The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - How to Find Hope in a Cynical World

Episode Date: September 9, 2024

It’s hard to stay hopeful these days. Stanford professor Jamil Zaki has been studying the incredible depth of human kindness for decades, but even he gives in to cynicism when he doubts our ability to be civil and cooperative.  That’s a shame - because shedding cynicism and grasping hope will make you happier and healthier. Jamil and Dr Laurie Santos look at the scientific evidence showing that we should be more trusting of other people and optimistic about our facility to work together.  Jamil's book Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness is out now.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. As a happiness professor, many people assume that I'm a beacon of optimism, that I always look on the bright side of life, to quote the Monty Python song. But some days I feel pretty down about things. Some days it feels easier to look on the bleak side of life, to quote the Monty Python song. But some days I feel pretty down about things. Some days it feels easier to look on the bleak side of life. Childish nicknames, the crazy conspiracy theories, this weird obsession with crowd size. Please stick to policy. Don't get personal. They're getting personal all night long, these people. Limited, narrow view of the world made him feel threatened by the

pathetic, low-life scumbags who happen to be Black. I'm a terrorist. A terrorist? I mean, politics and all the polarization right now? Pretty bleak. Climate? Ridiculously bleak. Racism?

Poverty? War? Bleak, bleak, super bleak. Climate, ridiculously bleak. Racism, poverty, war, bleak, bleak, super bleak. But thinking about all these problems doesn't just make me feel helpless. It also gets me super frustrated with the other members of my species. Sometimes I just want to be like, fellow humans, come on. Am I the only one who sees all these problems? Am I the only one who wants everybody to stop yelling at each other on Twitter long enough to actually start fixing things? Even just saying it out loud

makes me feel isolated and yucky and just bleh. I'm guessing that you may have felt something similar on your worst days. Like me, maybe you've wondered if there's any way to fight all the division and disillusionment and despair that seems to have taken over

our public conversation. Well, you're in luck, because over the next few shows, we'll see that the science gives us lots of reasons to be optimistic about stuff that scares us, from politics to human nature to our capacity to change society. We'll even learn how to transform our despair into positive action. So buckle up, Happiness Lab listener, because we're on a journey to find hope. Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy. But what if our minds are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us, leading us away from what will really make us happy? The good news is that understanding the science of the mind can point us all back

in the right direction. You're listening to The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos. I say this is The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos, but since this is a whole season about finding hope, which I sometimes struggle with, I decided to ask someone to help us on our journey. Hey, Jamil, how's it going? I'm good. How are you feeling? Better. I'm still sounding a little froggy, which hopefully won't come off too much in the interview. Stanford psychologist Jamil Zaki is the go-to guy if you want to learn why the world is kinder than the bleak vision we often bring to mind. Over the next four episodes, we'll be exploring some of the ideas he sets out in his new book, Hope for Cynics, The Surprising Science of Human Goodness. Hope for Cynics, The Surprising Science of Human Goodness. Hope for Cynics is literally life-changing.

You should buy it and read it. But the cliff note summary is that we needn't surrender to the cynical view that humans are mean, selfish, and hostile because a bunch of research shows that these notions are just plain mistaken. Now, Jamil's been steeped in the science for a very long time, so you might assume that he'd be the most hopeful man alive. For the last 20 years, I've studied and written and spoken about human kindness and empathy, and I've sort of become an unofficial ambassador for humanity's better angels. People often bring

me in to tell them about how great everybody is. And I love that work and I believe it in my mind. But that doesn't mean that it makes its way into the rest of me. And it's my job to think about and talk about how great everyone is. But oftentimes I feel the exact opposite. Any specific examples that have come up lately, like of just the opposite of the milk of hum kindness as you look at the world? I feel cynical and hopeless about I'd say six times a day thinking about current events. All I have to do to feel terrible about myself or humanity is just look at any of the screens in my life. My laptop, my TV, my phone, even my watch does the trick on occasion. And you're not alone but this is something that I can kind of reflect on a lot. As you know, I've been kind of sick lately. I've like had a cold and somehow like my main form of activity

has just been like peeking at my phone or like I'll just go on Reddit or I'll just see like what's, you know, on my favorite news channel. And it just makes me hate the world and hate other people. It just makes me feel really terrible. But it feels shocking that you could go through the same thing. You're supposed to know better. I am supposed to know better. But so many of us who are psychologists or behavioral scientists, we live with this. We study part of the world. We try to understand it. But again, just understanding something isn't the same as feeling it. And I guess for me, over the last few years, I became really curious about this cynicism I was experiencing, you know, feeling like the world was getting worse, like people were

terrible. And I thought, Laurie, about you and about the themes of the happiness lab and this idea that sometimes our minds play tricks on us. And I thought, well, maybe my mind is playing tricks on me as well. I decided to figure out whether my cynicism was warranted or whether it might be wrong, whether it might be a story that I was telling myself and what that might be doing to me and to the rest of us who might be feeling cynical. I guess I learned a lot in the process over the last few years that led me to write this book.

Jamil decided to call the book Hope for Cynics. I do sometimes feel scared about society and worry that there are people out there who don't exactly have my best interests at heart. But does that make me a cynic? It feels like a strong word. In his book, Jamil argues that cynicism is a disease of social health. A disease? Wasn't I just basing my ideas on realism? So cynicism is the theory that in general, humanity is greedy, selfish, and dishonest. And like any other theory, this guides what we do and what we don't do.

So cynics, for instance, if they see somebody act kindly, they'll suspect that maybe they're not genuine. Maybe they're doing that for some ulterior motive. They also act differently. So this is especially true when it comes to trust. Trust is our willingness to be vulnerable to somebody else on the expectation that they'll do right by us. You are putting your well-being in their hands, loaning somebody money or let somebody babysit your kids. It's a gamble,

a social gamble, and cynics think it's for suckers. So they're much less likely to trust strangers, but even their own friends, families, and romantic partners. So cynicism is a theory, but it doesn't stay in our minds. It leaks into the way that we live and the way that we treat other people. I know when I first started thinking about cynicism, I often thought it was really synonymous with skepticism, but you've argued that these are actually really different. So what's the difference between cynicism and skepticism? Yeah, this is really important because I think your sense that these two are the same is really common. A lot of people, I think,

view these terms as interchangeable, but they are not at all. As I've said, cynicism is a theory that people aren't that great. Skepticism isn't a theory about the world or about people. It's a mindset, an openness to new ideas, and a kind of restlessness, an unwillingness to just sit with our assumptions. I often think that cynics are a little bit like lawyers in the prosecution against humanity. They're really keen on whatever evidence supports their theory, whatever clues they can find that people are actually terrible. And they're really dismissive of any evidence to the contrary, that people might be actually pretty great in some circumstances. to the contrary, that people might be actually pretty great in some circumstances. Skeptics think less like lawyers and more like scientists. They test their assumptions. They look for data.

And because of that, skepticism is a much more agile way of viewing the world and a much better way to learn about people and situations. And so in some ways, they're almost more like opposites, the way you describe it, right? The skeptics are really kind of questioning their assumptions, whereas the cynics are really set in their theories that like, no, people are terrible. Actually, I think that's right. And in fact, if cynics have a lot in common with anybody, it's with the naive rubes that they love to make fun of. You know, cynics think that if you are not like them, you must just naively believe that everybody's great, even if they betray you. And that's true. Some people do have rose colored glasses on.

Some people do see only the best in others, even to their own detriment. Those people, I would say, are also thinking like lawyers, lawyers in the defense for humanity's trial. So I think that cynics and naive trusters are really both thinking and looking at only one side of the evidence. And again, skeptics are really different than both of them because they don't trust their assumptions. They look for evidence. It feels like these days that a lot of us have joined the side of the prosecution. Like it seems like a lot of us are feeling pretty cynical about humanity. Are there actually data about that? Do we know if cynicism is getting worse?

There are. And cynicism has been skyrocketing over time. The best proxy that we have for it is how much people agree with the statement, most people can be trusted. This is a question that scientists have been asking Americans and people around the world for many, many years. And the best data we have are from the U.S. and those data are pretty bleak. So in 1972, about 50% of Americans believed that most people can be trusted.

By 2018, that had fallen to about a third of Americans. The size of that drop is comparable to the amount of money that the stock market lost in the financial collapse of 2008. So we are experiencing in a real way a trust deficit and a cynicism boom in our country and actually around the world as well. I mean, that's terrifying. That is a huge drop. I mean, the other question is like, what's that deficit doing to us? Like, how is it affecting us as individuals? So I went through decades of data on this and discovered that in essence cynicism hurts us in every way psychologists and social scientists and even physicians can measure. Cynics tend to live much less healthy lives. They are more prone to depression, loneliness, and unhappiness. They're also much more likely to get physically sick with everything from diabetes to cellular

inflammation to heart disease. They even die younger than non-cynics. Their relationships are also damaged by their cynicism. So if you can't trust people, it's harder to connect deeply with them and you end up more isolated. It's really tragic. If cynicism were a pill, it'd be a poison. And Thomas Hobbes, one of the most famous cynical philosophers in history, wrote that we needed laws to rein us in because left to our own devices, human nature is nasty, brutish, and short. I think that's the best cynical encapsulation. That's like cynicism in one sentence. But ironically, that phrase, that sentence really captures the lives of cynics themselves better than anybody else.

That's horrifying. I mean, it sounds like it's terrible for individuals, but my guess is it's also probably bad for society if we're all going around thinking that everybody is nasty and brutish. Are there data there too? Yeah, there's tons of data showing that at the level of communities, whether those communities are families, companies, counties, or countries, at all of these levels, a lack of trust, a general sense of disconnection and suspicion harms the ability of that unit, large, small, enormous, whatever, to thrive. So I'll give you the example at the national level. So countries that are higher in trust tend to grow economically. Their people tend to be more civically engaged, voting more, for instance. They tend to donate more to charity and help strangers more. And they tend to be less politically polarized as well. If that's what trusting nations do, you see where we're going.

What cynical nations do is exactly the opposite. They shrink or stagnate economically. People bow out or leave civic engagement and civic duties. And they're less likely to engage with one another in pro-social ways as well. If you think of trust as a kind of glue that bonds communities together, cynicism erodes that glue and leaves us all feeling more alone and alienated. It also seems like that alienation must become a vicious cycle, right? You know, if you live in a cynical society, then you're getting more data that everybody's cynical. It

becomes easier to believe that everybody's brutish and hates you and that you shouldn't trust them. So these things must get worse for communities over time too. I totally agree. And you see this self-fulfilling prophecy all over the place. It's not just at the level of large communities, but even you see this in individuals' lives. So for instance, cynics, because they don't trust people, they'll treat them in all sorts of ways that show that mistrust. For instance, if they loan somebody money, they'll call them every day and follow up with them. Or if they interact with friends, they'll worry that their friends will disrespect them. So they'll disrespect their friends preemptively. And these actions that cynics take

end up basically pissing other people off and making other people feel angry and disrespected. And because of that, cynics actually bring out the worst in other people. They say, I bet these other folks will be selfish. I'll treat them like they're selfish. Then other people act selfishly and cynics decide they were right all along.

I'm guessing you agree that this sounds awful. A lot of us just assume we're approaching the world with a healthy amount of suspicion, making sure people don't take advantage of us. I never considered that I could be poisoning myself or those around me. Why are we attracted to cynicism? And why are we so very blind to its dangers? We'll explore these questions when the

Happiness Lab returns in a moment. Dr. Jamil Zaki has likened cynicism to a harmful disease. And what's worse, cynicism is spreading like a pandemic. We've got this experience that is growing, and it's creating like this fractal of pain and dysfunction across our lives. And as I researched this subject, I found that there are really three myths about cynicism that I think promote it and propagate it. Things that we believe that make us think we have to be cynical if we want to succeed in life that turn out in many cases to be exactly the opposite of the truth.

You're totally speaking my language at this. You know, on the Happiness Lab, we love any case where our minds are lying to us. And it seems like that's what's going on with cynicism too. Yeah, exactly. So the first of these myths is that cynicism is smart. So a lot of people I've talked with since working on this project will tell me that they are cynics. And they'll tell me this with a sort of bitter pride.

They say, well, yeah, I'm cynical and it might not be fun, but hey, that's the price of being right. You know, I don't get to just believe whatever I feel like. I have to be a realist. And there's this sense that in essence, by having this dim view of other people, cynics are expressing a sort of hard-fought wisdom. And it sounds like you're going to argue that this hard-fought wisdom is wrong. Yes. But before that, I think it's worth saying that cynics are not the only ones who think cynics are smart. There's a bunch of research that finds that if you ask people, who do you think would do better on a bunch of different tasks, a cynic or a non-cynic, about 70% of people believe that cynics are smarter than non-cynics in general, that they would do better at analytic tasks, for instance. And about 85% of people think that cynics would be socially smart, for instance, better at spotting liars. So most people put a lot of faith in people who don't have a lot of

faith in people. Say that three times fast, but it's true. And it turns out that most people are wrong. Cynics, in fact, do less well on cognitive tests than non-cynics. And they're also worse at spotting liars. It turns out that if you think everybody is on the take, you don't engage in skepticism. You don't take the energy and time to actually learn about people. So you end up with blunt and often incorrect black and white views of humanity. So cynicism ends up being way less smart and wise than we think it is. And so that's kind of the first myth about cynicism. It's not nearly as smart as we think. What's the second one? The second is that cynicism is a way of staying safe. There's a quote from the comedian George Carlin that I love where he said,

scratch a cynic and you'll find a disappointed idealist. I think a lot of cynics, whether they seem like they have a lot of bluster in their sneering attitude or not, actually are in recovery from some type of hurt or betrayal. I understand that. I feel like if people are cynical and they're listening to this, I don't want them to feel like I'm calling them out. I think a lot of us have been disappointed and hurt in our lives. And it's actually pretty natural to say, well,

gosh, I was really hurt before because I trusted somebody. I don't want to get hurt again. The only way that I can avoid that further pain is to close myself off, to stop trusting others. But you've argued that this isn't the right approach. You've argued that this winds up causing a term that I love, which is pre-disappointment. What's pre-disappointment? So if you think of disappointment as somebody hurt me, and so my expectations of that person are now lowered. Pre-disappointment is somebody hurt me, so my expectations of the entire world are now lowered. It's like a sort of psychological armor, or at least people believe it's a psychological armor. They say, if I have no faith in anybody, then they can't possibly hurt

me. It's like a thick skin of sorts. But I actually think that pre-disappointment is less like armor that protects us and more kind of like armor that suffocates us. Because when you don't have any openness to other people, yeah, you probably won't get hurt again, but you also won't be able to connect with people. You'll miss out on so many opportunities for friendship, love, collaboration, you name it, that all depend on our willingness to be open. So I feel like cynicism and pre-disappointment are safe kind of in the way that house arrest is safe. You probably won't get hurt. You won't get run over by a truck, but you also won't ever experience so many things that you might want to if you just stay at home trying to be safe in this really shallow way. And this act of being safe seems

like it's contributing to this self-fulfilling prophecy. If I'm cynical and I'm kind of disappointed in everybody and I assume that that's safe, maybe it's safe, but it winds up never giving me any opportunities to learn that, hey, this is a myth. People won't disappoint you as much as you think. You're kind of prevented from any learning opportunities that might change your mind. That's right. I mean, in nerdy terms, in the world of learning science, this is called a wicked learning environment where we expose ourselves to evidence that supports one perspective, but don't ever get chances to see the evidence that would go the other way. And I think that our minds also are built to focus a lot on negative things that have happened to us. There's all this work that I think

you all have talked about on what's known as negativity bias. Bad events, bad people take up a lot of our attention and we remember them more clearly as well. I don't know if you feel this, Lori. I feel like anytime that somebody's betrayed me or hurt me, I can come up with a list of those events from my teenage years at the drop of a hat. But if you ask me to tell you all the nice things that people did for me when I was 10, 12, 14, I draw a complete line. Yeah. Mine is always course evaluations, right? I teach a class with over a thousand students. A lot of people say nice things about the class, right? But those two kids who said really terrible things, I could quote it right now.

I choose not to, but I could quote it right now. Yeah, the negative stuff sticks in your brain in this terrible way. I have the same thing. It's almost like one person out of 500, that shirt was too much. But it's natural. It's really understandable.

And it's tragic, right? So again, I really feel for and resonate with people who have been hurt and don't want to get hurt again. I live that way. I have in the past. The problem is that it's so easy to remember betrayals and allow them to shape our lives. And when we do that, we're actually letting the people who betrayed us retain their power over us. We're kind of letting those negative experiences win in a way.

And again, I understand why that happens, but I feel terrible when it happens to me and especially when it happens to other people. So that's myth number two. We assume cynicism is kind of safe, but it's the sort of false safety that winds up hurting us. What's myth number three? Myth number three is the idea that cynicism is kind of safe, but it's the sort of false safety that winds up hurting us. What's myth number three? Myth number three is the idea that cynicism is moral. And I get this all the time when I tell people that I'm writing a book about hope. They often have this knee-jerk response, which is some version of, well, yeah, you can write that. You're this privileged professor at this fancy university. You have this charmed life, which is, first of all, hey, you can write that. You're this privileged professor at this fancy university. You have this charmed life, which is first of all, hey, you don't know me, but you have all

this privilege. And that's what hope is. Hope is a privilege that is only reserved for people who are very lucky. And in fact, that the world is pretty rough, especially for people, for instance, who come from marginalized backgrounds or communities, and that those people have to see the world for what it is. They don't have the luxury of being hopeful because they're affected by all of these larger structural forces. And positive thinking isn't going to fix any of that. And in fact, there's this term, hope-washing, that when we even talk about hope, we're telling individuals through the work of their own minds to fix the world, even though the world has historically hurt them in all of these different ways.

But in your research, you found that there's actually work on this, like whether or not cynicism can help us overcome it. What does this work find? That again, cynics see in real ways problems with the world. I think if cynics, for instance, mistrust politicians, gosh, that actually seems pretty reasonable, right? If they think of things like inequality or climate change and feel cynical about our species, that's completely understandable. But the issue is that cynicism doesn't inspire us to do anything about these problems. In fact, cynics, for instance, are less likely to take part in social movements or protests. They're less likely to engage civically than non-cynics.

And I think because of this, cynicism actually is a tool of the status quo. People like propagandists and authoritarian leaders love it when people don't trust because sure, they might not trust me, the authoritarian leader, but they also don't trust each other enough to get together and do anything about this. So I think cynicism might be moral in the sense that cynics see the harm that is being done, but it's not helpful in addressing any of those problems. So it seems like we're getting cynicism all wrong. And the fact that we have all these misperceptions about cynicism winds up hurting us a lot. But yet, cynicism does seem to still

be going up. Everybody's going through this right now. And so what's the alternative? How can we break out of this? I've been asking myself that for this entire decade. I feel like the 2020s between COVID and so many terrible events around the world, conflicts, and now this election season, I feel like cynicism is like the mood of the decade so far. And I've been wondering, can we do anything about it? And it turns out that we can, that there are lots of tools at our disposal when we think more carefully and act differently to beat back cynicism. And in particular, there's an idea that I've been trying to work on in my own life and that I want to suggest to people who are struggling with cynicism, which I call hopeful skepticism. So what's hopeful skepticism? It seems

like it starts with hope. So maybe we should start there. You know, what is hope and how does it differ from cynicism? Or maybe even how does it differ from something like optimism? This is another great distinction. So a lot of people think that hope and optimism are the same thing. They're not. Optimism is the idea that things will work out well. It can lead sometimes to complacency. You know, if I think that things are going to turn out great, I don't have to do anything. That's actually pretty similar, by the way, to cynical hopelessness. If I think things are going to turn out terribly, I don't need to do anything either.

Hope is different. It's the idea that things could go well, that even in the face of terrible problems, there is a version of the world where things improve. And it's a sense that I can do something about it. It's a sense of agency, that there's meaning to our actions. So hope is not optimism because hope is uncertain, just like the future actually is. And in that uncertainty lives our opportunities to act and live differently in ways that make positive change. I forget if you're a Marvel fan, Jamil, but it makes me think of Doctor Strange, who's this like Marvel character who can like do this thing where he like simulates all the possible worlds. And he's Strange, who's this Marvel character who can do this thing where

he simulates all the possible worlds. And he's like, there's 7 billion worlds where everything's really terrible, but there's one world in which if we do the right thing, things are going to be okay. It feels like hope is kind of like pulling a Doctor Strange, where you at least find some worlds where through your own agency, you can fix stuff. I was literally thinking about Doctor Strange, and I thought, should I say Doctor Strange? No, it's too nerdy. It's too nerdy. So thank you, Lori, for this validation. But yeah, but it's like, it's like just like coming up with some possible worlds in which things will be okay. But then realizing that you can contribute to that, not just like, well, if I just sit on my butt, that wonderful possible world will come up. It's

like, you got to take some action to go there. That's exactly right. I think of hope as this magnet where there are billions of possible worlds. I hope unlike the Avengers, we have more than a one in seven billion chance of achieving a positive outcome. But you see this panoply of worlds and possible futures And hope sort of attracts you to the ones that you want and pulls you and your actions towards those positive outcomes, right? And again, I think that because of this, hope isn't just something that we can turn to when things are going well. In fact, research shows that hope is especially useful for people who are dealing with major problems. Cancer patients, people towards the end of their lives, students in lower socioeconomic backgrounds. In all of these cases, hope pulls people toward the future that they want and helps them live happier and healthier lives.

And you've advocated not just for hope, but a particular brand of hope that you've called hopeful skepticism. Why does the skepticism part need to be there too? Well, I think that as we've talked about, skepticism is this scientific perspective on the world. And as we've talked about, there's this pervasive negativity bias that lives in our minds. That means that most of us pay much more attention to cruelty than kindness, selfishness than generosity. And because of that, we have this systematically warped view where we underestimate how trustworthy, open-minded, warm, and compassionate people are. What that means to me is that when we are skeptical, when we instead leave behind our assumptions and give people a chance

to show us who they are, then naturally we might become more hopeful because we'll find pleasant surprises everywhere. We'll realize that most people are better than most people think they are, right? And in that, I think is a natural source of hope. Later in this season, you'll get to meet some very hopeful folks, people actively working to make their communities and workplaces better. They'll share what they've learned about rejecting cynicism, and they'll have plenty of ideas about how you can become skeptically hopeful too. But when we get back from the break, we'll talk to a scholar who's inspired plenty of people to work towards a better common future. I grew up when America was the maximum of we society that we've ever seen. And my whole life has been going downhill.

And I really wish I could figure out a way to reverse that, or at least pause it. The Happiness Lab will be right back. The book that I have on my desk in my office remains Bowling Alone. Like me, Jamil is a big fan of the political scientist Robert Putnam. It's one of the books that affected me the most over the course of my career and I think captured this massive trend in our society to feel more alone and to lose our sense of connection. We spoke to Robert in our season about the importance of connecting better. Robert grew up in Port Clinton, Ohio, where in the years after World War II, people's lives crossed and intercrossed every day. The richest and poorest people in his town ate at the same diner.

And teenage Robert joined a bowling team with members from every neighborhood in his community. We did pretty well. We were not great. And there's a picture that shows the team, three white guys, one tall gangly guy in the middle, which was me, and two black guys. And we did not think that was strange. But when Robert grew up and began studying politics, he realized the way of life he'd taken for granted in Port Clinton was disappearing. I didn't know it was special, and I don't think it was all that special in America in the middle of the 1950s. Robert discovered that many of the spaces where people regularly met were closing. People were no longer taking part in bowling leagues as he had. They were, as the title of his book explained, bowling alone. Robert's book painted a bleak picture of communal life in the late 90s. It argued that if we continued to shun social contact, we'd become sadder, his book explained, Bowling Alone. Robert's book painted a bleak picture of communal life in the

late 90s. It argued that if we continued to shun social contact, we'd become sadder, lonelier, and less trusting. It's a book that I keep on my desk that also makes me depressed all the time. But are we destined for this depressing, lonelier path? That's the question Robert explored in his most recent book, The Upswing, How America came together a century ago and how we can do it again. The Upswing argues that America in the 1890s looks a lot like it did today. Think inequality, conflict, and division. But people back then hated feeling so divided, so they joined the very charities, clubs, and societies that peaked in the 1950s. Things in America were getting better and better. We were economically growing. We were equal.

We were taking care of each other. We were attending PTA meetings. We were focused on the we. We were like this amazing country. The upswing was a revelation for Jamil. It showed him that hope could prevail. When I started working on Hope for Cynics, I was talking with a mentor of mine

and bemoaning the rise in cynicism and how it's hurting all of us. And he challenged me. He said, you know what you need to find is figure out, is there any place in the world or any time in history where things have gone the opposite way, where trust has increased instead of decreased, where people were able to form more coalitions and better, stronger communities than they had in the past. And I thought, oh gosh, it's going to be hard, but I'll try. And when I read The Upswing, I had this sort of epiphany that, wait a minute, that did happen. It happened right here in the US. It just happened before I was born. The first half of the 20th century was this tectonic shift where the country, because of all these

progressive social movements, became more interconnected and trust rose to incredible levels, way higher than they have been at any other time that we've been measuring. And so with that hope, you've put together this kind of three-part idea for how we can do it again, for how we can reduce our cynicism and get back to this hopeful skepticism that allows us to trust one another. What are those three steps? Yeah, the first step is to think differently, to try and adopt this mindset of hopeful skepticism. And I think of that as happening in a couple of different ways. By the way, I work on this all the time myself.

I try to do this through some tools that are drawn from cognitive behavioral therapy. So one of them is known as reality testing, but I just think of it as fact-checking my cynical feelings, right? I personally often find myself thinking things that are very uncharitable, you know, about people who cut me off in traffic or influencers. Not you, Lori, but other influencers. No, not you, of course. And just people in general. And oftentimes that type of chatter

just goes on unchecked and drives our lives. And lately I've tried to hit the pause button on it much more frequently and ask myself, wait a minute, you're having this thought, you're having these contemptuous feelings. Where are they coming from? What do they mean? And I try to basically use my

life as a scientist in this way. I say, well, if this was a hypothesis and you had to defend it in a scientific paper or at a conference, what is the evidence that you would marshal in defense for this terrible thought that you're having about humanity? And oftentimes I realize, wait a minute, And oftentimes I realize, wait a minute, I don't have good evidence for this at all. So I try to be more open-minded and I guess skeptical of my own cynicism when I can. A different thought pattern you've encouraged is one that you've called a reciprocity mindset. What's that? So we talked about these self-fulfilling prophecies that when I'm cynical, I treat other people in cynical ways, which then brings out the

worst from them, makes them more selfish and untrustworthy. Well, it turns out that we often don't realize that when other people act badly, it's because of how we've treated them. We don't realize how influential we are on other people. So a reciprocity mindset is teaching people about the power that they have over others. In fact, in my lab, we've tried to adopt this approach. We taught some people in a set of studies that, hey, you know, if you trust others, they'll act more trustworthy. And if you don't trust them, they'll act more selfishly. And we find that when we teach people that, they think differently about others. They talk and write about more of their responsibility in social settings to treat

people the way that they would want to be treated. And then they do it more. So for instance, in our studies, when we teach people about this reciprocity mindset, they're more willing to trust strangers. And when people trust strangers, strangers act in more trustworthy ways. For instance, paying back investments more than if they're not trusted. So we find that teaching people about their own power causes them to wield it more responsibly in ways that are kinder and less cynical. And that turns these sort of vicious, self-fulfilling prophecies into more virtuous ones. And so that's a nice transition to the second step that you've advocated,

which is to act differently, right? Once we start thinking differently, we can start doing stuff differently. Any specific strategies you have for people to start acting differently to engage their hopeful skepticism? Yeah, I think there's a bunch of ways to do this. So if thinking like a hopeful skeptic means having to consider your beliefs as hypotheses, almost scientific predictions, then acting differently is a matter of testing those predictions out in the real world.

And there's a couple of ways to do this. One that I've tried to do a lot more is what I call leaps of faith. That is taking small calculated risks on other people. Ernest Hemingway once wrote, the best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them. And I think that that's a really powerful idea. I often, in situations where normally I would be really guarded, have tried to be more open, whether that's trusting somebody with a task in my lab that maybe is a challenge for them, or just opening up to somebody I don't know that well about a struggle that I'm going through.

And my cynical mind often screams at me while I'm doing this, what the hell are you thinking? Don't do it, don't do it. You're about to be betrayed. And basically, I just try to say, shut up for a second. I need to do this. And I'm often shocked by the results, by how much people are honored when you trust them, how much it strengthens relationships, how it's a fast track to a more connected life. And I guess it's shocking to me how shocking this is to me given that I study this, but I think that I'm trying to do it more so that it can

come more naturally. Because in science, of course, when we test a hypothesis and find something out, it updates our beliefs and our theories. So we can use this real world social data to slowly, incrementally update our theories about the world away from cynicism. And a final way to update our theories about the world is to help other people update their theories about the world. And that gets to your third step, which is to share differently. What do you mean there? Yeah, I think it's, again, important to understand our influence on other people. We can do that in understanding that when we trust others, they're more likely to step

up. But we can also do that in understanding that what we talk about also influences the way that other people see the world. And if we talk in cynical ways, if we only share information about the worst people doing the worst things, we're sort of like the news. We're giving people all the material they need to become more cynical. It's a real instinct. Just like we think so much about bad things in the world to talk about those things. And it's, again, an instinct that we can fight. I've tried to do this, especially with my kids. I sort of

noticed that even though I try to be positive around them, when my wife and I are talking about some corporation or something in the news or even inconveniences that we face in our day-to-day lives, we end up being pretty negative. And so I started trying to do this thing with my kids that I call social savoring. That is, if I notice somebody doing something positive, I try to pause and recognize it and then tell them, hey, look, did you see that? This person helped a stranger who was struggling. Can you see these people picking up litter on the streets? And in all of these cases, social savoring has, A, I hope, helped them plug into this more positive view of people. But it's also helped me because, of course, what you say to

other people changes what you think about. In looking for examples of positivity that I could share with them in this sort of positive gossip, that sort of popped an antenna out of my mind that caused me to look for and really quite easily find many people acting in positive ways myself. And so have all of these things helped you? I mean, it sounds like you're putting all this stuff into practice, which is awesome. Has it actually changed your level of cynicism? Has it changed how happy you feel generally? I think of this as really quite connected to how you have experienced a lot of these happiness interventions. I know you do a lot of these things to try to tap into the science.

And I know for you, it works a lot of the times. And that doesn't mean that it's perfect, right? Yeah, it's helped a lot. But that doesn't mean I'm like happy all the time, right? And I'm guessing that's exactly what's happening with cynicism for you, that less cynical, but not a perfect hopeful skeptic just yet. You're guessing correctly. Yeah, that's right. I mean, I think of myself as a recovering cynic.

You know, I don't think of myself as some person who's figured it all out and here to share. I'm in the struggle with so many other people. And these are instincts. They're knee-jerk responses. And we need to fight them actively. I think of cynicism as a sort of being on a treadmill. If you stand still, you're going to get pulled backwards. So it's this kind of constant effort to move forward against the grain of what our minds tend to do. It's a struggle. It's something that I work on all the time and probably will for the rest of my life. But it's such an important struggle. I feel like especially right now, everything we see in the news is something

that just like pulls me into this like hopelessness spiral. This just feels like the kind of advice that we all need so much right now. So would you be willing to help us out even more? Maybe we could take a hopeful skeptics lens to so much of what's going on on the planet right now. Would you be game to come along? Oh, I thought you'd never ask. Of course, I would love that. Awesome. Well, on the next episode of the Happiness Lab,

we will continue tackling what we can do to reduce our painful cynicism and develop a hopeful skeptics lens. We're going to be doing a deeper dive across three more episodes where we'll be talking about this. And all that will happen next time on The Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos and... Me, Dr. Jamil Zaki. You sounded kind of skeptical. Oh, really? Okay, let me do it again. Let me do it again.

All that next time on the Happiness Lab would be Dr. Laurie Santos. And me, Dr. Jamil Zaki. Okay, okay, that was better. No, no, we're good. We did it. We did it. We did it.

Yeah.