Something You Should Know - SYSK TRENDING -The Truth About Cynicism

Episode Date: April 28, 2026

Being a little skeptical can feel smart. After all, cynics pride themselves on “seeing things as they really are”—not getting fooled, not trusting too easily. But is that actually true? Or does cynicism quietly distort the way you see other people and the world? Research suggests that cynicism may come with a significant cost. People who assume the worst in others often miss opportunities for connection, collaboration, and even personal success. In fact, believing that others are selfish or untrustworthy can become a self-fulfilling cycle—one that shapes how you behave and how others respond to you. Dr. Jamil Zaki, professor of psychology at Stanford University and director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab, studies empathy, trust, and human connection. In his book Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness (https://amzn.to/3XeRfpL), he explores what science actually says about human nature—and why many of us are far more trustworthy and cooperative than cynics assume. In our conversation, he explains why cynicism feels protective, why it spreads so easily, and what you can do to challenge it without becoming naïve. If you—or someone you know—tends to expect the worst, this perspective may change the way you think about people and your place among them. PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS POCKET HOSE: For a limited time, when you purchase a new Pocket Hose Ballistic, you'll get a FREE 360 degree rotating pocket pivot and a FREE thumb drive nozzle! Just text SYSK to 64000 RULA: Thousands of people are already using Rula to get affordable, high-quality therapy that’s actually covered by insurance. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Rula.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to get started. QUINCE: Refresh your wardrobe with Quince! Go to ⁠https://Quince.com/sysk⁠ for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada, too! SHOPIFY: See less carts go abandoned with Shopify and their Shop Pay button! Sign up for your $1 per month trail and start selling today at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Shopify.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ PLANET VISIONARIES : We love the Planet Visionaries podcast! In partnership with The Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. Listen or watch on Apple, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you are listening to this podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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listen to podcasts. With so much negativity in the news today, it's no wonder we sometimes become cynical. Some of us are cynical on occasion and others are naturally cynical. Cynicism can feel like a kind of wisdom, a shield against disappointment, a way to avoid being fooled. But what if that instinct to distrust others is actually holding you back more than it's protecting you? That's why today's SYSK trending topic is the truth. about cynicism. Today, in my conversation with psychologist Jamil Zaki, who has spent years studying empathy, trust, and human connection, we're exploring the truth about cynicism, where it comes from, how it shapes the way you see the world, why it might be less accurate

than you think, and how it can cut ourselves off from meaningful connections. It's a fascinating discussion, and we'll get to it right after this. Are you a cynic? Do you think people are trustworthy, or people are not to be trusted? Are people selfish or generous, cruel, or kind? Are people mostly just out for themselves and screw everyone else? It certainly appears that more people think this way now than ever before, and all this cynicism is a problem.

In fact, it's a disease. according to my guest, Dr. Jamil Zaki. He is a professor of psychology at Stanford University and director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab. He's author of a book called Hope for Cynics, The Surprising Science of Human Goodness. Hi, Jamil, welcome to something you should know. Oh, thanks for having me.

So, what, first of all, what is the data say about all this cynicism and lack of trust in society today? Is it true? What's the science say? Well, I think the data are pretty clear that humanity has lost faith in itself. In 1972, about half of Americans believed that most people can be trusted. By 2018, that had fallen to a third of Americans, a drop as big as the stock market took during the financial collapse of 2008. We don't have to feel this way.

There is a lot of good under the surface if you look more carefully. So why do you think this big loss in trust? Where is that coming from? You know, it's hard to know because history is not an experiment, right? You can't run it back a thousand times and tinker with different factors to see what caused the drop in trust. That said, there are some factors that seem to correlate that are really interesting. One is inequality. generally when a place like a town or country is really economically unequal, people trust each other less.

And also over time, in the U.S., when we've had times of greater equality, people have generally felt more connected. A second factor is the media. Not you, of course, Mike. You are an exception. But in much of the media, we are bombarded with really negative, toxic and extreme representations. of who's out there. And it's really easy to decide if you're tuned in, if you're watching a lot of news on cable or doom scrolling on your phone for hours, that actually people are pretty rotten. Those data, though, are biased. And so it turns out that watching a bunch of news or staying

online a lot doesn't actually make you more accurate about what people are really like. It might lead to not just cynicism, but unnecessary cynicism. So this lack of trust that you spoke about a moment ago, is that what leads to cynicism? Is that the definition of a cynic is someone who doesn't trust? I think it's close. I see cynicism as a theory about human nature. It's the idea that in general people are selfish, greedy, and dishonest. And one way that that comes out, as you're rightly pointing out, is a lack of trust.

If you think that people generally are up to no good, that they're out only for themselves, then trusting somebody, putting your faith in them, taking a risk on them is a sucker's bet. So indeed, cynics trust less than non- cynics. But there are other ways that cynicism also comes out. One is just a kind of negative, bleak attitude towards most people, a general sense of, let's call it, ambient contempt. So mistrust is part of it, but I wouldn't say, say it's entirely the whole story. Do we have a sense of how many people self-describe as cynics? Yeah, if you ask, so there are questionnaires that capture people's cynicism,

and in general, people score a little bit away from the cynicism side of the scale. So most people are not super cynical, but again, the trends are what I'm most interested in. So the proportion of people who would describe themselves as cynics has risen steadily over over the last few decades. And if that trend continues, then soon our entire culture might flip over from generally trusting to generally cynical. I would be curious to know, if you know,

what cynics have in common besides cynicism? In other words, are they older, younger, men, women, they live in cities or they live in rural areas? What else do cynics share besides their cynicism? I love this question, Mike. So there are some data on demographic correlates is what we would call it of cynicism. And it turns out to be less obvious than you might think. But I think the data makes sense.

So it's not the case that rural versus urban people, for instance, are systematically more or less cynical than one another. But it is the case that people who have gone through a lot of adversity tend to become cynical through those struggles. So, for instance, people who have lower economic opportunities tend to mistrust more. People who have been traumatized tend to trust less. People who have had difficult family upbringings where they don't feel like they can count on people in their immediate environment. They tend to be more cynical, too. So I think oftentimes I see, you know, you talk to a cynic and they often have a kind of sneering, almost sense of superiority, like they're wise. or smarter than other people, I actually think if you dig down, oftentimes they're responding to pain and betrayal.

The comedian George Carlin once said, scratch a cynic, and you'll find a disappointed idealist. And I think that there's a lot to that. So it sounds like you're saying that cynicism is a position or a belief that you come to as a result of your experience. I think so. So there is a genetic component to it, but it's a very small minority. So your genes explain very little of how cynical you are, which leaves your experience. And some experiences are personal. Others are collective. So for instance, when people are put in really competitive environments, think about a company, for instance, where you are pitted against your colleagues and only some of you can rise to the top and you're in a zero-sum. environment, those circumstances can make us more cynical, whereas being in a cooperative environment where people work together and are rewarded together can decrease our cynicism and make us mentally healthier. Well, but see, but what you just said implies that cynicism is mentally unhealthier, but a lot of

people wear cynicism as a kind of a badge of honor, that they're proud of being cynics because they're more realistic. They understand the world better. They know what's going on. They're proud to be cynics. I hear this all the time. People tell me, I'm not a cynic. I'm a realist.

But there is a lot of evidence to the contrary. For instance, cynics, it turns out, score less well on cognitive tests than non- cynics. And they have a harder time spotting liars than non- cynics. In fact, you can think about cynicism. as apparent wisdom that actually, if you look more closely, is just a bunch of assumptions. You know, you think of the opposite of a cynic as a naive, gullible person who blindly trusts people, but cynics blindly mistrust people. And because of that, they actually stop paying attention to evidence about who they can trust and who they can't.

And it turns out that a lot of cynical assumptions about people are really clearly wrong. when you look again at the data. So I would say to a cynic who argues that they're a realist, that they should take a closer look at the people around them. Here's a question to maybe better understand what a cynic is. It's to ask you what a cynic isn't. If you're not a cynic, if you're the opposite of a cynic, what are you? Yeah, I think that's a great question. And again, I think if you ask a cynic, what is the opposite of cynicism, they would tell you it's someone who's naive and unthinking. But actually, as I've been mentioning, I think cynics and naive people have a lot in common in that each one of

them has a conclusion already and they just look for evidence that supports their conclusion. Really trusting people will put faith in others even if they've been betrayed. They're missing the evidence of who they can't trust. Cynical people decide that nobody can be trusted, and also don't look at the evidence. In my opinion, the opposite of both of these folks is somebody who is skeptical. So skepticism, unlike cynicism, is not a theory about people. It's not a blanket assumption.

Skeptics think like scientists. They focus on evidence and update their impressions, update their perspective based on what they learn. So to me, that type of skepticism is much healthier and allows us not just to feel good, but to understand each other better. But in order to do that, in order to examine the evidence takes time. And a lot of us size people up instantly.

And some people size people up as to whether they're trustworthy, what kind of person they are. It's more of a gut instinct. And are we predisposed to just assume about people? Or are we using some sort of filter or what? I think that we trust our gut instincts way too much. lot of the time. I mean, our gut instincts also tell us that we should trust people who look like us or who have a similar background from us and not people who are different. Those types of biases we know exist in our mind and we don't celebrate them. We don't go with them unthinkingly. For people

with depression and anxiety, their gut instinct tells them that they're terrible or that everybody around them is judging them. Cognitive therapy is about helping people not trust those instincts. And it turns out that for the rest of us, we have something called negativity bias. People pay lots more attention to evidence about threats and possible harms than they do to the good stuff in life. This is really clear across dozens of studies. So when our gut instinct drives us to think, huh, I think that I just shouldn't trust people, or I think that people in general are selfish, that might not be a trustworthy instinct.

It might be more like a bias. So one thing that I encourage people to do is to be skeptical about your cynicism. I'm not saying that you should trust or send your bank information to the prince who's going to wire you $14 million. But it's good to be open to evidence as opposed to drawing sweeping conclusions before you've even had a chance to learn about people. We're discussing cynicism and the problems it can cause with Dr. Jamil Zaki. He's a professor at Stanford and author of the book, Hope for Cynics, the surprising science of human goodness. So, Jamil, I'm anxious to hear about the science of human goodness,

which is the subtitle of your book. What is the science tell us and what, in fact, is human goodness? I think of human goodness as expressed through the actions that people take in their everyday lives to help each other. You know, we are a social species and we are a deeply pro-social species. We show up for each other in a way that no other animal on the planet does. And I think that one of the tragedies of cynicism is that it cuts us off from seeing that everyday beauty of human positive actions. And letting go of cynicism gives us a chance to witness it more clearly.

The data, again, are really clear that if you ask people to estimate how, trustworthy or kind or compassionate or open-minded others are, we miss the mark. We think that people have much less of all of these positive qualities than they really do. And that makes us miss out on the ability to connect with people, to collaborate, to form relationships. The good news is that when we look more closely, when we replace cynicism with skepticism, pleasant surprises are everywhere. Again, I'm not saying that everyone is terrific. I'm not saying that there aren't people who are terrible and do awful things. What I am saying and what the data are clear on is that the average person underestimates the average person. And that leads to all sorts of missed connections,

but we can choose to think a different way and connect more effectively. And is it simply a matter of changing your thinking of saying, you know, now I'm going to be more open, even though I haven't been? No, I think that that's a first step. I really, in my own life, because I struggle with cynicism myself, I try to fact-check my cynical feelings. If I find myself mistrusting somebody who I've just met, right, that gut instinct rising up inside me saying, what is this guy and who is this guy and what does he want?

I try to say, well, come on, Zaki, what evidence do you have for that cynical claim? And often the answer is nothing. I don't know. So I think rethinking is the first step. But I also try to do what I call taking leaps of faith on other people. That is taking small, calculated risks, giving people a chance to show me who they are. And it turns out that that actually doesn't just allow you to learn more about people. It exerts a positive effect on them. Economists talk about what they call earned trust. That's the idea that when you trust people, they are more likely to step up and want to become trustworthy. So cynicism creates all these

poisonous, self-fulfilling prophecies. You decide that people are terrible, you treat them terribly, and you bring out the worst in them. But skepticism and what I call hopeful skepticism, which is also understanding that our default setting might be too negative, that type of perspective allows us to take a chance on people and bring out their best, turning a negative self-fulfilling prophecy into a positive one. How good are we, though, when we decide we're going to give someone a chance, we're not going to prejudge them, we're going to let, we're going to allow them to be who they are, and let's see, how good are we at judging, oh, he's not as bad as I thought he was?

So there's a bunch of studies that explore this, where people are asked to predict, what would it be like if you struck up a conversation with a stranger or confided in an acquaintance about something that you're struggling with? You know, these little acts of vulnerability and openness. And first, you ask one group of people to predict, how would that go? And they say, oh, my gosh, this would be awful. It would be awkward and cringe and everybody would hate the experience. You then ask a separate group of people, hey, go and try it and then report back. And people are shocked at how positive these interactions are. Even conversations with people they disagree with are much more positive than they think. And the evidence suggests that if we pay close attention, if we

savor the difference between our bleak expectations and the often very good reality, we actually do learn. We start to become more habitually open to other people, which is a great way, again, to become healthier and more connected. So we've been talking about cynicism in terms of how it relates to our views of other people. But there seems to be a lot of cynicism about government, right? You can't trust the government, that people don't like the government. And also about conspiracy theories, that if you're a cynic, you don't trust the official story, you believe the conspiracy theory story. Is there something there that's part of this?

There's a strong correlation between people's cynicism and their susceptibility to conspiracy theories. And again, I'm not at all saying that we should all unthinkingly trust the government. That sounds like lunacy. But when we decide that nobody can be trusted, that anything that we hear on the news is automatically fake, that actually opens us up to being controlled in other ways. And there are lots of people, including elites like politicians, who benefit a lot from a population that doesn't trust itself and doesn't trust anybody. In fact, this is an old part of the authoritarian playbook, is to make sure that people suspect one another and can't ban together and discover common cause. So, again, I think that mistrust of government understandable.

But total mistrust of everything that we hear actually can be a tool of the status quo. Because if you believe that nobody can be trusted, there's no point in trying to fight for any type of positive social change. So is there any research that you're aware of that you can talk about of recovered cynics? Like how does that go? Are they happy they aren't anymore or what happens to them? Oh yeah. I mean, cynicism tracks all sorts of negative outcomes in our lives from worse mental health, worse physical health, earlier death, lower salaries. I mean, you name it. If it was a pill, it would be a poison. And people who recover from cynicism, likewise, tend to recover their ability to

connect and then have all the benefits that come with it. You know, when I started work on this book and I was thinking about the trust deficit, one of the challenges that I laid out from myself was to ask, is there any place in the world where the trend went in the opposite direction, where an entire culture went from being untrusting to being more trusting? And I discovered that that has happened,

and it happened right here. We have been losing faith in one another for 50 years. But in fact, the first half of the 20th century in the U.S. was this incredible rise in solidarity and trust. From the 1890s, which was a very cynical decade, to the 1950s, which, although far from perfect, was a much more trusting time than before or since. So we have done it through social programs, through social movements, and through, well, at that time, something known as the Christian social gospel, the U.S. became a much more

community-oriented place and people grew faith in one another. And if we did that before, I believe we can do it again. You've clearly researched this topic in depth. I'm wondering, is there anything that you think that we haven't spoken about yet that people need to understand that maybe they don't and that surprises you? You know, one angle that we haven't talked about, Mike, is the effective cynicism on parenting. I think that a lot of, so there's some really interesting data that came out recently, where parents were asked, what should your child believe about the world if they are to succeed? And most parents thought that their kids should think the world is a dangerous place, that thinking the world is dangerous would be helpful to their lives.

It turns out that the exact opposite is true. People who think that the world is dangerous tend to be less happy. They tend to do less well in their careers. But I think that in some cases, in the spirit of keeping our children safe, a beautiful and critical impulse, we actually end up making them less trusting and shrinking their opportunities. This is the kind of discussion that makes you think, makes you think about your own cynicism and where you fall on the scale of just how cynical you are and what that might be doing to you and to your relationships and your opportunities. It certainly gives you something to think about.

I've been speaking with Dr. Jamil Zaki. He is a professor of psychology at Stanford and director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab. The name of his book is Hope for Cynics, the surprising science of human goodness. And there's a link to his book in the show notes. Jamil, always a pleasure to have you on. It's always a thought-provoking conversation.

Thanks for being here. And thank you for listening to this SYSK trending episode about cynicism. I'm Mike Carruthers, and this is something you should know.