Cynicism, Part 2

In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe explore the topic of modern psychological cynicism, as well as its roots in the philosophy of the ancient Cynics.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb.

Speaker 3 (00:16):
And I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with Part
two in our series on cynicism, the tendency to believe
other people are selfish, untrustworthy, and immoral. In Part one,
we talked about what cynicism means in its modern usage,
and we contrasted that with similar but distinct concepts like pessimism,

(00:38):
and also with cynic philosophy, the latter being a school
of philosophy born in ancient Greece that emphasized moral integrity,
self sufficiency, and virtue, and achieved in part by shedding pretensions,
like ignoring the pressure to conform and living in accordance
with our nature. The word cynic comes from the Greek

(00:59):
word for, and so a cynic philosopher in the ancient
sense might say that we can all learn something from
watching the honest way that a dog lives according to
its nature. This, of course, is quite different from what
we mean by cynicism today in common language, which is
a disposition of low social trust, the tendency to believe,

(01:19):
as we put it, last time, that people are bad,
people are selfish, and morals are fake. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:26):
Yeah, ancient philosophic cynics be like a dog. Modern cynics
dog eat dog.

Speaker 3 (01:34):
Yes, now, last time, we also talked a bit about
cynicism in literature, with my observation that really, like the
most cynical writing I could find anywhere was all in
the Bible, which I'm not sure exactly what to make
of that, but that is kind of surprising and counterintuitive perhaps,
But it's like, especially in the books of the prophets

(01:56):
in the Hebrew Bible, like Micah and Jeremiah, full of
just very eloquent, devastating condemnations of human nature. The heart
is deceitful above all things. There is none that doeth good, No,
not one, that sort of thing. We also discussed medical, psychological,
and sociological research on the correlates of cynicism, with the

(02:19):
overwhelming conclusion being that holding cynical beliefs about human nature
and low trust in others is quite harmful to us
in many different ways. It appears to be bad for
our health, mental and physical health. It is correlated with
all kinds of undesirable outcomes, including early death. We didn't
really get into this research last time, but you probably

(02:40):
won't be surprised to learn it is associated with low
quality social relationships, and despite the archetype of the ruthless,
cynical striver and achiever, it also tends, on average to
make it harder for us to reach even our material
goals like making money and attaining positions of leadership, at
least in part because cynical people waste a lot of

(03:03):
time and resources trying to avoid being made a sucker
and miss out on opportunities to cooperate with others for
mutual benefit. So I think it's safe to say that
believing everyone is just in it for themselves and cannot
be trusted is in so many ways bad, bad, bad
for us. It's bad for our lives. But of course,

(03:25):
the somewhat heartwarming implied inverse of all this is the
evidence that it really does us good to cooperate and
trust people.

Speaker 2 (03:33):
Definite silver lining there to all all of this research
we've been doing here now.

Speaker 3 (03:38):
In the last episode, we also raised a number of
questions that we weren't able to fully answer yet, and
we'll come back to them throughout the series. I think
we'll look at at least one study today that sheds
some light on this. But these were questions like, do
more cynical or less cynical people actually have a better
predictive model of the world, who's model of how other

(04:01):
people behave is more accurate? And in any given situation,
how can we know if we're being too trusting, too cynical,
or if we're striking just the most reasonable balance. And also,
given that it comes with so many clear downsides, what
if anything, is the benefit of cynicism.

Speaker 2 (04:21):
Well, I'm not sure this will actually help us answer
any of these questions, but then maybe it'll give us
just a little more elbow room to work with the concept.
Reading through Anscar Allen's cynicism book Mit that I reverenced
in the last episode, and he covers several subsets of
modern cynicism, and here are a few that I thought

(04:43):
might help us out. So one category is insider cynics,
So the cynicism of contemporary professionals who believe that people
are ultimately selfish, and these individuals do their best to
survive in their organizations by dealing with their colleagues on
those terms. So we might think of it as a
you know, I'm not here to make friends approach, but

(05:04):
you know, only to work or specifically to work, with
the idea being that maybe outside of that work environment
they are less cynical.

Speaker 3 (05:12):
Oh okay, well, I would certainly have questions about how
skilled people are actually are at like turning cynicism on
and off when switching between contexts. But you can certainly
see how that would be useful, maybe because you know,
it's quite reasonable to understand that, like, certain professional environments

(05:32):
require a lot less trust, require you to be more
doubting of people. Maybe if you are, I don't know,
investigating murders or something like that, like you you really
need to not just like trust people.

Speaker 2 (05:45):
There are so many movies about murder detectives being able
to neatly separate their work life from their home life.

Speaker 3 (05:53):
Yeah, but so hopefully if you were in a job
like that, or if you're in just in kind of
a cutthrow business environment where everybody, you know, everybody's trying
to edge other people out in deals, you would hope
to be able to turn that off when you come
out of that and get into your relationships in life.
I guess it's questionable to what extent people can do
that very well.

Speaker 2 (06:14):
I would agree with that. Yes, Another classification that he
singles out are the master cynics, so rich and powerful
contemporary cynics who hide their own cynicism by adopting the
values and beliefs of people they hold power over. In
a weird sense, system's kind of kind of a puzzle
because a person who's really cynical about politics would no

(06:37):
doubt assume that every politician is a master cynic, that
they're just when they're glad handing and so forth, they're
just pretending to take on these values where deep down
they know the truth, like I know that people are
just selfish and they're exploiting everyone as well.

Speaker 3 (06:54):
We're going to have to come back to the question
of cynicism in politics and political participation because I think
that raises all sorts of interesting questions.

Speaker 2 (07:01):
Yeah, and there's been a lot of research, a lot
of writing just on that area alone. Now, the third
of the categories that I'm going to reference here. There
are some additional ones that I'm not getting into, but
the third one I want to reference here is paternalistic cynicism,
and in this one holds a cynical view of human
motivations and seeks to capitalize on those motivations, but not

(07:22):
for personal gain, but for the greater good. And that one,
you know, made me think a little bit more and
maybe gives us a little more room to play when
considering the effectiveness or possible effectiveness of cynicism. I was thinking, like,
let's say you wanted to encourage a certain behavior in
the general public, and you're presented with two messaging options,
one that works based on a cynical view of human motivations,

(07:44):
you know, greed and self interest, while the other appeals
to the higher angels of their nature. Well, which is
more likely to work. It's going to depend on the messaging,
of course, and the exact details of the target audience,
you know, general audience versus you know, some narrow or audience.
But yeah, which worldview is a better starting place? I

(08:05):
feel like this might work as a good sort of
practical thought experiment because it entails making a choice about
how you're going to model the motivations of a given population.
But on the other hand, we kind of come back
to that sliding scale of cynicism. If one is cynical
enough about the intended audience, then would any messaging seem
like it would work, like why are you even bothering?
If you're just assuming that everyone out there is just selfish,

(08:28):
you might not be able to get them to stop littering,
or to recycle or to I don't know where seat belts.

Speaker 3 (08:35):
But maybe the paternalistic cynicism model is like, you must
stop littering and you must be kind to your fellow
human being or you will go to hell something you know,
like appealing to your base personal interest in order to
get you to do something that the messager sees as good.

Speaker 2 (08:52):
Yeah, bring it back to fear right. Maybe I'm just
muddying the waters. But there's so many different areas you
can get into in discussion of modern cynicism. Rob.

Speaker 3 (09:01):
One thing you said in the last episode that I
thought was really insightful and I have kept thinking about
ever since we recorded that is that you said maybe
one of the appeals of cynicism is that expressions of
cynicism are cathartic statements, like people suck. They when you
say things like that, or when somebody else says that

(09:23):
and you get to agree with them, it feels like
a psychological pressure release valve by like making a statement
of that sort you're sort of blowing off steam. And
of course this can be true even for people who
are not especially cynical on average, having these little moments
of situational cynicism. But I was thinking more about the

(09:44):
Catharsis element, and I wonder if this association of cynicism
with cathartic relief also tells us something about how people
can acquire generalized dispositional cynicism. Like what if the person
who is very cynical on average gets to be that
way by creating by like habituating themselves to a desire

(10:07):
for that momentary catharsis that you get from saying people suck?
Does that make any sense?

Speaker 2 (10:13):
Yeah, Like you dip your hand into the cynicism cookie
jar a few times too often and the crumbs begin
to stick. Yeah. I was thinking about this when I
was looking at some material related to cynicism in the workplace,
which is its own huge area of consideration that we're
not really going to get into in this episode per se.

(10:34):
But I was just thinking about, Okay, if one's really
cynical regarding one's employers, one's corporate overlords, you might excuse
any amount of inaction or slacking based on the view that, well,
they don't really care about me, they're not invested in me,
they're not paying me enough, and so forth, all any
grievance you might imagine. And maybe, just maybe in small doses,

(10:58):
this gives you space to let things glide in ways
that ease your work burden or create space for something
else you want to do. And yeah, maybe it's a
situation where if you stick your hand into that cookie
jar too often, it does become your default view, at
least of your work situation. And maybe it bleeds over
into other areas as well.

Speaker 3 (11:19):
That is an interesting possibility. So you're in a kind
of a pressure inducing scenario and you, for whatever reason,
you can get little moments of relief from that pressure
by resorting to cynical evaluations. And so does that create
a kind of addiction, Like you associate the moment of

(11:39):
cathartic cynicism with relaxation of the pain, or with pleasure
even or something like that, and you just kind of
keep pressing the pleasure button until that's just what your
personality is. Yeah, I don't have research to back up
that interpretation of where cynicism comes from, but I think
that is an interesting possibility or if it ever sets

(12:00):
in that way.

Speaker 2 (12:02):
Yeah, yeah, I also was thinking, you know, in terms
of dealing with this a corporation or a company, like
it's one thing to sort of initially think cynically about,
like this faceless thing, this organization. But of course organizations
are made up of people, and so I wonder how
the cynicism might spread where you might generally have cynical

(12:24):
ideas about a company, but then those cynical ideas end
up applying to certain heads of that company. But then
it could potentially trickle down and then where does it stop?
Like who stops being the face of the company. I
guess they have to be cynical enough. They have to
share your cynicism in order to be like your your
brothers in arms against the company, that sort of thing.

Speaker 3 (12:44):
Yeah, yeah, you know, Actually this sort of gets a
little bit into something I'm gonna talk about in the paper.
I'm about to explain. But there are different environments. There
are different sort of environments and contexts that encourage and
or different levels of cynicism. And so there can be
very like cynicism positive organizations, like if you are within

(13:07):
a company that is very cruel and in which you
know you don't do very well by placing trust in people,
it can be quite reasonable to end up responding with
the generalized cynicism about interactions within that company. Organizational culture
is a thing. So anyway, So I want to turn

(13:28):
to a concept in psychological research on cynicism that I
found really interesting, and that is the so called cynical
genius illusion. So I was reading about this in a
paper by a couple of researchers that I cited in
part one of the series. These scientists are Olga Stavrova,

(13:50):
a professor of psychology at Tilburg University in the Netherlands,
and Daniel Illbracht at the University of Cologne in Germany.
These two published a paper in the year twenty eighteen
in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, and the
paper was called the Cynical Genius Illusion, Exploring and Debunking
lay beliefs about cynicism and competence. Now they begin by

(14:15):
acknowledging a lot of the things we talked about in
the last episode. They define cynicism as you know, the
main cognitive component of hostility. They're talking about it pretty
much in the same terms we are a belief that
other people you know, you should be suspicious of their motives,
that they that they are primarily motivated by self interest,
that they can't be trusted and will harm you. And

(14:37):
then they run through the long list of ways that
cynicism appears to be bad for us, bad for our
lives in health, in relationships, and ability to attain goals
and so forth. However, the authors complicate that picture by
noting that if you just look at popular culture and
literature and folk wisdom, cynicism does not not seem to

(15:00):
have and on the whole negative reputation. To read from
their introduction here quote, Among nineteenth and twentieth century writers
in popular figures, cynicism has often been seen as a
sign of intelligence and wit. American writers Ambrose Bierce and
Lillian Hellman praised cynicism as an art of seeing the

(15:21):
true nature of things. Bernard Shaw referred to cynicism as
a quote power of accurate observation, and John Stuart Mill
noticed that quote it is thought essential to a man
who has any knowledge of the world to have an
extremely bad opinion of it. And as for the other
authors they named, I looked up some of the cynical quotes.

(15:43):
I can't believe I didn't think of Ambrose Bierce as
a good source of literary cynicism in the last episode.
But in The Devil's Dictionary, Bierce defines a cynic as
someone quote whose faulty vision sees things as they are,
not as they ought to be. They all so cided
Lillian Hellman. Her version of this was, quote, cynicism is

(16:04):
an unpleasant way of saying the truth. And I do
think there's something interesting in Hellman's phrasing here, because of
the emphasis on tone. It is an unpleasant way of
saying what is true. So what is the difference between
somebody just quote being real and somebody being cynical. It

(16:25):
might be in the substance of what they say and
how they think. It might be like you know, material
substantive differences. But I think sometimes we make that distinction
based on whether there is negative emotion in their expression,
Like if they are counseling us against trust, did they
deliver that council with anger or contempt? But anyway, so

(16:46):
you've got all this literature that equates cynicism with the
kind of wisdom and you know, like the power to
see what is really going on. Also, the authors here
point out that if you draw up a list of
like cynical characters in popular culture, they don't tend to
be pitiable wretches dealing with setbacks imposed by their lack

(17:09):
of faith in humankind. More often, cynicism in fictional characters
is presented as gruff hard one realism and wisdom. The
cynical character has knowledge, insights, and powers of deduction not
available to their more trusting peers. So think of Sherlock

(17:30):
Holmes or the authors give the example of House from
how simd. I'm not a watcher of House, but I'm
familiar with the character.

Speaker 2 (17:38):
I mean, you could do a full stop after Sherlock,
because Sherlock, of course influences so many different similar characters
and cast a long shadow across across the English language
and fiction and other languages, but cast a long shadow
across our media. Yeah, and yet at this and it
is interesting to think about Sherlock Holmes in these terms,

(17:59):
because yes, Sherlock Holmes is presented as being, you know,
somewhat emotionally detached, but not you know, certainly he's fighting
the good fight. He is on the side of the
good guy, and will sometimes even you know, break the
rules a little bit or bend them in order to
make sure that justice is served. But on the other hand,

(18:20):
I think if you, if you look closely enough at Sherlock,
I mean he's also a character who at times admits
that he's never loved anyone or has certainly never had
a romantic love in his life. He also struggles horribly
with addiction at one point. You know, so you know,
he's he's not an angel. But again, I guess this
part of his presentation, he's he's hard boiled. It's it's

(18:43):
it's it's hard one cynicism that he uses in order
to solve the crimes that he's presented with.

Speaker 3 (18:49):
Yeah, yeah, I mean I think that is actually generally true.
Cynical characters are often presented as suffering as a result
of their own cynicism, but not wrong because of it,
Like that their cynicism is something that hurts them and
it makes them sad and lonely, but it also gives
them cognitive superiority. It gives them intelligence and wisdom and

(19:13):
power to see through the facade and see what's really happening.

Speaker 2 (19:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (19:19):
But anyway, so based on this background of the cynical
geniuses in fiction, and the sort of cynical wit and
wisdom from literature. The author is conducted a number of
different studies. They did four studies to explore common beliefs
about the link between cynicism and cognitive superiority and competence,

(19:39):
and then three more studies to look at whether there
actually is a link. So, do people in general think
that cynicism is a sign of knowledge, intellect, and competence.
Do cynics actually seem smarter? And are they actually smarter
and more competent than the rest of us?

Speaker 2 (19:58):
Well Sherlock is above reproach, but I'm curious to hear
how it lights to real people.

Speaker 3 (20:03):
So the authors begin by acknowledging some existing research that
touches on these questions. For example, there was a study
by Evans and Venda Caalceda published in Personality and Social
Psychology Bulletin in twenty eighteen called the Reputational Consequences of
Generalized Trust. And this study looked at what we was

(20:23):
just sort of a survey of what we tend to
think of people when we know that they are high
in trust or low in cynicism. The findings were that
high trust, individuals are seen as moral and seen as sociable,
but also seen as less competent. And this kind of
makes sense as a familiar personality archetype, right like, Johnny

(20:45):
is so trusting, he's a good guy, he's friendly, but
he doesn't know what he's doing. So, if showing generalized
trust makes people think we're less competent, does that imply
that showing generalized distrust makes people think we're more competent. Perhaps? However,
the authors also found here that people see you as

(21:08):
more competent if you display what they call discriminate ability,
which is the ability to tell the difference between a
situation in which you should trust and situations in which
you should not. And this takes us back to the
question we mentioned in part one. Obviously, nobody either trusts
or distrusts in every situation, So how do you determine

(21:30):
how cynical it is reasonable to be in this situation?
And how do we know if we're off balance?

Speaker 2 (21:37):
Now?

Speaker 3 (21:37):
The authors also discuss reasons that people might think it
is wise to be cynical. One is pretty familiar better
safe than sorry reasoning. They write, quote in many domains,
the consequences of false negative errors e g. Believing that
someone is trustworthy when they really are not have often

(21:58):
been more costly than false positive errors e g. Believing
that someone is untrustworthy when they really are trustworthy. Over
human evolutionary history, making the cognitive system of modern humans
biased toward false alarms, which is hard to argue with, right, Like, Yeah,
in this series, we are showing lots of evidence that

(22:20):
it is bad for you to be highly chronically cynical,
and yet it's true that more often if you distrust
a trustworthy person, the immediate consequences are fairly limited, but
if you trust an untrustworthy person, the consequences can be disastrous.

Speaker 2 (22:38):
Yeah, we talked about this a little bit in the
last episode. Type one Eras and Cognition. You know, it's
like you've got to make your way across an open field,
and you know there's going to be a time cost
and probably like you know, an anxiety cost to checking
every bush along the way to make sure there's not
a tiger in there to jump out and get you.

(22:58):
But you know, the way our brains work and the
way we're hardwired, it's like we know that that's one
sort of risk I'm going to lose some time, and
I might you know, feel horrible the whole way versus
getting eaten by a tiger. Yeah, like one of those
is like a mutt like looms far larger in our
short term threat analysis.

Speaker 3 (23:18):
One side of the balance has an infinite cost on it. Yeah,
it's like kind of hard to outbalance that, even though,
like wasting all your time and resources checking every bush
that really does matter, like over time, that hugely impacts
your quality of life.

Speaker 2 (23:32):
Yeah, yeah, especially of course, you know when you get
into not only real tigers, but all the paper tigers
in one's life, you know.

Speaker 3 (23:39):
So anyway, they say that a general appreciation for the
merits of the better safe than sorry framework could lead
to the widespread notion that cynics are smarter people. They're
more knowledgeable and more competent. Now, continuing the background review,

(24:02):
the authors also get into existing research on whether there
is an actual link between cynicism and competence. So now
we're asking not about how cynics are perceived, but about
what their relative competence level actually is. And this, I
guess comes back to another question we brought up in
Part one. Do cynics or nonsnics have a better predictive

(24:24):
model of the world. And one very interesting way of
studying this is the so called trust game. So here's
an example of a type of trust game. This was
described in a paper called why so cynical asymmetric feedback
underlies misguided skepticism regarding the trustworthiness of others. This was
by Debt Left, Fetchenhawer, and David Dunning in the journal

(24:47):
Psychological Science in twenty ten and it describes this what
is sometimes called an investing game. They call it a
trust game, and it goes like this quote. In the game,
the trust is given money that can be kept or
handed to a completely random and anonymous stranger, the trustee.

(25:08):
If the trust hands his or her money over, the
amount of money is quadrupled eg. Five dollars becomes twenty dollars,
and trustees have two options. They can either split the
money evenly between themselves and the truster, eg. Give ten
dollars back and keep ten dollars for themselves, or they

(25:28):
can keep all the money for themselves. So the way
the game works is I'm the truster. I'm the person
who gets to make the first decision. If I trust
you and you are trustworthy, we both benefit and I
double my money. If I trust you and you are
not trustworthy, I get nothing. So the authors did this
experiment lots of times and some interesting patterns came out.

(25:51):
They found that trusters estimate the rate of trustworthiness of
anonymous strangers in the game. They estimate it will be
between four forty five and sixty percent. So it seems
that most people think it's a little better than a
coin flip chance that the other person will honor their
trust and split the money for mutual benefit. In reality,

(26:13):
the trustees honored the trust and split the money around
eighty to ninety percent of the time. So people in
this game massively underestimated how trustworthy random strangers would be.
At least in the context of this game, anonymous strangers
were something like twenty to fifty percent more trustworthy and

(26:36):
cooperative than people expected them to be. Isn't that interesting?
That's crazy?

Speaker 2 (26:41):
Yeah, eighty to ninety percent of the time. That's higher
than I would have guessed. But then again, it's like,
I'd like to think that if someone offered me the
scenario and I was not too cynical and trusted that
it was not some sort of a scam, I would
be as trustworthy.

Speaker 3 (26:57):
Can I offer. I think maybe one thing that could
be working in this particular scenario is that it makes
sense to be wary of people who are offering to
double your money in financial transactions. But I think that
makes sense when like people come to you and they

(27:19):
say like, hey, you know, you give me some money
and I'll double it, you should. I mean, if somebody
says that they're not telling you the truth, almost always,
so like there's a good reason to be wary there.
This is a different thing because the trustee in this
game is not somebody who is coming out of nowhere
to offer you money if you just give them some first.

(27:39):
They're a random stranger who is who has been pulled
into this experiment designed by somebody else. And so I
think what this shows is most of the time, if
given the opportunity to be trustworthy and cooperate, most people will.
But also it makes sense to be wary of people
who are claiming they're trying to help you cooperate, you know,
from mutual benefit. If they're coming out of nowhere with this,

(28:03):
you know, that's often going to be a scam. Does
that make sense?

Speaker 2 (28:06):
Yeah? Yeah, I think so.

Speaker 3 (28:08):
But anyway. So yeah, in the trust game, most people
are very trustworthy and players are on average way too
cynical about their fellow human being. They are missing out
on lots of opportunities to double their money. And this
is consistent with research by Miller in nineteen ninety eight
and ninety nine finding that people just tend to grossly
overestimate the selfishness and underestimate the trustworthiness of strangers. In

(28:33):
this particular paper, the authors note that cynicism might grow
from what they call asymmetric feedback. And the way that
works is this, when you trust somebody and you get betrayed,
you get very clear feedback that it was wrong to trust.
The downside of granting your trust is very apparent to you.

(28:56):
They walk away with the money, you get nothing, and
you know it's clear to you happened. But when you
refrain from trusting people, the downsides are often invisible to
you because you don't actually see the lost opportunity as
a scenario that plays out in front of you. You
have to like imagine it as a counterfactual. It's not

(29:17):
concrete and in your face, like being betrayed is, so
you don't really get conditioned by feedback from instances where
you harmed yourself by withholding trust. Does that make sense?

Speaker 2 (29:30):
Yeah, Yeah, it's kind of like ive, like, here's a scenario.
Let's imagine that you're just really pedantic when looking at
the checks when you go out to eat with friends.
You know, you're like, all right, I want to see
everybody's work. I got to make one hundred percent sure
this is fair. And maybe it's because at some point
someone really did stick you, yeah, over one of these situations,

(29:51):
and so it maybe that is more apparent. You like,
you're never going to forget that that you were wronged
in this way. But if you're if you're just overly
pedantic when it comes to the bills, eventually people might
stop asking you to join them for dinner. Yeah, And
that might be very invisible to you that that's happening.

Speaker 3 (30:11):
Yes, you don't realize. Yeah, it's just like things are
not as good now, and I don't know why I'm
feeling lonely. Yeah, Or is a more direct comparison, If
you're not looking at the checks all the time, you
might not notice the times when somebody made a mistake
in your favor that just passed You never even noticed
that it just goes right by you. That is a

(30:32):
good comparison. But anyway, what the study found is that
if you give subjects symmetric feedback about the trustworthiness of others,
it tended to reduce the subject's cynicism. So, like, let's
say you play the trust game, symmetric feedback would be
rob whether or not you decide to hand somebody the

(30:52):
five dollars and try to cooperate to quadruple it. You
get to find out what they would have done either way,
so you know, you get to keep playing the game
that way, And it turns out if you play it
that way, where people keep seeing, oh, I kept the money,
but they I saw that they would have doubled my
money if I just trusted them, and you get to
see that happen over and over. That actually does decrease

(31:15):
people's cynicism, which also is interesting and that it gives
you at least a little bit of an idea where
some elements of cynicism could be coming from. It could
be related in part to this asymmetric build up of information.
We get to see where trust fails very clearly, but
the opportunities we lose out on by not granting trust

(31:37):
are often just like, we don't even realize what's happened.
We don't even realize anything. We don't even know what
we're missing. Yeah, so this research does not give us
a complete picture. But I think some evidence is starting
to accumulate that the cynic does not have a highly
accurate internal model of the world. They might in some scenarios,
but generalized cynicism is not like as some of these

(32:01):
writers were saying, seeing things as they really are. In fact,
cynicism often causes us to incorrectly predict the behavior of
other people, assuming they will be more selfish and treacherous
than they really are. Now coming back to the main
paper I was talking about, but Stavrova and elibract they
note some other research on the link between cynicism and competence. Again,

(32:24):
contrary to the cynical genius archetype, the authors are able
to cite a long list of studies looking at links
between cynicism and various types of cognitive performance and ability,
and they find it's exactly the opposite of what you
might guess from the Sherlock Holmes example. Higher performance on
various types of cognitive academic and IQ tests is negatively

(32:49):
correlated with cynicism. It is instead positively correlated with increased
tendency to trust. There are a few confounding results here.
It's not like every single study has found this, but
the vast majority have. Some of the confounding results are
For example, they cite a twenty thirteen study that found
that higher IQ does not, on average improve a person's

(33:12):
ability to correctly predict who will be trustworthy and who
will not. So like you do better on cognitive tests,
that doesn't mean that if we pair you up with,
you know, Johnny and Billy in the in the Trust
Game experiment, you can predict whether Johnny or Billy you'll
be more likely to help you out. It just it
doesn't help us in that regard.

Speaker 2 (33:33):
Yeah, it's like the compass is already pulling you in
one direction or another, and however higher IQ is, I mean,
that's just that's just the kind of mental energy that
ends up being wrapped around the initial impulse.

Speaker 3 (33:44):
Another thing to keep in mind here is that, of course,
while like various cognitive and IQ and academic tests can
tell you, they can tell you a lot of things
about cognitive ability, they don't tell you everything. So you know,
they can tell you about certain kinds of skills with
reasoning certain kinds of intelligence, but there are always going
to be elements of intelligence that are not perfectly captured

(34:06):
by these sorts of tests. So the authors begin to
develop a possible hypothetical model to explain what's going on here.
They say, what if intelligence, knowledge and competence don't really
help you very much in identifying who to trust in
a given scenario. They don't tell you really if Johnny

(34:27):
or Billy, both of whom you've just met, is more trustworthy,
But instead they help you evaluate the scenario itself to
decide whether to deploy a more cynical or a more
trusting framework given the environment and the circumstances. The authors
rit quote high levels of competence might allow individuals to

(34:49):
correctly identify the corruptness of their environment and adjust their
level of cynicism to match it. Following this reasoning, high
competence individuals might hold adapt attitudes and recur to cynicism
only when it seems warranted, while they're less competent. Counterparts
might show more cognitive rigidity and relying on the better

(35:11):
safe than sorry heuristic tend to endorse cynicism indiscriminately. So
if this model is correct, they're saying it can be
efficient to just remain in better safe than sorry mode
when you lack the ability to tell whether you're dealing
with a corrupt, untrustworthy environment or not.

Speaker 2 (35:30):
Yeah, yeah, this makes sense. We can all think of
examples where the scenario is very clear, like, Okay, even
if someone is out to get me, this is not
the environment where they can just really take me for
all I'm worth. I'm literally handing somebody a five dollar bill.
What are they going to do. They're going to run
away into the woods and keep my dollar fifty and
change that the risks seem low.

Speaker 3 (35:52):
So onto Stevrova and Illebrect's actual experiments, and I'll start
with the very short version of their findings. First of all,
they find yes on average across multiple experiments. Regular people
tend to believe that cynicism is a sign of cognitive
superiority in others, if you think people are bad, you

(36:12):
think people are selfish and morals are fake. On balance,
people will tend to assume you are smarter and more competent,
especially at certain types of cognitive tasks. Things involving logic
and numbers and stuff. They're more likely to assign you
important cognitive tasks like doing mathematical calculations and logical analysis

(36:34):
of documents if they think you're cynical. And on the
other hand, the authors found in their experiments no, on average,
cynicism is not associated with cognitive superiority or greater competence.
They had three studies based on data from about two
hundred thousand subjects across thirty different countries and showed that
on average, cynicism was negatively correlated with tests of cognitive

(36:58):
ability and tests of academic nolede and competency. So this
included all kinds of things like reading, comprehension, mathematical skills,
scientific literacy, technological literacy, and so forth. And this negative
association between cynicism and cognitive tests was true even after
controlling for confounding variables like age, gender, household income, wealth, test,

(37:21):
language proficiency, and Big five personality traits. Now, one major
distinction here is that they found that people who tested
higher incompetence tended to have attitudes of contingent trust. They
might be trusting by default, but we're not rigid in

(37:41):
that regard and would become more cynical if it was
warranted situationally or based on the environment and cultural context,
whereas people scoring lower incompetence tended to accept an unconditionally
cynical worldview. In the words of the authors quote suggesting
that at low leane levels of competence, holding a cynical

(38:02):
worldview might represent an adaptive default strategy to avoid the
potential costs of falling prey to others cunning. Now, I
wanted to expand on these findings with a few notes.
One of the things about the early tests of people's
perceptions of cynicism a control they had here, is that
the authors didn't just ask about cognitive competence. They also

(38:24):
asked about social and moral competence, and quite along the
lines you might expect. People tended to think that low
trust individuals would be better at cognitive things like math, logic,
and critical thinking, but they thought that high trust individuals
would be better at social tasks like cheering up a
depressed friend or taking care of a stray animal. So

(38:44):
it wasn't just like across the board we think cynics
are great. We think cynics are better at everything. It's
that people tend to think cynics are better at certain
types of intelligence based skills, things like math and logic
and so forth.

Speaker 2 (39:00):
This this is sounding kind of like when you see
somebody smoking a cigarette. You know, they can look pretty cool,
especially in movies, like but we all we know deep
down that like, well, the smoking a cigarette doesn't actually
make you cool, but we can't help it. And likewise
you might think, well who you know. You might say, okay,
doctor smoking a cigarette. I have questions. Maybe this is

(39:21):
not the doctor for me, but private detective smoking a cigarette, Well,
obviously that's the guy I want looking after my interests.

Speaker 3 (39:28):
Oh do you mean like the smoking of the cigarette
implies like a rejection of the consensus about the health
effects of it, or just that it I mean, I
guess that often is suggested. It's like, I don't think
it's hurting me. I don't care what people say. I
guess there are two ways of going It's like it
would be cynical. I think it's part of a cynical
worldview to say, like, ah, these doctors who say it
causes cancer or heart disease, they don't know what they're

(39:50):
talking about. I can just smoke it's fine. Or there's
the version that's like I don't care what happens to me,
which I think is a little bit different than cynicism.
Maybe though could go along with cynicism.

Speaker 4 (40:01):
Yeah, yeah, but.

Speaker 3 (40:02):
I follow you in general because yeah, there's like, apart
from thinking that cynical people are smart, there is also
a tendency to think that cynical people are cool.

Speaker 2 (40:11):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (40:12):
That's in fact, I've got a section where maybe we'll
get more into that in just a minute.

Speaker 4 (40:16):
Here.

Speaker 2 (40:16):
Scientific analysis of the coolness.

Speaker 3 (40:18):
Of another thing here is that they tried different like
wordings and types of questions across multiple replication attempts to
make sure that like the cynical genius effect was robust,

(40:39):
And it was robust, but the effects were modulated a
little bit by changes in phrasing, such as whether you
describe the opposite of cynicism as an idealistic versus a
positive view of human nature. Apparently people think being idealistic
about human nature is a little bit dumber than being
positive about human nature. It's always funny how just changing

(41:01):
the swapping a word out can have some effects there.
They also replicated these findings in different samples, so they
did some online surveys, international online surveys, and they did
some in person tests of university students in Germany. They
did some with British adults, and the cynical genius effect
appeared to varying degrees in all the groups tested here. However,

(41:23):
in some of these experiments, respondents got to rate essentially
how cynical they would like a person assigned to a
cognitive task to be, and the breakdown, to be clear,
was not toward a preference for extreme cynicism, but for
higher than average cynicism. So one example here is that

(41:44):
in a group of British adults selecting between hypothetical candidates
to solve intellectual problems, participants quote desired mix of cynical
and non cynical tendencies was fifty six percent cynical to
forty four percent non cynical. So on average, the group
they thought, we need somebody smart. We want somebody who

(42:05):
is a little bit more cynical than the median.

Speaker 2 (42:08):
That makes sense, you know, if you were able to
move the slider on your so like your android doctor,
your android lawyer, or whatever it happens to be. Yeah,
you want the right mix of cynicism. A little more
than the average person, but not not too much. This
will be interesting to get into later when we start
talking about like absolute cynicism and what what that is

(42:29):
and where we stand in relation to it.

Speaker 3 (42:31):
Yeah. So, as for the actual inverse link between cynicism
and competence, when broken down by test domain, I was
interested to see that the effect was strongest in reading
skills and weakest in information processing speed. So in these tests,
apparently highly cynical people holding up relatively okay with speed

(42:54):
of reasoning, doing a lot worse in like reading comprehension,
and finally getting to the element of the paper comparing cynicism, competence,
and environment. The author's tested levels of cynicism cross referenced
with these cognitive tests in subjects across thirty different countries,
and they found that in countries that scored low in

(43:16):
corruption and high in rule of law according to an
international database called the World Governance Indicators, the effect we've
been talking about did hold true, but in countries with
high corruption and eroded rule of law, the effect was
greatly diminished.

Speaker 2 (43:34):
Quote.

Speaker 3 (43:34):
The harsher the social climate, the more these high competence
people embraced a cynical worldview. So kind of along the
lines of results we talked about in the last episode,
it hurts you materially to hold cynical views unless those
views are correct in the environment where you operate. Along
these lines, the authors discuss ways that cynicism might be

(43:57):
learned directly from personal experience. Despite the fact that they
tried to control for the influence of variables like age, gender,
and wealth, it's still possible that quote higher levels of
cognitive ability, academic competence, and education might protect from adverse
life experiences, not only as they allow discovering potential fraud,

(44:19):
but also as they increase the chances of living in
a safe and friendly environment, providing more evidence for a
positive than for a negative view of human nature, and
consequently preventing cynicism development. So that's talking about the idea that,
like that education and cognitive skills, they might not just
be about how accurately you're seeing the world around you.

(44:41):
They might actually, over time, influence what the world around
you is like. On the other hand, since cynicism entails
generalized distrust quote cynical versus less cynical, individuals might be
more distrustful of the opinions and knowledge of others, a
behavior that can eventually prevent them from expanding their knowledge

(45:03):
and understanding.

Speaker 2 (45:04):
Well, that that seems like it tracks the idea that
if you're cynical about about potential information sources, and you're
more likely to sort of back your way into a
corner where you have very few informational sources coming in
and they're the only the only ones you're going to
accept are the ones that back up your existing cynicism.

Speaker 3 (45:24):
Yes, but they say, of course, there is more work
to do exploring the different possible causal mechanisms here. So
this paper does find good robust evidence for the cynical
genius illusion, that the illusion is widely present, and it
is in fact an illusion, but the questions about why
are still largely open. One thing, I wonder about a

(45:48):
lot of the cognitive tasks that subjects said they would
entrust to a cynical person more than a non cynical person.
I was looking through the inventory, and a lot of
these tasks involved screwy of details, like crunching numbers, following
complex logic, analyzing scientific results, things like that, And I

(46:08):
wonder if the same pattern would hold for cognitive tasks
that people associate less with scrutiny of details and instead
with things like creativity and imagination. And to be clear,
the cynical genius effect would be an illusion even if
it were only applied to scrutinizing cognition. But I wonder

(46:29):
if the illusion is actually more specific to certain kinds
of cognition.

Speaker 2 (46:33):
Yeah, yeah, that very much, that Sherlock Holmes scenario.

Speaker 3 (46:37):
But also coming back to this question, we've asked several
times now, are there any benefits to generalize cynicism. It
comes with tons of harms for the cynic it hurts
you to be cynical, But are there any benefits? Well,
first of all, this paper does find if you're in
a really corrupt, untrustworthy environment, obviously it does make more

(46:58):
sense to be more cynical. That's just like a correct
understanding of how your environment operates. Number Two, even if
you're not in a more corrupt, untrustworthy environment, if you
don't understand your environment and you're basically out of your depth,
cynicism may protect you from catastrophic outcomes. It's like, I

(47:19):
don't really know what's going on here, don't know if
I can trust or not, so by default I'm not
going to trust. That's better safe than sorry. And then third,
I think this is going to be mainly related to
the cynical genius illusion. Having a reputation for cynicism may
have the effect of convincing people around you that you
are very smart and intellectually savvy, even though on average

(47:43):
the opposite is more likely to be true. So there's
a kind of social premium incentive to appear to be cynical.
It's in a lot of cases it's going to make
people think that you know something they don't, and you're
a wise and world weary and intelligent person.

Speaker 2 (47:59):
Yes, is often kind of a safe gambole at, like
a cocktail party or a mixer. Right if politics should
come up, which of course is bad manners anyway, but
if it were to come up, you might say something
that is just kind of a you know, a blanket
statement of cynicism, like aoh, well, politicians are all the same.
And then what people are gonna have to double down.
They're gonna have to come back and try to convince

(48:22):
you no, no, not all politicians. Some are great, and
they're going to look like the person who's naive where
you've already you know, mounted your cynicism high horse.

Speaker 3 (48:32):
We've talked about this before. Yeah, the the like all
politicians are the same as the kind of statement that
I think is just facially untrue. It could not be true,
obviously wrong, but you feel foolish trying to argue with it. Yeah,
and I think that goes beyond politics. I mean, just
generally trying to argue with the cynic is so difficult.

(48:54):
Statements of cynicism often come with this a priori tech
mixture of factuality just feels self evidently true with it,
even when it's obviously wrong, when it would be absurd
for it.

Speaker 4 (49:07):
To be true.

Speaker 3 (49:18):
One more thing before I wrap up from the Stavrovia
and Ilbrect study here talking about in their discussion, they
talk about why do we tend to assume highly cynical
people are smarter than the rest of us, even though
this is usually not the case. We touched on this earlier,
but the authors do offer a few ideas based on

(49:39):
common cognitive biases. In particular, they call out negativity bias
and loss aversion. Negativity bias is the observation that we
are more psychologically affected by negative things than we are
by positive things of equal intensity and loss a version
is very similar. It's the finding that we're more strong

(50:00):
motivated to avoid a loss than we are to achieve
a gain of the same value. So here's an example.
I find a five dollar bill on the sidewalk. Oh,
that's nice, quickly forget about it, Versus I drop a
five dollar bill down a storm drain or you know
why me, ah, I hate this. You know, it's like

(50:21):
the dollar value is exactly the same, but the loss
is more memorable, it's more salient and will cause a
greater emotional reaction. And I think for those reasons, like
we are more likely to learn something from it, to
try to draw a general inference that we will take
and apply to the rest of life from these moments

(50:43):
of loss than from gains of the exact same value.

Speaker 2 (50:46):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, I'd go as far as to
say that at the very least, you're more likely to
remember dropping that five than finding a ten. Yeah, and yeah,
there's probably been an interesting thought experiment to be had,
and just trying to determine which point the find value
would be equal to a much lesser loss value, I think.

Speaker 3 (51:06):
I think work on that exact question has been done.
I don't have it pulled up in front of me,
but I think we've looked at that before. Yeah, I'm
sure for some reason seeing the exact numbers is going
to be really funny. But anyway, so you apply this
these biases negativity, bias, and loss aversion to the domain
of trust and cynicism, and they could mean that the

(51:28):
pain of being betrayed is much greater than the pleasure
of having our trust rewarded, even given the exact same
original act of trust. And this is back to the
mental cherry picking that you mentioned last time.

Speaker 2 (51:42):
Rob.

Speaker 3 (51:42):
You know, you can always like think of these really
sticky examples of times when you shouldn't have trusted someone
or something. We may trust somebody twenty times, it works
out great nineteen times, but the one time it did
not work out is shocking and painful and we feel
so hurt. And so from this we form an idea

(52:03):
that people who do not trust easily have learned a
lot of valuable lessons. Therefore they are generally knowledgeable, wise,
and smart. Another explanation comes back to that study from
the background section that we talked about briefly about the
the invisibility of consequences in situations where we refrain from
from giving trust to our detriment. So again you get

(52:27):
to see what happens when you trust and that trust
is betrayed. But when you withhold trust and you just
miss out on an opportunity to gain, you don't really
get to see that loss made concrete. It's just like
it's another path you could have taken. You can even
go without thinking about it.

Speaker 2 (52:45):
Yeah, that's right. Unless you're visited by you know, Christmas
spirits or something, You're just not going to have any
alternate views.

Speaker 3 (52:50):
That's a really you know what. I think a Christmas
Carol is a great example here. That is something the
ghost of Christmas past has to come and make the
lost oportunities concrete. And then one last point the authors
make that I thought was a very interesting point. They raise,
what if the cynical genius illusion arises in part from

(53:11):
biases of storytelling. We fill our lives with fictional stories.
Fictional stories need to be entertaining. Stories are usually more
entertaining if danger and conflict are heightened, if villains are
meaner and more dangerous, if the stakes are high, if

(53:33):
no one can be trusted, you can you can hear
all these phrases in the Don la Fontaine movie trailer voice,
can't you you know? It's like that's what stories are
made out of. Fictional storytelling selects for narratives about the
dangers of trust and the risk of betrayal because stories
like that are captivating to our attention and we want

(53:54):
to know what happens next. So hostile and treacherous worlds
may be more entertaining and narrative. But it's possible that
we draw incorrect inferences from those fictional worlds. We learn
too much about how life works from unrealities that are
specifically crafted to hack our attention. And who are the smart,

(54:16):
savvy characters in these worlds. I think very often they
are cynics who are very reluctant to trust.

Speaker 2 (54:22):
That's right, That's a great point.

Speaker 3 (54:23):
So anyway, that's all I've got in the study for now.
But I think the cynical genius illusion is so interesting.
I'm going to be thinking about this a lot in
the days and weeks to come.

Speaker 2 (54:32):
Yeah, this will be an interesting one to bring into
our weird house cinema discussions as we inevitably come around
to a film that has a cynic genius in it,
and I'm sure if I was to go back and
look at some of the titles we've covered, we've probably
encountered these sorts of characters before, probably played by someone
like Christopher Lee. Yes, all right, well, on that note,

(54:54):
we're going to go ahead and close out this episode,
but we're going to come back with at least one
more episode on cynicism. Again, this is a huge topic.
In the next episode, I believe we're going to get
into cynicism, politics, and social media, so that should be
fun discussion either way. Tune in. We're looking forward to

(55:15):
getting into it. In the meantime, I'd like to remind
everyone that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a
science and culture podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
We have a short form episode on Wednesdays, and on
Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just talk
about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.

Speaker 3 (55:32):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at Stuff to Blow
Your Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (55:53):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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