of Jesus, yada, yada, yada. This is the exact opposite of critical thinking. This is reading a text for the purpose of imposing your hopes and dreams upon it. I think at the broadest level, most political analysis is isegesis. As somebody who more or less follows economic news, science news, and political news, I can tell you with absolute certainty that the average quality of analysis and political journalism is horrendous compared to the first two, in large part because so much of it is done by, people who are so obviously rooting for a specific outcome and therefore reading into every new piece of information what they hope and dream. When Republicans see a poll that they like,

they say, oh, this is true and worth talking about. When they confront a poll they don't like, they ignore it, or they dive into the cross tabs to prove that the pollsters got something obviously wrong. When Democrats see a poll that they like, it's the same thing. The good polls are celebrated, the bad polls are tortured with context and cross-tab surgery. Some folks who don't fit snugly into the categories of Democrat versus Republican will sometimes claim other hardened biases. For example, they'll claim that they know for sure that the polls systematically undercount Trump support.

And this might sound like sophisticated analysis, but it is not sophisticated. It's barely even analysis. Polling errors are random. If they weren't random, there wouldn't be polling errors. I'm absolutely begging people to understand this point, so I'll repeat it.

Polling errors are hard to predict, because if they were easy to predict, polls would not have errors in the first place. It is true, of course, that the last two elections undercounted Trump's support, and anybody who remembers the fact that polling averages undercounted Trump's support

in 2016 and 2020 love to tell everybody that they know that they remember this fact. But the best pollsters also remember this fact, and they have a financial incentive to do their best to correct for their past sins. If, for example, the New York Times knew that they were consistently underrepresenting Trump's support in Pennsylvania by three percentage points, they wouldn't publish wrong polls on purpose. That would just be stupid. They would just add three percentage points to Trump's average as a final measure. The extremely frustrating but unfortunately true thing about polling from historically high-quality outlets is that they don't know if or how

much they're wrong. And we don't know if or how much they're wrong. And the best thing that you can do is not to perform this cross-tab surgery on every poll that violates. your belief about what should happen, but rather just average them. Average the polls, wait five weeks, get on with your life. This instinct to look for errors in every poll that you disagree with might make you feel clever, but it is not intelligence. It is much more like isegesis, reading into a text the meaning you hope to see rather than the meaning that's actually there.

Now, I know nobody likes to toss up election, not Republicans. not Democrats, and a steady-state toss-up election, which is what we have today, can be boring for news organizations because the news events don't dramatically swing the polls one way or another to create a David versus Goliath dynamic on the one hand and then a comeback storyline on the other. But a toss-up election is what we've got. A coin will be flipped collectively among 150 million people in a few weeks, and then we'll see what happens. At today's guest is Jamil Saki, a professor of psychology at Stanford University and the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab. He is the author of a new book, Hope for Cynics.

His book explores a tension or a paradox really in human affairs that I have been obsessed with for a long time and that we've covered on this show before, but never quite like this. On the one hand, social cooperation is the very basis of human civilization. and progress and our separation from apes. And yet cynicism, a baseline ofversion to social cooperation, an assumption that most human beings are greedy and selfish and dishonest, is also core to the human experience. We are constantly violating the very secret of our own success. And today, Professor Saki explains why.

I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Jamil Zaki, welcome with the show. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks, Derek. I want to start with a very basic question. What is cynicism? So cynicism, I want to separate two versions of it. The first is an ancient Greek school of philosophy headed by antistinies and diogenes. That's not what I talk about when I describe modern cynicism. Modern cynicism as psychologists think about it is a theory about people. It's a

that any of us might carry around, and it's the idea that in general people are selfish, greedy, and dishonest. Now, that's not to say that a cynic would be shocked if somebody donated to charity or helped a stranger, but they might suspect the person's motives, saying, I bet they're just out for a tax break, we're trying to look good in front of other people. So cynicism is not a theory about what people do, but rather who we are at the deepest level. How do you distinguish cynicism from two terms that I feel like might encroach on some of its real estate. Skepticism and negativity. Why is cynicism distinct from skepticism on the one hand and mere negativity on the other? Yeah, let's start with the negativity one, because I think this is probably the finer cut.

So cynics are quite negative, but not necessarily about the natural world or about the future or about the past, specifically cynicism is a hostile form of negativity about people and humanity. Now, it stands to reason that if you feel really negative about people, you might also feel that the future will not unfold very well, because of course, the future in many ways depends on what people decide to do with it. The cut between cynicism and skepticism is much deeper, and I think even more important. It turns out that skepticism is very different from cynicism, in part because cynics, again, have this assumption. A theory, as you know, Derek, if you're a scientist and you have a theory, it shapes the questions that you ask and the way that you look for evidence. It almost

can leave you thinking and acting like a lawyer. So a cynic might be considered a lawyer in the trial against humanity. They're on the prosecution, and so they are looking for evidence that people are awful and dismissing or explaining away evidence that people are pretty great. A skeptic doesn't think like a lawyer, but rather like a scientist. They don't assume that people are untrustworthy or that they're trustworthy, but rather look for evidence about each person and each situation. One thing I want to do right off the bat is make sure that I have a really concrete idea of who cynics are among us,

where they might be distributed in terms of age or occupation, like where they live, who they are. So let's start with age. When I think about cynicism as an archetype, interestingly, I think about old people and I think about young people, but in slightly different ways. So when I think about an old cynic,

I think of a grouchy, crotchety, get off my lawn, Clint Eastwood snarling type. But when I think about young cynics, I think about the research that the Danish political scientist Michael Bang Peterson has done in Pollyci on the need for chaos, which is his term,

the need for chaos among some voters on the far right and also in the far left. And these are people, often younger, often less educated, who feel like the world is so terrible that their political opinions are often to,

burn everything down rather than focus on incremental solutions. They might have good reasons to want to burn everything down. They might not have good reasons to burn everything down. But they have this, what Peterson calls, need for chaos. And I think of these as two different faces of maybe not pure cynicism, maybe not pure misanthropy, but something in that zone. And I wonder if you think in a strange way, the get-off-my-law-in attitudes of the old and the burn-it-all-down views of young radicals, how you see these as maybe being different faces of cynicism or connected in some way. It's a beautiful description. It's almost like a generational horseshoe theory for cynicism, right? That people from different generations for different reasons arrive at similar conclusions.

Certainly the Clint Eastwood yelling at a chair during a political convention comes to mind as the crotchety older cynic. The data are much less clear on age and especially older adults and cynicism. It turns out that, in fact, cynicism tends to be pretty stable across somebody's life if they don't intervene in some way. So if something terrible or great doesn't happen to you, you tend to stay at a relatively similar, level of cynicism, it's also true that contrary to many of our intuitions, older adults tend to be more positive in a lot of ways. They experience more positive emotions than younger adults. And if you look at happiness and at pro-social kind behavior, you see that both escalate over time. So I think that that stereotype is there for a reason, but there aren't great data

showing that older people necessarily are actually more cynical? The idea that cynicism is relatively stable across time is very interesting because it suggests either that there's a relatively strong genetic component or that there's a relatively strong sensitive period component, as if cynicism bakes itself into our personality at a relatively early age, the same way that music tastes seem to have a sensitive period, or taste for food tends to have a sensitive period. If you're someone like me, a Jewish kid growing up in Northern Virginia

and you don't have a tremendous amount of exposure to really, really spicy Indian and Mexican food, you may or may not, I will let people know, turn into a 38-year-old who can't really handle the spiciest Indian and Mexican food. It is nothing to do with the quality of the food. It has to do with my own sensitive period, or at least that's the story I tell myself. How early can cynicism,

be diagnosed in a person? It's a great question. It's tricky to diagnose cynicism likely as early as it arises because a lot of our diagnoses for it are questionnaires where a person needs to be able to cogently answer on their theory about the world, and I'm not sure that a two-year-old or one-year-old can be trusted to answer questions like that.

That said, there's some evidence that one of the precursors to cynicism is what we could call insertion. secure attachment, right? If you in your early life with your caregivers, parents or otherwise, come to feel as though you can't trust the people around you, that your social world is unstable and you can only count on yourself, that tends to track a sort of lack of trust that develops early on in the context of usually family and then extends. So kids who are insecurely attached at one year old tend to turn into adults who have a harder time trusting strangers and other adults in their lives and even elites like politicians.

So there's this sort of expanding circle of mistrust that can start with insecure attachment. And here, you're being open about your experience with spicy food. I just want to be open here and say that my own treatment and perspective on cynicism is not that of someone pointing a finger and saying, oh, those cynics, they've got all these problems. I myself suffer or deal with a lot of these experiences and have from an early age. So I want to just take a moment to express solidarity for those folks who might be listening and feel cynical. Among adults, what are the behaviors and thought patterns associated with what you call modern cynicism?

Like if someone is listening right now, they're thinking, okay, I generally get this idea, but I want to know if I'm a cynic. I want to know if my wife or husband is a cynic. I want to know if my best friend or boss is a cynic. Without from the top of your head reciting like a full Myers-Briggs test in order to determine whether this person is it, what are some examples of behaviors or thought patterns that people can use to identify whether they or the people they know and or love are, as you call them, cynics? Yeah, it's a great question.

And there are questionnaires that you can find online. The most famous is what's known as the Cook Medley, cynical hostility scale. It's a mouthful. It's a set of statements, and you're asked, do you believe this is true or not? Do you agree with this statement? So I can give you, Derek, just a couple of examples. Like, one would be people are honest chiefly through fear of getting caught. Another would be people generally don't like helping one another.

other. And you can again see that these items don't refer to whether people lie or not, but their motives, not whether they help other people or not, but whether they want to. And so I wonder, Derek, would you generally agree with those bleak statements or disagree with them? Well, my next question was going to be about toxic positivity, which I think is the psychological malady that I am much more likely to suffer from. So we'll get to possible toxic positivity in a second, but my immediate answer to question to keep your answer rolling is, no, I think that maybe even to a fault, I tend to be relatively trusting, despise the feeling of disliking people, and very slow to make what I would consider enemies in the world, and generally just want

everyone to like me. So I acknowledge that there are all sorts of problems associated with those instincts, but those are my stuck priors. So there's somewhat the opposite of what you seem to be describing in terms of cynicism. And, you know, in your description there, you actually are grabbing, you asked for things that people might say or do that would indicate cynicism, and you're actually grabbing a cluster of behaviors and experiences that tend to go along with answering, with the way that you answer the Cook Medley scale. So people who agree, unlike you, with statements like the ones that I just offered, they would be much less willing to to trust others.

I mean, trust is a social gamble where you make yourself vulnerable to somebody else on the expectation that they will show up for you. And if you are cynical and think people are generally selfish, that bet is for suckers, right? So you see in all sorts of different contexts, cynics not willing to trust other people. They also tend to like people less and care less as to whether other people like them. they're more willing to express disagreeable tendencies, for instance. And finally, a lot of times cynics actually act in ways that they fear other people will act because they figure they might as well strike first.

If they see social life as a war, then there's no point in just waiting to be attacked. So one example of this is in the workplace. Cynics believe that you can only succeed at work by dominating others. They think that others will try to defeat them, that their colleagues will try to step on or over them, and so they have to do it first. So, in essence, cynics have these beliefs, but they also are unwilling to trust and generally more willing to act in ways that are at least mildly harmful to other people on the expectation that that's what others would do to them if they had the chance. When I think about my positivity and my restless search for approval, I'm saying this smiling, and my need to like people and my deep preference that they like me to, when I think about these thought patterns, I'm sure that some of them are genetic and therefore I couldn't possibly begin to explain the polygenic dance going on inside of my cells that explains them.

But I think a lot about my mother and the environment in which I was raised, which was extremely positive, which was highly complimentary and was extremely warm. And I sometimes wonder whether I am essentially trying to recapitulate or reproduce that home environment wherever I go. And that that is why I am the way I am. And when it comes to cynicism, I wonder what you think are the cultures and environments that build cynics, that breed cynicism, because it can't be the case that this is some purely genetic thing, like eye and hair color, where people that just spit out into the world is either positive thinking people who believe that everyone's doing their best versus people that are negative toward the motivations of those around them.

what are the environments and cultures that you think build cynicism? And I would like you in this answer to both talk about the micro, which is to say parental environments, and if you know anything about the macro, I've been interested in that too. Are the Danish and the Swedes less cynical than Americans? Are there macro environments that build cynicism? Yeah, well, first of all,

it's a beautiful thing that one of the, your maybe covert missions in life is to recreate your home environment in other contexts, that speaks super well to the environment in which you were raised. You know, we talked about the micro level of environments that could lead people the other way towards mistrust and cynicism if you have a home environment early in life where you don't feel that other people are reliably there for you. And that's the sort of attachment style. The broader macro trends that predict and build cynicism,

And you're right, there are such trends. It's not a genetic, or at least predominantly genetic set of experiences, have to do with whether we feel in our environment that we are safe and that we are inherently in competition with other people or not. One of my favorite studies on this comes from Brazil. So in southeastern Brazil, there are these two fishing villages. They're very similar in socioeconomic status, religion, size, and so forth. but one of them sits on the ocean, and it turns out that ocean fishing requires large boats

and heavy equipment. It's really dangerous. You can't do it alone. You have to work together with other people. The other village is on a lake where fishermen strike out alone on small boats, and the only time that they really see each other is when they're competing for good fishing spots. And so economists went there and measured how trusting and how trustworthy fishermen at each of these villages were, not in the context of their work, but even in general, in their lives. And they found that when they started their careers, ocean and lake fishermen were no different from one another. So this again gets to the idea that it's not genetics, not how we're born. But over the course of their careers, being in a highly competitive environment made over

the course of years, again, lake fishermen become less trustworthy, so they were more likely to betray others and less trusting. They were almost baked, and maybe this is another critical period, into an environment where they had to compete. And so their instincts followed. Ocean fishermen, by contrast, became more trusting and more trustworthy over the course of their careers. And this is just one particularly dramatic example. But I think that's a lot of I think that there are other macro conditions that put people in a sense of zero-sum competition, one of which is deep inequality. You know, you asked about which nations tend to be more or less cynical or trusting.

And it turns out that one of the best predictors across countries of cynicism is inequality. So I would have thought intuitively that very collectivistic countries, like where my mother comes from in Peru, might be highly trusting because people are so concerned. connected with one another, it turns out that a lot of South American countries are among the least trusting in the world and also among the least equal economically in the world. Seeing cynicism through the lens of safety and competition is so interesting. And I don't want to submerge this conversation in politics just because it's coming out a few weeks before a very Ballyhooed national election. But I do think that some of the political implications

of your research on cynicism are worth pulling. out. And this might be one. So, you know, there's many societies that are known or assumed to be the most trusting, including Nordic societies. They have lower levels of inequality, but they also generally have lower levels of immigration. They have a ton of homogeneity. And some of these countries, including Sweden, have had this experience where as more immigrants come into these societies, far-right political parties become more successful through the demonization

of these outsiders. And it makes me think that people draw circles in their life. And someone who could be a cynic about the external world might hold very anti-synical ideas about their own community, right?

So someone could, for example, live in a predominantly homogenous area or be surrounded by their family and adore their family and adore their neighbors who are all just like them, but then at the same time, be deeply cynical about people that are very different from them.

And so this same person combines both deeply trusting feelings about their closest circle and deeply cynical feelings about the circle that exists outside of the nuclear family, the homogenous core. How do you think about this idea that it might be difficult to divide people into categories of cynics versus non-synics when many cynics might feel very non-synical opinions about the people closest to their life, right, about the people who are closest to their heart? How do you think about that sort of cross-cutting effect? This is such a powerful point you're raising.

And so let me try to pull on a couple of threads here. The first, And your intuition is exactly right here. People can be quite cynical about the world and about humanity while being quite trusting and hopeful when it comes to the people who they actually know and interact with. In fact, there are many cases, especially in more unequal or poorer countries, where if you ask people, can most of humanity be trusted? You get like 10% of people saying yes, or even less.

So huge mistrust of people in quotes. But then if you ask those same individuals, well, can you trust the people in your neighborhood, the people in your community, the folks you interact with, you'll get 60, 70, 75 percent of people saying yes to that question. The way I think about it is there's a neighborhood-sized hole cut out in human cynicism. And that to me is really beautiful because it suggests that oftentimes, cynicism comes from our assumptions about people who we've never met and have no contact with and are experiencing only through our screens. And when we actually have a chance to interact with real human beings, generally speaking, not always, but reliably our cynicism diminishes

and our willingness to trust and open up increases. And to your point about cosmopolitanism and homogeneity, it turns out that in many cases, Having a multicultural or cosmopolitan society can be hugely helpful to decreasing cynicism if people actually have a chance to interact in deep and cooperative ways with folks who are different from themselves. I think one issue these days is that oftentimes when we feel cynical about humanity as a whole, but especially about groups that we don't belong to, it's because we're not interacting with individuals from those groups as much. We have sorted in so many ways by socioeconomic class, by ideology, by race and ethnicity,

when we are sorted in our cities, in our states, in our countries, then the representations that we have of people who are different from us are filtered through media lenses that often try to build a sense of threat and competition, not a sense of solidarity or connection across those differences. You've arrived at exactly the point that I wanted to get. get to, which is this broader question of trust. And I'm going to put that in the fridge for five minutes because I just want to round out this part of the conversation by asking you, what's the opposite of cynicism? It can't be pure trust. It can't be pure positive thinking.

It certainly can't be a kind of naive assumption that everyone wants to help us. It must be something more sophisticated than that. What is it? What is the opposite of cynicism? I think it depends who you ask, right? So if you ask a cynic, what's the opposite of cynicism? They would say it's being a gullible rube, chump, who trusts anybody. And it's true that being a naive truster, assuming that everybody is great and that you can count on every stranger and you can loan your car to a person you've just met on the sidewalk, that in terms of valence, positive.

versus negative, that appears to be the opposite of a cynic. I actually think that's a very shallow take on it. I don't think we should be considering this only in terms of positivity and negativity. Because to me, if we go back to that lawyer analogy, right, if a cynic is a lawyer in the prosecution against humanity, I would say a naive truster, somebody who's toxicly positive, is also thinking like a lawyer for the defense. And yes, they're on opposite sides of the case, but both of those individuals are discarding half the evidence. Here's where we get back to skepticism.

I would say that being a skeptic, being more data-driven and scientific in our perceptions, is actually much different than either being a cynic or being toxicly positive, a naive truster. And so I prefer to think in terms of are you using data or are you using your assumptions? in your judgments of other people, and your expectations of other people. And there, I think the skeptic, not the naive truster, becomes the opposite of the cynic.

One of the most interesting parts of your book, and one of those interesting parts of your research on cynicism, is that it seems like in studies, if you ask people whether they think cynics are smart, they are much more likely to say, yes, cynics seem incredibly intelligent to me. But in other studies, you found that people who you've diagnosed with or described pulled under the field of cynicism don't actually seem nearly as smart as other people think they are. Can you help me understand this tension between the assumptions that our society has for cynical thought patterns and the truth about whether people with cynical thought patterns are actually smarter and more?

more successful. Yeah, this is such a fascinating part of the scientific literature, because it is so entrenched, isn't it? I mean, when you think about a cynic, you think, yeah, maybe they're grouchy, maybe they're contemptuous, but they're pretty smart, you know, they're sharp. And this goes back, I mean, there's all sorts of quotes about this. George Bernard Shaw once said, the power of accurate observation is called cynicism by those who haven't got it, right? that if you don't ascribe to cynicism, you must be naive in some way. And you're right. When given a description of a cynical and a non-synical person and asked who would do

better at these various tasks, 70% of people think that cynics would do better at cognitive tasks, that they're smarter. 85% of people believe that cynics would be socially smarter. For instance, better able to pick out people who are lying from those who are telling the truth. And I think this assumption is so prevalent that when we want to look smart, we often become more cynical. We perform cynicism in order to appear like we are wise. We feel almost as though it's embarrassing to be too positive, or it shows that you're some type of shill or that you're not thinking straight. But it turns out that again, and these are data from Olga

Stavarova, a great psychologist in this space, when you look at actual performance on cognitive tasks in panels of hundreds of thousands of people, cynics do worse on those tests than non-cynics. And in other research, they do worse at spotting liars as well. And here, again, one of my missions, I suppose, has become to defrock cynicism and to take away some of its cultural cachet. I really think that cynicism has the appearance of wisdom, in part because if you trust somebody and you screw up, that's highly visible to the people around you. If you get taken for a ride, if you get scammed, if you get duped, that's embarrassing. People can see it.

But if you're cynical and you mistrust somebody who you should have trusted, that failure is invisible to you and to the people around you. So we get this asymmetric information that makes cynics look smart, makes them look safe, makes them look wise. when, in fact, they're missing out, they're failing in all sorts of ways that we just can't see. They're making all sorts of cognitive errors when they unthinkingly mistrust people, but those are hidden under the surface. I find this absolutely fascinating,

and I see elements of it in my work all the time. I think it's so interesting to think about cynicism or even more broadly negativity as a kind of cheap Halloween store costume for skepticism or wisdom or predictive accuracy, We want to identify in other people, and in the media that we follow, we want to identify wisdom. We want to identify commentators that tell us what's going to happen, that are going to predict the future. That's what we want from a lot of media.

Not just certainly financial media, what stocks should I pick, but also sports media. Is my team going to win six games this year or 12? But it's very difficult in the moment to do that. It's actually impossible because we can't see the future. but we're negativity biased, which means, and tell me if you disagree with this analysis, because I'm just sort of riffing off of what you're saying, we remember positive predictions that fail. So someone says you're at Stanford.

Someone says the 49ers are going to win 12 games this year, and they only win four. Okay, you're going to remember the person who got that wrong. But there are financial commentators who every three months predict that we're about to enter a recession. And every three months, they go on CNBC and they say, it's all over for the U.S. economy. We're going to enter a recession. And then a recession isn't happen. The economy just grows. But you know what's very unmemorable is no change in GDP growth rates.

That's not memorable at all. There's no negativity to hook your memory onto. And so these people can keep going on television and keep predicting another economic calamity, even though nothing happens because not only does their negativity get attention, but also their imprecise negativity never creates a moment that is remembered by lots of people. And so I do think there is something very naughty about that's K-N-O-T-Y, not N-A-U-G-H-T-Y. But maybe it's also naughty. There is something both K-N-N-N-N-N-N-T-E about the fact that the combination

of our negativity bias and the perception of cynicism being wisdom seduces us into seeking out cynical media when cynical media isn't necessarily and might be the opposite of true wisdom. Yeah, I love this perspective. I mean, economists have predicted, what, 25 out of the last two recessions? Isn't that the saying? And likewise, I mean, I'm a huge Celtics fan. I'm from the Boston area. I did not feel like I could predict anything positive happening for the Celtics, even as they were careening towards the championship earlier this year, especially with my friends who were also Celtics fans. There's this sense that if you predict something good will happen and it doesn't happen,

it's kind of your fault. And obviously this is magical realism, but there is this sense that there's a great risk in our social circles of being positive. and wrong at the same time. It just, it seems silly, it almost seems harmful in a way that being negative and wrong does not seem harmful. And I think this gets back to this great idea of negativity bias that you're raising, which I think is an ancient instinct. Because generally, if you stay in your cave and don't venture out onto the savannah to try to get food, and you were wrong to do so, there was actually great hunting to be had, yeah, that was.

over the long term could really hurt you, you could starve. But if you go out into the Savannah when you shouldn't have, that's the end. You're, you know, a predator will come in and eat you and you're done. And I think that we have, well, I know that we, from the data, that we have this deep risk aversion. And so if you're playing into people's risk aversion, if your negative predictions are helping them feel safe, even if later it turns out they could have taken a chance in one, well, then you're not as bad as the person who induces somebody to take a risk that causes them to fail. I think that because of this, because of negativity bias, we are actually far too risk averse in many contexts.

I don't know about financially. I don't know about when it comes to sports, but certainly in the social world, I think that we are far too risk averse because we load, we rotate too heavily on worrying that we will put ourselves out there in a way that causes harm. and we don't rotate enough on the harm that we cause ourselves and others when we try to stay safe and shouldn't have when there was an opportunity out there that we forsook. If cynicism appears to be wise,

but in fact cynics are less successful, what are the ingredients of the opposite of cynicism that produce better outcomes? For example, it seems like what you're describing right now are the beginnings of a growth mindset. an idea that I should take lots of risks because at base, I might be afraid of failure, but I am built to be resilient. I'm built to survive disappointment, to get over small failures in my life,

and because of that, I should be trying much, I should be attempting to live a much bolder life than the one that might come naturally to my cynical nature. Put some meat on these bones. What is, what is, how would you describe the mindset that's more likely to succeed that casts that cast off these cynical assumptions that can be so tantalizing? I love this perspective and, and what I would call it is hopeful skepticism. So the first part again is this need to not rest on our assumptions. You know, I think a cynic doesn't have faith in people, but has a lot of faith in their own expectations.

To be a skeptic is a lot, it's much harder work, and it's constant work. It's the ability to question our assumptions and almost try to leave them at the door of different situations and be curious and humble about what a new person or a situation has to offer us, even if we already have built up assumptions or instincts,

working against that humility. The second piece, this hopeful part of hopeful skepticism, is, in essence, understanding that negativity bias is our default setting, that at rest, we are probably too negative in our assumptions. You're pointing out, Derek, beautifully, our assumptions about ourselves, that maybe we think that a failure or disappointment or betrayal will knock us off our feet for years, when in fact, we're pretty resilient to a lot of these situations. I'd like to add to that understanding that we're too negative, typically, in our expectations of other people.

And the data are quite clear that we are, right? That in general, people underestimate how trustworthy, generous, open-minded, and friendly others are. And so loading that into our skepticism, we can say, okay, wait a minute, I'm going to be open to evidence, but I'm also going to realize that in many cases, if I'm open to evidence, if I put myself out there, the risk reward calculation is actually probably better than I'm giving it credit for. The risk of somebody betraying me is, of course, real. And I'm not telling people to take reckless chances in their social lives. But in general,

the risk of betrayal is lower than we think it is. And the upside, the chance that putting yourself out there will lead to something you want, whether it's a collaboration or a friendship, or just a deepening of yourself through a meaningful conversation, the chance of those positive outcomes is probably way higher than we think it is. So hopeful skepticism is an openness to information, plus an attempt to rebalance our negativity bias. There's a lovely Kurt Vonnegut phrase that you quote in your book, we are what we pretend to be,

so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. I'm thinking about this a lot in my own life, because I do feel like from social life to romantic life to even religion, we are constantly living by pretending if certain things are true. And that's kind of how I put it, even though other people might call pretending to be. They might call it faith. They might call it belief. They might call it a theory of the world. But just as a Christian is pretending as if heaven and hell exists, an atheist is pretending as if heaven and hell don't exist. Now that these people have any certainty about this,

and yet they're living their life, pretending as if this is so. You can also work this framework into social lives. I think that Nick Epley, a University of Chicago psychologist, has this lovely paper called Mistakenly Seeking Solitude, where he asks people if they would like to talk to people on their train ride, on the L in Chicago. And most of them say, no, I would absolutely hate that.

And then he pays a separate group to force them to talk to people in the train, and they realized that they had a wonderful experience talking to these strangers on a train when forced to do so. And one conclusion you can make from that paper is that a lot of people live by almost pretending as if they were introverts.

They don't truly know if they have the introvert gene because no such thing exists, but they live their life pretending as if they were introverts. but we could just as easily live our life pretending as if we were extroverts. And you think about, you know, whether it's religion or personal identity, this pretending as if we were framework, I think, can be a really powerful one. To apply it to cynicism at last, because that was quite a long preamble, cynicism is also a pretense. We are pretending as if other people are incredibly selfish and manipulative and not to be trusted.

what is a better thing to pretend? How would you very concretely encourage people to deal with each other under a framework that is more adaptive and more likely to end with them succeeding? This is a really powerful way of framing these questions. And oftentimes I think of cynicism as interacting with almost quasi-spiritual perspectives on the world. It is a faith. Yeah, it's a faith. We have no idea who other people are.

So any manner of choosing to deal with them is a kind of disorganized religion. It requires the exact same leap of faith that it would take for an atheist to say, I know hell doesn't exist, or for a Christian to say, I know heaven does exist, or for a Jew to say, I know Moses part of the waters. It is interesting to think that these are all elements of faith. And so I'm wondering what kind of interpersonal faith you think is most likely to succeed. Yeah, I think that in general, we all have to answer for ourselves what we believe humanity to be. And the cynic answers pretty crappy, that in general our worst capacities, our worst behaviors are the best evidence about who we are. And that, as we've been describing, shrinks our lives in so many ways, right?

You can never answer this question for certain, but the faith that you put in to the answer that people are bad, will lead you to trust less, will lead you to be more isolated, will lead you to be less healthy and less successful. So what is the better approach? Well, I think that, you know, I'm not, I'm not encouraging people to just blithely say that everybody is terrific. But I do think that it's worth understanding that the average person underestimates the average person, that in many cases people are at least better than our minds are telling us they are. And then, you know, to your point, I think this can also shape the way that we live and the choices that we make. Another thing that I would add to this, though, is I think it's important to realize not just

that people are in general better than we think, but that we matter in shaping who they are to us, right? That we own our... power and our responsibility for creating our own version of the social world. I'll give you an example. Cynical bosses in many cases will micromanage their employees on the assumption that if they don't do that, their employees will selfishly try to shirk and do anything to get away with working less. It turns out that when people feel as though their boss is monitoring them and is cynically thinking about them, they're much less likely to work hard at that job. In essence, a boss by showing mistrust in their employees makes it more likely that those

people become untrustworthy. It's a sort of toxic self-fulfilling prophecy. I think a better mindset to face the social world through is to understand that people aren't just out there being good or bad, trustworthy or untrustworthy. The way that we treat the them will affect the way that they treat us, and even if we have power over them, if we're their parents or if we're their bosses, might shape who they are over the course of the long term. And so I would add to maybe slightly more positive expectation, also a sense of responsibility. One of the reasons why I've been talking to folks like Nick Epley and thinking about his paper mistakenly seeking solitude is that something I'm thinking about a lot right now and

writing about a bit right now is what I see as a period of unusual American introversion. Lots of evidence from both the federal government and individual surveys coming out of major universities showing that Americans are spending more time alone than any period we have records for, that they're spending more time at home than almost any period we have modern records for. And it does seem like there's been around COVID, but certainly I think preexisting it as well, a kind of withdrawal from the physical world into our own worlds and often our own digital worlds on our phones and on our screens. I wonder if you see this great introversion or this great withdrawal having anything to do with the rise of cynicism in America, because it seems

It seems to me like one thing that being alone more does is it takes that circle. Remember I was talking about the concentric circles, how someone might have one circle of trust, then outside that circle of trust is a circle of distrust. It seems possible to me that spending more time alone, having fewer friends, spending less time and face-to-face socializing, it shrinks the circle of trust. It almost has to. You are quantitatively spending less time around the most important people in your life. or certainly around the village that exists

around the most important people in your life. And I wonder if you've thoughts about an interaction effect between, on the one hand, this increase in alone time and on the other hand, this sort of fattish blooming of cynicism as a style in our politics and in our social life. I do see a connection here. And this idea from Nick Epley and others of under-sociality or mistakenly seeking solitude,

is often thought of, and I think the way that you put it just now is great, as a sort of withdrawal, a kind of a building introversion and maybe a misplaced introversion. I think introversion often is construed as my sense of social energy. How much social energy do I have? And maybe people are thinking of themselves, believing that they have less social energy than they did before. But there's another possibility, too, Derek, right?

which is that I withdraw from social life, not because of what I think about myself, but because of what I think about other people. And there's evidence from Nick and others that oftentimes when we withdraw, it's because we don't think other people are that friendly. We don't think that they want to help us so we don't ask for favors. We don't think that they want to know about us, so we stick to small talk instead of large talk. We don't think that they want to hear from us. There's this very sad study, but very telling study, by Laura Aitkenen and her colleagues. They asked people to name a friend who they used to be close with but had lost touch with. And they said, well, how much do you want to hear from that person and how much do you think

they want to hear from you? And across the board, people desperately wanted to hear from their old pal. They missed their old pal. But they were sure that if they were to ring that person, to call them, that they would be a burden on them, that the other person didn't want to connect with them. So it's not an assumption about my own introversion, in that case at least. It's rather an assumption about somebody else's disinterest, their lack of warmth, really, that's driving people to stay away from social contact. And the saddest part about this to me is that we are living, and again, we're experiencing

this great withdrawal that is contributing to also a great rising tide of sadness, depression, and anxiety. People are alone. We don't want to be alone, but we think that everybody else is totally fine with being alone. So we stay that way. We miss each other, even though we really miss each other because we don't understand how much others want what we want. So I do think there's a hazy cynicism that's playing into this great withdrawal, this rise in loneliness, and this sort of trend towards disconnection that I think is hurting a lot of us, especially younger people.

It's so interesting because if you ask people about their own lives, their own friends, their own neighbors, their own family, seems like they'll typically say, these are good people, these are my people and I trust them. Cynicism seems to me to be more prevalent in the abstract if you ask people, is our humans more trustworthy,

Are Americans more trustworthy? Are immigrants more trustworthy? Are people in a neighboring country more trustworthy? The more abstracted the population becomes, it seems, the more likely subjects of studies are to say, no, I don't trust them. My attitude toward them is not one of intimacy and trust. It's one of cynicism and distrust. And the reason I find that very interesting is that it feels to me like other people are becoming more abstract to us, if that makes sense. Almost by definition, if you spend more time alone, the minds of and bodies of and needs of and lives of other people become a kind of mediated distraction. Other people are things that you see on your phone while at home.

They're not people that you experience in the flesh and blood complexity of everyday life. And so I don't want to end on the darkest notes. Maybe I'll think of a question after this, but it does seem to me like there would be a natural relationship between digital technology use that turns other people into abstractions, or really any media that turns other people into abstractions, and the possibility to feel cynically about them. Does that track for you? It tracks enormously. There's this phenomenon in communication theory called Mean World Syndrome. The idea is that the more that you watch, especially cable news, the more time that you're on social media, the more wrong you are about other people and the worse you think things are.

And again, you could say, well, people think it's worse because they're more informed. But for instance, people who watch tons of TV news believe that violent crime is on the rise in the U.S. even when it's clearly declining. And likewise, people who spend lots of time on social media vastly overestimate the percentage of people who post toxic comments and who have toxic things to say. You know, you have written beautifully about this effect you call everything sucks but I'm fine,

where we imagine in the abstract that economically where the nation is collapsing and everybody's doing terribly, but in our own lives, things are going quite well. I would say that here we're moving towards an everyone sucks, but these people are fine, effect, right? Where when we have mediated and abstracted representations of others, especially given the idea that oftentimes the media companies that are giving us those abstractions are systematically biased towards the negative themselves, right? When you have basically a media ecosystem feeding you negative abstracted information, you are going to, you are going to. to arrive at a negative and abstract conclusion. This is not rocket science, right? It's pretty clear that the information that we're getting is what we are then producing when asked to pontificate

about people in general. But, and I think that's, that's again, really tragic because we're withdrawing based not on real people, but based on a representation of people that lives in our minds and is demonstrably false as well. But to me, the excellent news under that that terrible news is that all we have to do if we want to cultivate a less cynical, healthier, more productive, but let me underline this, more accurate view about people, is to just spend more time with them, to try to get past our risk aversion, even just a little bit, and step into the social environment more often. If you are like most people, when you do that, pleasant surprises are everywhere.

It seems like a beautiful place to end, even though I asked a question that was somewhat, I won't say negative or cynical. Hopefully it was accurately dark. Jamil, I really appreciate talking to you. That was really fun. Thank you. This was delightful. Thanks, Derek. Thank you for listening.

Today's episode was produced by Devin Baraldi. Our summer schedule for plain English for the next few weeks will be one episode a week on Fridays. We'll see you next week.