Cynicism, Part 3: Politics and Social Media

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 1 (00:15):
And I am Joe McCormick. And today we are returning
with Part three in our series on cynicism, the tendency
to believe that other people are selfish, untrustworthy, and immoral.
In part one of the series, we defined cynicism in
its modern usage along the lines I just said, and
we distinguished it from other concepts like pessimism, and from

(00:39):
the cynic school of philosophy founded in ancient Greece, which
was not defined by thinking about other people as morally
bad and undeserving of trust, but instead by the idea
that people should strive for self sufficiency and moral integrity
based on living according to our nature, sort of throwing
off the hypocrisies that are mandated culture. And I think

(01:01):
this goal of exposing hypocrisy is one of the few
threads you might find between modern cynicism and ancient cynic philosophy,
though it's still with some differences. It's not quite this simple.
But I was thinking the other day about it. I
think you could say cynic philosophy was like hypocrisy is
bad and I'm going to try to get rid of it,

(01:22):
whereas modern cynicism is more like everybody's a hypocrite, you
can't trust them, so a decay from what was once
a positive mission for truth into a kind of surrender
to the idea that we're all living a lie. In
Part one, we also talked about research into the correlates
of modern cynicism, So like, if I am highly cynical,

(01:42):
what are the effects of that on my life? It
turns out there's a lot of research on this question,
and the answer is the effects are overwhelmingly negative. Cynicism
appears to be bad for health outcomes, leading to things
like cardiovascular disease, depression, substance abuse, and early death. It
is correlated with lower quality relationships, a decreased tendency to

(02:05):
pursue certain types of goals, and even contrary to the
very familiar image of the cynical Machiavelian elite power player,
and of course we can think of individual examples of
this from the real world, on average, cynicism actually makes
it harder for regular people to achieve even cynically coded
material goals like money and positions of power. Probably because

(02:28):
in part, cynicism makes people less likely to cooperate with
others and thus less likely to benefit from relationships of
mutual trust. In Part two, we followed up on a
number of tangents from the first episode, and we also
took a detailed look at a paper on the so
called cynical genius illusion. The short version of this is

(02:49):
that while people don't necessarily like cynics, we do tend
to believe, on average that cinics are more intelligent and
more cognitively competent the non cynics. For example, people are
more likely to assign a cynical person jobs like doing
mathematical calculations or reviewing charts of scientific results, and this

(03:10):
is in line with the long running archetype and fiction
of the cynical genius, like Sherlock Holmes, someone who withholds
trust and has a very low opinion of human nature,
but also has superior knowledge, memory, and powers of reasoning.

Speaker 2 (03:25):
One thing that I neglected to bring up when we
were talking about the Sherlock Holmes trope is that you know,
there is a distinction to be made between skepticism and cynicism. Yes, now,
you can imagine where the line begins to blur at
some points, and certainly, as we've been discussing, you know,

(03:45):
your cynicism level may not be constant throughout your life.
You may drift back and forth, and so you can
imagine a scenario where one is essentially a skeptic, but
then that may sort of stray into cynical territory.

Speaker 1 (03:59):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, I was thinking about the distinction there also.
I was in fact talking about this with Rachel and
I guess we never got into this in the previous parts,
but I think there is a big difference between how
I use the word cynicism and skepticism. For me, skepticism
is an attempt to dole out your trust according to
how trustworthy something is based on the evidence. It's essentially

(04:23):
trying to overcome your natural biases to be more trusting
or less trusting than the situation actually deserves. It's just
trying to be as rational as you can. What reasons
do I have to trust or distrust? Whereas cynicism is
just a bias toward distrust.

Speaker 2 (04:40):
Yeah, I think that's a good way to put it.
One of the interesting things, though, is that someone who
is truly cynical about a given topic may self label
as skeptical, and that can lead to a fair amount
of confusion.

Speaker 1 (04:54):
Right well, of course, if skepticism is defined as being
as reasonable as you can with trust, the cynic always
thinks they're being reasonable, or usually probably thinks they're being reasonable.
They just think it is reasonable to have very low
trust and think everyone's going to stab them in the back,
And in fact, that brings us back, coming back to

(05:15):
the recap of the cynical genius illusion, The question is
are they correct in thinking that is the cynic in
fact being reasonable and having correct insights that non cynics lack.
The other half of the finding in that paper was
that the cynical genius illusion is actually an illusion. Highly
cynical people are not smarter or more knowledgeable on average.

(05:37):
In fact, in the majority of scenarios tested, the association
runs the other way, with education and intelligence being correlated
with a greater tendency to trust. The big caveat here,
of course, is that cynicism is warranted in some situations,
in particularly corrupt situations and scenarios. So it seems like

(05:58):
a common pattern the researchers found is that knowledgeable and
intelligent people might be might be more trusting by default,
but shift into cynical mode when they recognize that they
are dealing with a corrupt and untrustworthy situation or environment.
And in fact, that would sort of line up with
how I just defined skepticism, right. It's sort of like

(06:20):
detecting reliable signals from your environment, essentially paying attention to
evidence of how trustworthy the situation you're in is. But anyway,
this study and some studies cited by it helped us
answer some questions we raised in Part one. First of all,
do cynics or nonsnics have a more accurate model of

(06:40):
the world. Of course, it's hard to answer that question
in a way that averages out all environments in all situations.
It's kind of hard to say, like who's more correct overall,
but at least in a bunch of experimental scenarios like
random strangers are much more trustworthy than we tend to
give them credit. For example of this was that trust

(07:02):
based investing game we talked about where researchers give you
an initial reward of money. So they give you five dollars,
and then you have the option to either just keep
the five or hand that money to a stranger, which
quadruples the initial sum, turning five dollars into twenty dollars.
And then the stranger has the option to either keep

(07:22):
all the money or give you back half of the
total sum, doubling your initial investment. So you started with five,
you end up with ten if the stranger gives you
the money back. And in these types of experiments, strangers
tended to be cooperative and trustworthy. In the overwhelming number
of cases people doubted them way too often. So again,
that doesn't tell you about every situation in life, but

(07:43):
it is a piece of evidence that people on average
tend to overestimate other people's selfishness, and thus the highly
cynical person is probably going to miss out on lots
of opportunities to trust and to benefit from cooperation. But
the other question that's study shed some light on for
us was, since generalized cynicism has so many horrible downsides,

(08:07):
it's like, really bad for you in so many ways,
not just for the people around the cynic, but for
the cynic themselves, what are its upsides if any? And
there were a few answers here. If you are not
good at being able to recognize the difference between a
corrupt situation and a trustworthy one. Generalized cynicism may help

(08:27):
you avoid catastrophic outcomes from misplacing your trust, but again
this comes at great cost. It's sort of, you know,
we have to destroy the town in order to save it.

Speaker 2 (08:37):
Yeah. Or you can imagine, like a biological analogy would
be some sort of an organism that has had to
extend a great deal of energy into evolving some sort
of like highly protective shell that also slows it down
and restricts it restricts its range or something to that
effect exactly.

Speaker 1 (08:56):
I think that's a great analogy. And then the other
thing being that cynicism may have, according to the cynical
genius effect, the socially desirable effect of making you appear
smarter and more competent to others. Again, this comes at
great cost. Like Sherlock Holmes is cool, you might want
to seem smart like Sherlock Holmes, but given all the downsides,

(09:18):
the Sherlock gambit is probably not worth it, at least
in my opinion. Anyway, we're back today to talk about more.

Speaker 2 (09:24):
Yeah, and in this episode we're going to get a
little bit into social media and politics, which shouldn't come
as a surprise, right, Cynicism, social media, politics, these are
all I think expected waters.

Speaker 1 (09:37):
Wait, did you mean to sound cynical when you were
saying that? Was that the joke?

Speaker 2 (09:40):
Probably? Probably? Yeah, I mean it's easy to feel cynical
about all of this sort of thing, right, So just
looking considering just say, cynicism and social media like this
alone is a really big area to get into, and likewise,
political cynicism is another huge topic. Both of these have
been topics of discussion and analysis for years and years

(10:02):
and years.

Speaker 1 (10:03):
Yes, and I would say, of course the relationship between
cynicism and politics is especially important to understand within democracies,
you know, within places of popular political participation, and like
civil liberties and freedoms. You know, whether you are cynical
about the political structures you live under matters a lot

(10:25):
less if you are like a peasant in medieval France
than it does if you are somebody who is free
to act within a democracy, free to vote and run
for office yourself and engage in political rhetoric.

Speaker 2 (10:37):
Yeah, yeah, because it means coming to believe that the
thing that you can do that matters doesn't matter. And
then it's like the old saying by doing nothing. You know,
all problems are solved. So one of the books that
I referenced in the first episode is the MIT Press
book on Cynicism by Anscar Allen and Alan digs into

(11:01):
this topic a lot, and I won't attempt to cover
every point that he makes and every point that he
brings up on the matter, but there's some really good
nuggets of wisdom and observation in here related to the
level of high energy, negative and critical rhetoric that you
tend to find on the Internet and on social media,
very much encouraged for profit by service providers and social

(11:22):
media companies, as we've discussed in the past. Yeah, so
I've long been a fan of the LA based artist
collective known as Everything Is Terrible, Joe. I know you're
familiar with them as well. Oh yeah. Their slogan is
if everything is terrible, then nothing.

Speaker 1 (11:40):
Is that's great. I think that statement is meant with
a dash of irony, but yeah, everything is terrible is great.
You know, you may have seen videos of theirs, even
if you're not familiar with the name of like super
cuts of weird moments from old found media. One of
my favorites of all times. I think everything is terrible.

(12:01):
Did the video of it? Was just moments from a
video cassette that accompanied a Star Trek board game where
there's a like a kling on guy who keeps like
screaming at you to punish you. It was one of
the one of those things where they were trying to
do like mixed media board games I think in the
late eighties or early nineties, where like, I don't know,

(12:23):
you'd put the tape in and then you'd have to
roll stuff and anyway, this guy keeps Suddenly there's a
klingon popping on the TV saying, like you the one
who is moving now punishment.

Speaker 2 (12:35):
Yeah. Yeah. They several different individuals involved with that over
the years, and you know, the resurrect different bits of
old media, and it often super cut them into some
sort of a presentation. If you ever get to get
the chance to see them live, it's it's well worth it.
So if everything is terrible, then nothing is. Alan brings
up this exact point amid contemplations on the possible death

(12:58):
of philosophy in modern times, citing German philosopher and social
critic Peter Slaughterdyke, who frequently cites ancient cynic Diogenes is
pooping in public in his evaluation of modern cynicism as well,
So Alan now I should clarify though, Alan, in discussing

(13:18):
Slaughterdyke's ideas, he sees them as an overstatement. But Slaughterodyke
says that quote, because everything has become problematic, everything is
also now a matter of indifference.

Speaker 1 (13:33):
So I'm not sure I understand the context of that, right.
But the way I guess i'd interpret that at face
value is like, because of our increasing sort of critical
consciousness and awareness of the world, you can sort of
find that there are flaws in literally everything, and thus
if there are flaws in literally everything, nothing matters.

Speaker 2 (13:55):
Yeah, Yeah, and especially if you are just hyper aware
of all of the negative stories, you know, and this
has been this has been the case for a while.
I mean it comes back to some of the you know,
the very ancient ideas of how do you survive in
the world by maybe focusing a little more on the
dangers certainly, you know, if it bleeds, it leads, and
so forth. But the social media age, as we've discussed

(14:19):
on the show before, you know, various social media algorithms
have long favorite engagement over everything else, and engagement can
certainly mean things like love and excitement like look a
cute cat or look there's a new John Carpenter blu ray,
but it can also just mean hate, anger, and disgust.

Speaker 1 (14:35):
Yes, where your emotions become a tech company's business model
because your emotions are correlated to behavior on the app
and your susceptibility. You know how long you stay on
the app, how long you scroll, you know whether you're
likely to click on ads and things like that. And
it turns out that certain emotions, I think positive and

(14:57):
negative emotions, when manipulated in certain ways, have been found
to increase people's engagement. But the negative emotions, it seems
like those are really easy. That's an easy button to push.

Speaker 2 (15:08):
Yeah, yeah, And you know, it can often feel like
you're just being bombarded by all of this. And I mean,
there's a strong case to be made that this is
weaponized to a certain extent by various players. Right, if
there's just enough bad news coming at you, if there's
enough controversy, then you know, what are you going to
respond to? You can't possibly respond to all of it,
and maybe you end up responding to nothing at all.

Speaker 1 (15:30):
But you have to keep scrolling because what if there's
something you don't know about yet.

Speaker 2 (15:34):
Now, Alan cites that all of this is an overstatement because,
according to him, for individuals to truly feel this way,
their cynicism would have to be complete. And this reminds
me a bit in theme of something that's come up
on the show before. The author R. Scott Baker had
this idea of something he called the somatic apocalypse, in

(15:56):
which quote, all the shoulds of a meaningful life are
either individual or subcultural. As a result, the only universal
imperatives that remain are those arising out of our shared
biology are fears and hungers. So everything else just kind
of shuts down, descends into chaos or entropy. So absolute
widespread cynicism would, to paraphrase the words of Slaughterdyke, be

(16:20):
a situation where everything is poop in the street and
people are nauseated all the time. Okay, sounds bad, Yeah
yeah my understanding, as we would be talking about a
world in which cynicism concerning the human experience at large
becomes more absolute. But basically we withdraw into individual and

(16:41):
localized efforts. But Allan's counter argument here is that most
people are not so absolutely cynical he contends, quote modern
cynicism is driven not by generalized apathy, but by incomplete disenchantment.
In other words, his argument here is that modern cynics
have not entirely so admitted themselves to cynicism. They never

(17:03):
hit rock bottom, the point at which they might be
forced to confront their own cynicism. And so he mentions, how,
you know, coming back to the idea of diogenies, you know, again,
living in the streets among dogs, and you know, and
rags and shrouds, pooping in the streets. He brings up
this public defecation as a shock tactic that's meant to

(17:26):
make a point quote how funny is it that you
find this upsetting? And the modern cynic is just not
nauseated enough by the reality they're faced with to the
point where they make that big sea cynic shift toward
the pursuit of virtue. M okay, So almost as if
we're forever weightless in our cynicism, free falling toward a

(17:46):
point a forced self recognition and revelation we never quite reach,
Like an imagined space vessel, inching ever closer to the
speed of light, but unable to actually touch it. Or
to quote Allan again, he refers to it as quote
unembedded but is yet underdeveloped negativity interesting.

Speaker 1 (18:07):
Okay, wait, so am I interpreting this right? Then? Essentially
that Allan is suggesting that maybe if cynicism were more
intense and more total, that would actually lead to a
kind of horseshoe boomerang into seeing value and virtue.

Speaker 2 (18:23):
Again exactly, Yeah, that is exactly the point I believe
he's making is that, Yeah, we're just with this incomplete
disenchantment with the world, like we think things were bad.
We've lost trust and establishments, but we haven't completely bottomed out,
like to the point where we actually like look up
and potentially begin scaling back up this ladder of virtue.

Speaker 1 (18:46):
Hmm, I wonder I wonder about that. I don't know
if it really works that way, but I'm interested in
the idea.

Speaker 2 (18:53):
Yeah, Yeah, it's an interesting concept. And the idea here
is that social media would be part of that equation,
and writes that quote, the visceral discomfort of a live
audience gathered before the defecating cynic that's a capital cynic,
as in the philosopher, has been replaced by a virtual
audience that turns indignation into profit. So an Internet ecosystem

(19:16):
that thrives on bad sentiments and becomes characterized by just
non stop righteous indignation.

Speaker 1 (19:23):
But one that is discouraged from actually going anywhere positive rights,
just kind of festering negative emotion.

Speaker 2 (19:30):
Yeah. Now this made me think about past discussions of
the ideas of Jaron Lanier, And I don't know that
he ever directly invoked cynicism in any of his works,
or not the ones I'm familiar with, but one of
his basic observations was that social media companies reduce us
to data and to a product that's sold to advertisers,

(19:53):
and you know, there's an inherent modern cynicism to that
view of people, like the people are the product and
people are while at the same time realizing this can
fuel individual cynicism towards the entire social media endeavor to
the point that it's really hard to trust even you know,
alternate decentralized social media alternatives, or at least that's how
it seems to me. Now, there have been a number

(20:15):
of papers about this over the years. Have been some studies.
A recent study published in the International Journal of Press
Politics by Hassel at All digs into this a little bit,
and also there have been some past papers by the
lead author here, Ariel Hassel. The basic idea that I
was reading about from this author is that in political

(20:38):
is that political cynicism is on the rise in democracies
around the world, as people increasingly use social media to
access their news as well as additional political information, much
of which is hostile and lacking in civility. This should
come as no surprise you. If you are not aware
of this phenomena, then God bless you because you have

(20:59):
stayed out of the mud of all of this over
the past decade.

Speaker 1 (21:04):
I think this is broadly what's found by research in general,
but Rob, maybe you can let me know what you've
come across here. At least in myself, I've noticed that
if I there is a huge difference in how I
feel about the same news in when I'm getting it
from like reading articles in a newspaper or online newspaper

(21:25):
versus seeing it by scrolling social media. Gigantic difference in
how I process that, you know, even very bad and
distressing news. When I'm reading about it in you know,
in news articles, I feel like my response to it
is more measured and productive my mind tends to go

(21:46):
to what would be things that could be done to
fix this situation, well, you know that sort of thing.
Whereas when I consume basically the same news events by
like say, scrolling on a social media I tend to
not do this these days, but you know I can
remember from other times, and I have done it a
few times recently. Profoundly different emotional experience, one that is

(22:09):
much more distressing, and it just creates a feeling of
despair and helplessness. Like I do not have a productive
response to it, like thinking about things that could be
done to make the situation better. It's more just like
I want to surrender and curl up in a ball.

Speaker 2 (22:29):
You know.

Speaker 1 (22:29):
It's much more disempowering and horrifying.

Speaker 2 (22:32):
Yeah, and I think that's not an uncommon experience. Now,
coming back to this study from the International Journal of
Press Politics, this is basically what they found out based

(22:52):
on a panel survey of eighteen hundred American American adults
during the twenty twenty election. They found that the more
a person was exposed to political attacks on social media,
the more politically cynical they became.

Speaker 1 (23:07):
Yeah, okay, exposure led.

Speaker 2 (23:09):
To anger with increased political cynicism. Thus it became this
kind of like rodent wheel of exposure, anger, rising cynicism,
then more exposure, more anger, more rising cynicism. And to
be clear, they characterize this not as a kind of
healthy cynicism in response to corruption or failure, which they acknowledge.
You know, if you know, when when the system is corrupt,

(23:32):
when they are failures, it's right to have like some
response of cynicism. But this is the sort of cynicism
that is much more dangerous, and it can ultimately lead
to the delegitimization of democratic process.

Speaker 1 (23:45):
I might make the distinction we talked about earlier between
skepticism and cynicism, like that it can be very health
healthy to be skeptical of politics, to not just take
politician's word for it, you know, to look for evidence
of claims and things like that, versus cynicism where you
just have a bias toward negative emotion and low opinions
of moral character.

Speaker 2 (24:06):
Yeah. Yeah, And what's interesting here too is that it
ultimately goes beyond the sort of like you could frame
it as positive political fear mongering or you know, the
sort of anxiety fueling messaging that does get people to
the polls. That does inspire some sort of action, but
instead we're getting to like the level where it can

(24:27):
result in cynical inaction, where it's not like, well, I'm
revved up, I'm going to go do something about it.
I'm revved up, but I can do nothing about it
because thus is the world now. To go back to
that discussion of cynical poop in the streets again, it's
not that you're fed up with all the poop and
wants to do something about it or in response to it. Rather,

(24:49):
you're just generally nauseated by all the poop you see,
and you just engage from seeing it all together.

Speaker 1 (24:55):
So that is one type of response to political cynicism.
I came across the paper talking talking about it a
little bit differently that I think has some interesting insights here.
So I was looking for research that studied the particular
characteristics of how cynicism is expressed in political behavior, and
it turns out there's a decent amount of research on
this going back many years. Actually, there's a long running

(25:17):
link in the literature between high cynicism and a preference
for authoritarian rhetoric and governance. Authoritarianism being the concentration of
power under a central authority, under a figure or structure,
often a single person, and the repression of individual freedoms,
especially the forceful suppression of dissent. So I wanted to

(25:40):
look at one pretty highly cited paper on the subject
of cynicism and politics, and this was published in the
year twenty twelve in the European Journal of Personality by
Svin Patten, Elaine van Heil, Christoff Daunt and Emma Onrit
and it's called Stripping the Political cynic A psychological exploration
of the concept of political cynicism. Now, this was a

(26:04):
study of how cynicism manifests in politics in multiple samples,
specifically from Western Europe, and the authors note multiple times
that some of these results could be culture specific, and
so cynicism could manifest differently in one culture than it
does in another, or differently in one type of political

(26:25):
system than it does in another. But at least looking
at these samples in Belgium and the Netherlands, they found
some interesting results. And now I'm not going to be
able to get into everything the study found, but a
few bullets that stood out to me. The authors were
able to detect political cynicism as its own variable, which
was distinct from just generalized social cynicism, which we've been

(26:49):
talking about throughout this series, and from a somewhat distinct
from what they call political distrust. Now, what would be
the difference there. Political cynicism is cynicism applied specifically to
politics and politicians. So if general cynicism is the belief
that people are bad, people are selfish, and morals are fake,

(27:10):
political cynicism is the belief that politics and politicians are bad,
they're motivated by self interest and are unbound by professed morals.
Political cynicism is also differentiated here from simple distrust of
politicians and of politics. And I think a simple way
of explaining this slight difference is, if I have political distrust,

(27:34):
I am cautious about believing politicians and what they say.
I think that politicians and political institutions may in some
cases have incentives to lie or to make promises they
can't keep, So I am skeptical of what they say
and I try, You know, I am withholding some trust.
So there is this withholding trust element. But if I

(27:55):
have high political cynicism, I not only treat their claims
skeptically and withhold trust. But I also think politicians and
political institutions are bad, corrupt, and in it exclusively for themselves.
So it's like more of a negative emotional and moral
judgment against politics, not just caution or skepticism about the

(28:18):
claims emanating from it. Does that distinction makes sense? Yes,
So in this study, the authors found evidence that political
cynicism was its own thing, and while related to general
social cynicism and political distrust, it had its own distinct
predictive characteristics separate from those other two categories. Political cynicism,

(28:38):
in particular, was a predictor of a bunch of other
variables in a person. It tended to be related to
feelings of political powerlessness and political normlessness, so kind of
there's nothing I can do, and also there is no
right or wrong in politics, just power. The authors also
find that people high in political cynicism do not always

(29:01):
just sit out of politics. And we've talked about, or
we mentioned at least in previous parts some other studies
finding that people high in general cynicism were less likely
to vote, less likely to be involved in the political process,
But in this study they did not find that political
cynics were always sitting things out. At least within the

(29:21):
context of the samples from Belgium and the Netherlands, the
rate of voting among political cynics is not very different
from that of less cynical people, but people high in
political cynicism tended to view their vote more as a
protest or as a rebuke of the political system, rather
than a means of advancing a specific policy agenda. Quote.

(29:44):
Political cynics boost parties not for their ideological program per se,
but rather because of their supposed integrity. So it's like,
it's not so much about the policies that the party
they're supporting is proposing, but more often about like, this
is the only party that really tells it like it is.
The authors say political cynicism can be found all across

(30:07):
the political spectrum, but in this context, in these Western
European democracies, it tended to manifest most in support of
extreme right wing protest parties that use anti establishment rhetoric,
and the author say it's possible that this link is
specific to Belgium and the Netherlands at this time the
study was from twenty twelve, and it's possible that in

(30:28):
a different political environment, cynicism could be more left wing
coded or maybe even centrist. More research would be needed
on that. However, another dimension is that the authors here
also found a link between high political cynicism, racial prejudice,
and intolerance. This is in line with previous findings in
political psychology, and the research was only able to establish

(30:50):
a correlation, not to determine if there was a causal
effect between these variables, and so it invites the question,
if there is an effect, which way does the effect goes.
Racial prejudice tend to cause people to become politically cynical,
or does political cynicism tend to cause people to become
more racist. It could be thought, of course, that political
cynicism serves to support racist assumptions if the racist believes

(31:14):
the political system is working to the benefit of racial
groups they dislike. But it also could be that racial
prejudice itself is maybe a particular variety or expression of
underlying cynicism. So ultimately, political cynicism, it seems, is certainly
a thing that is distinct in itself. It's related to,

(31:34):
but distinct from, general social cynicism, and its expression is
a very important factor in understanding how democracies work. So
if you're involved in political science or political psychology, and
you want to understand and be able to model and
predict democracies, you need to understand political cynicism. It is
a factor. But another way I was thinking about the

(31:56):
expression of political cynicism is actually really to what we
talked about last time, to the cynical genius illusion. The
cynical genius illusion study found that while people don't necessarily
love cynics or think that they are the best at everything, remember,
people were less likely to trust cynics with, say a
social task like cheering up a depressed friend or taking

(32:19):
care of a stray animal or something like that. It
found that, you know, so we don't love cynics for everything,
we do tend on average to assume highly cynical people
are smarter and more cognitively competent, and you know who
doesn't want to be seen as smart. So specifically, I
was thinking about how this applies to conversations about politics,

(32:42):
where I've had this thought for a while that I
think people often selectively deploy cynical rhetoric in political conversations,
whether or not they really believe it all that strongly,
in order to look like they know what they're talking
about without having to get in to specifics, so like

(33:02):
broad sweeping statements of political cynicism. I think last time
we mentioned the example in all politicians they're all the same,
you know, it's just they're all liars, they're all the same.
It allows you to sound like you know what you're
talking about and sit up on a high horse about
the subject without having to know anything, or read anything
or follow the news. You can loftily condemn others without

(33:26):
having to do any homework.

Speaker 2 (33:29):
Yeah, yeah, and yeah. I think we've seen some very
strong examples of this over the past ten years, and
sometimes sadly you see it puppeted in say comedy, in
mainstream rhetoric. One of the main examples being in any
case where someone is just talking about a given election

(33:51):
and saying it's just a choice between two bad choices.
You know, it was like both of the choices are
just as bad. I mean, that's just like, I mean,
that's a great example of lowercase the cynicism, where it's
like it doesn't matter, everything's just as bad. It doesn't
it doesn't matter if I vote for one or the other.
But it also means you don't have to get into
actually comparing the two its assume they're all just as bad,

(34:13):
which I mean, is there ever a case where two
bad choices are exactly as bad? Yeah? I mean, if
you're you're given a choice between two different toxic mushrooms,
there are going to be different symptoms, there are different
dosages and so forth, Like, they're not exactly the same.
Even if yes, in this one cherry picked example, the
end result is the same for you, the consumer of

(34:35):
the toxic mushroom.

Speaker 1 (34:36):
I think that's a great analogy, and it's not to
say it is illegitimate to say in a you know,
in a two party democracy, to dislike both major parties
or dates, and you know that's fair, but like, yeah,
the statements like they're all the same, Like if you
if you really meant that, that would be absurd. It
couldn't be all exactly the same. Maybe neither as to
your liking. But but if you phrased it that way,

(35:00):
that might invite people to ask follow up questions like
well in what way you know?

Speaker 2 (35:04):
Yeah, like like what's your scoring method and is it
a scoring method where yeah, you reach an absolute zero,
but you can't get underneath the zero, so you can
just have have them bottomed out an equal I I guess,
but that doesn't sound like a great scoring mechanism.

Speaker 1 (35:16):
And you know what I want to say also that
I think there is a more innoxious version of this
exact thing. I mean, I've been framing it in a
kind of like I'm framing this hypothetical person in a
kind of unfriendly way, like they're trying to seem smart
without doing any homework. But there's also a more common,
you know, you might say, at least seemingly benign version
of it, where you're just trying to like sort of

(35:39):
get through a tense moment in a conversation, or like
get through something quickly I don't know, with a relative
or something like that, just by making a kind of
quick sweep it all under the rug conversation, you know,
statement about politics, just to like avoid having a difficult conversation.
Go on, do you know what I'm talking about?

Speaker 2 (36:01):
Yeah? Yeah, just as an escape hatch for an unpleasant conversation,
that sort of thing.

Speaker 1 (36:05):
I think people do that sort of thing all the time,
even if they're not like trying to look like a
cynical genius. And to an extent, that functions the same
kind of way. It's just like it's a defense mechanism.
It's a way of using cynicism to avoid uncomfortable specifics,
whether that's like revealing that you don't have as much

(36:26):
knowledge as you would like to appear to have, or
revealing sort of uncomfortable tensions and differences between people.

Speaker 2 (36:34):
Yeah, And I think also we have to acknowledge that
this sort of cynicism can arise and certainly in response
to the very sort of social media bombardment so we've
been talking about, but also as a direct result of
manipulation and disinformation that can force you into this mode.
So I want to be not to completely forgive cynicism

(36:56):
as it nanifests, but we have to acknowledge like the
complexity of its manifestation in a given person as a
response to streams of information and their overall media, political,
social environment.

Speaker 1 (37:09):
So in this series, I think at several points it's
clear I'm coming down somewhat normatively against cynicism in a
lot of scenarios. But I also think it's very important
to understand and be sympathetic to the pressures that give
rise to cynicism and to understand how we're all susceptible
to it. Even people who are not high in cynicism,

(37:30):
like you've talked about, we have cynical moments, and we
might well become more cynical over time if we sort
of water those little cynical instincts and let them grow.

Speaker 2 (37:39):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (37:39):
But anyway, coming back to that idea raised of trying
to leverage expressions of cynicism to make yourself look better
or to come off more favorably in conversation. I did
find a study on this, so it wasn't just a hunch.
There's a study in the journal Public Opinion Quarterly in
twenty twenty four by Hillary K's style called Impression Management
and Expectations of Political Cynicism, and this found that cynicism,

(38:04):
specifically with reference to politics, was a means that people
use to try to control how others perceive them to
read from the abstract quote. In three studies, I demonstrate
that people report they are cynical in order to avoid
giving the impression they do not know much about politics.
Political cynicism is not a socially desirable characteristic. People do

(38:29):
not believe cynicism is normatively good. At the same time,
many see value to cynicism in politics, a finding which
carries broad implications for the relationship between cynicism and perceived
knowledge in political discourse. And so I think that's important too,
like recognizing that you might not be overall a highly

(38:51):
cynical person, and yet you might still deploy cynicism specifically
with reference to politics, maybe because of a response to
how you perceive politics. You know, maybe you think you're
just rationally responding to politics being very corrupt and something
that is not worthy of trust, or investing the time
and energy to figure out who is worth trusting within politics,

(39:14):
or maybe you're trying to manage the impressions you make
on other people, which, again, despite the kind of unfriendly
way I was phrasing it earlier, I mean that's something
we're all always trying to do. I mean, let's be real,
I mean, everybody's always to some extent, even if you're
a very authentic person or you think you are, you're
somewhat trying to control how other people think about you.
And it seems that people often think cynicism is one

(39:37):
way of avoiding coming off as dumb or not knowing
anything about politics.

Speaker 2 (39:44):
Right right, and perhaps a way to express neutrality, but
kind of like a hard edge neutrality that keeps people
from poking at you. Because if you're just like, you know,
I don't know yet, I'm just kind of in a
fact finding area right now, then the people might want
to understandably help you with your fact finding. But if
you're like, no, I've already figured it all out and

(40:05):
everything is horrible, then that kind of pushes people away
and they'll be like, okay, fair enough.

Speaker 1 (40:11):
But though, another thing that is interesting, going back to
the previous study is you might assume at first glance
that if you express generalized political cynicism that is politically neutral,
but it turns out that is not the case. In fact,
people who express generalized political cynicism were often fans of
extreme parties. There actually were supporters of people within the

(40:34):
political system, very often what are considered by most people
the extreme wings of the political spectrum, especially at least
within the Western European sample here the extreme right wing
anti establishment parties. But also coming back to the idea
of impression management and these little moments in conversation where
we might use cynicism to paper over something or try

(40:57):
to come off a certain way to kind of get
through a tough spot. But I had to wonder to
what extent these little acts of performative political cynicism, which
again may seem harmless enough because you're just trying to
get through a conversation without you know, revealing you don't
know much, or trying to get through some tension, to
what extent these actually contribute over time to genuine generalized

(41:21):
political cynicism, which is sometimes linked to these toxic attitudes
like racism and intolerance, which can erode the legitimacy of democracies,
can lead people toward authoritarianism or make them submit to
it more easily, even if they don't love it. You know,
I think most people listening will probably agree these are
like bad outcomes. And I don't have a way of

(41:44):
proving that these little, more harmless seeming moments contribute to
that snowball effect overall, but I have to suspect that
they do. And it makes me think that I, at
least personally want to be more careful about having these
little harmless seeming moments of cynicism, even even in passing,
because I think they do kind of add up when

(42:06):
you hear things like that over and over.

Speaker 2 (42:08):
Yeah, because I feel like on a personal level, you're just, yeah,
you're just kind of going into that cynical mindset more
and potentially going into at the very least that area
of no hope and no action. But then perhaps in
our social interactions you're kind of like greasing the shoot
of cynicism for everyone else. Like everyone if someone has
like a cynical trajectory going on in the way they're

(42:30):
viewing the world and interacting with others, if they come,
if they interact with you, and you're just kind of like,
carry on, let me actually speed you up a little
bit as you head down that hut, Like, obviously that's
that's not helping anyone, and we don't want to find
it out. What is it the end of that shoot? Yeah, Now,

(42:55):
at this point I wanted to turn our attention not
completely away from this topic because it's actually rather related
to it, and that is to the interactions between cynicism
and conspiracy theories and conspiracy thought.

Speaker 1 (43:09):
Ah, yeah, I think this is going to be some
fertile ground.

Speaker 2 (43:12):
Yeah. We of course, we've talked about conspiracy theories quite
a bit on the show before, generally and often discussing
the dangers of following their siren song to easy wonder,
to prejudice, endorsement, and more harmful worldviews. And studies have
indeed linked belief in conspiracy theories to not only distrust

(43:32):
of authority, but also general political cynicism and just general
cynicism as well. One paper I was looking at on
this topic is from twenty thirteen by Einstein and Glick
titled Scandals, Conspiracies, and the Vicious Cycle of Cynicism, and
this is from the annual meeting of the American Political
Science Association, and the authors here describe a cycle of

(43:56):
cynicism that goes as follows, quote political scandals, dominion is
trust in government. This lower confidence, in turn, spurs higher
levels of conspiracy belief, even in claims unrelated to ongoing scandals.
So the idea of being you know, I think we
can all sort of imagine the scenario here. There's some
sort of you know, sex scandal here that you're hearing about,

(44:19):
some sort of you know, money scandal here with other politicians,
and it kind of like, in your viewpoint, like muddies,
the water makes them for a cynical political environment, and
in that cynical political environment, it seems more likely that
they're perhaps covering up UFOs or what have you.

Speaker 1 (44:38):
I was just thinking about this and about how this
type of thinking I think benefits from what to use
mathematical terms, might be sort of like the transitive property
of distrust, where it's like if if one politician or
political institution, government, or whatever has done something to earn
your distrust, that therefore is evidence against all of them

(45:01):
or all objects of that class. So it's like, you know,
a politician A lied, therefore we know politician B is lying.

Speaker 2 (45:10):
Yeah. Yeah, And my own tendency here is also to
think about, you know, the desire for we've talked about
the desire for for there to be aliens, for there
to be UFO visitations, and you know, and this this
is a pretty you know, rich area as well. You know,
in some levels, perhaps it's most pure form. There is
the idea of like, I want aliens to be real

(45:32):
because I want them to come here and solve our problems.
Oh yeah, or you know, or it's somehow you drop
aliens into all of this and everything makes sense. It's
it's going to be a way to understand a confusing world,
a confusing and troubling world. But if you want to
believe strongly enough, and the scientific world is saying there's
no evidence for this, and the government or various government

(45:56):
agencies and different governments are saying there's no evidence for this,
then one was response, One way to keep the dream
alive is to just assume that all of these voices
that are telling you no are doing so because they
are covering something up.

Speaker 1 (46:08):
Yeah, they must all be evil, otherwise why would they lie. Now.

Speaker 2 (46:12):
Of course, this is not to say that a government
or some sort of governmental body wouldn't have reason to
keep the discovery of alien technology or alien existence secret exactly.

Speaker 1 (46:26):
But you know, hypothetical incentive to lie is not evidence
for the underlying premise. It's like how I could say,
if my wife had actually been replaced by the thing
from John Carpenter's The Thing, it would make sense for
her to lie and say she was not the thing
and was in fact still a human. But that is
not evidence that she has in fact been cloned by

(46:46):
an alien.

Speaker 2 (46:48):
That's a good point. That's a good point. So I
was looking around for some additional thoughts in all of this,
and I found a twenty twenty four article for Proceedings
of the International Astronomical Union from philosoph for Tony Milligan.
And this is interesting because Milligan argues that belief in
UFO visitation may well at this point constitute a true

(47:08):
societal problem. And while he contends that certainly low level
belief and stuff like this and fringe belief and enthusiasm
for stuff like this is nothing to get bent out
of shape about, his point is that as it edges
closer to like mainstream belief, three major problems emerge, one
of which is central to our discussion here, and the

(47:29):
other two I think are also interesting in their own right.
One of them is that UFO narratives can sometimes infringe
upon and even overwrite indigenous storytelling. I found this interesting because,
of course, we see examples of this in popular conspiracy theories,
where they link indigenous beliefs and stories to UFOs and

(47:50):
cryptids and so forth, reinterpreting those traditional stories as a
kind of proof and potentially corrupting those stories in the process.

Speaker 1 (48:00):
And not letting those stories just be what they actually are, right.

Speaker 2 (48:04):
And you know, it's you know, you can note that
we do see this with all aspects of history, myth,
and religion. But I think the kicker here is the
power imbalance and the appropriation involved. Milligan also says that
it all generates noise that distracts from genuine science quote
background noise which impedes science communication. So you know, we've

(48:25):
talked about this before, like putting scientists on the defensive
regarding something like the UFOs and so forth, instead of
you know, actually highlighting legitimate scientific efforts that can improve
our world.

Speaker 1 (48:40):
Well, right, because the kind of UFO conspiracy ideation we're
talking about is always engaging in motivated reasoning. I mean,
we can you can hypothetically imagine a you know, just
a sort of a maximally unbiased, skeptical UFO researcher who's like,
I'm just going to look into these claims and see
what I find. But there are people like that, and

(49:02):
in my experience, they always find that, like, yeah, there's
no good reason to believe any of these stories, right
and so and so, what you're left with among the
UFO believers is people who are highly for a variety
of reasons, motivated to believe already that yes, UFOs are real,
yes they're being hidden. And thus the fact that you
do not agree with me is evidence that you are

(49:23):
at best, you know, woefully naive, and at worst you're
part of the conspiracy.

Speaker 2 (49:28):
Yeah, but the number one point that Milligan makes is
that it can lead to erosion of trust in governments
and institutions, because again, if you want to believe, if
this is your like core belief, then you just assume
that everyone else is covering the aliens up. So of
course you're not going to trust governments, you're not going

(49:48):
to trust institutions, you're not going to trust experts, and
you know, yeah, if you're a true believer. It seems
to me one of the problems here is you'd never
be able to one hundred percent show off the cynicism.
You know, like if the government or institution said tomorrow, okay,
you got this alien life exists, but they say, here's

(50:10):
the kicker though it's only microbial or it, you know,
or even if they were just to go even further
than that and say, all right, here's the deal. Gray
aliens absolutely real, but like Nordic aliens, green aliens and
reptilians are totally not real. Would that that would not
please everyone. There's no way you could please everyone, Like

(50:31):
there's i'm you know, I'm certainly willing to admit that
it's possible that some of what's out there in the
ufology world is real, but is all of it one
absolutely not, There's no way it could be. So you're
always going to have like some level of conspiracy thinking

(50:52):
and no matter what could conceivably be revealed.

Speaker 1 (50:56):
I think this is actually a good point that in
some cases could get through to people who are fond
of this type of conspiracy ideation, because I think a
lot of people in that situation and I'm trying to
be sympathetic to people with whom I disagree about a
lot of things, but I think a lot of them
would recognize if you bring it up that there really

(51:17):
isn't a plausible scenario. They could imagine where they would
be satisfied, right, Well, Like, what, okay, imagine you know
to them that actually we had not been visited by aliens.
I no, that's not what you think. But imagine it
turns out you're wrong and that is the case. What

(51:37):
what would satisfy you of that fact? What piece of evidence?

Speaker 2 (51:42):
What?

Speaker 1 (51:42):
Like? How would you be like, Okay, I'm convinced now, Well.

Speaker 2 (51:46):
I mean it's it's like it's it is it becomes
a worldview, right, I mean, and the conspiracy is part
of the worldview, so you would have to like, it
would completely turn everything on its head if you were
able to do that. So instead, it just seems like
it would be a case where you would have this revelation,
but it wouldn't please everyone, and so everyone would just

(52:07):
assume some greater revelation is possible and that some cover
up is still in place, like, Okay, they told us
about the grace, Why are they not telling us about
the Greens?

Speaker 1 (52:16):
Yeah, And coming back to your point about the erosion
of trust, I mean, one problem with this sort of
the fondness for conspiracy narratives is really it makes trust impossible.
No matter how trustworthy you know, an institution has a
track record of being, institutions are actually of variable trustworthiness.
Some lie more than others, some I think of, you know,

(52:38):
overall or quite trustworthy institutions, others are not very trustworthy.
And so like a skeptical person as opposed to a
cynical person, would try to evaluate the track record of
an institution or of an individual spokesperson and say, like,
you know, what, do we have reason to trust them
or not? But if you take a sort of a
conspiracy cover up as a starting point, and you start

(53:01):
with that conclusion, you will always have evidence that anybody
who doesn't agree with you has already violated your trust,
they've already lied to you. So you're taking instead of
the thing we talked about earlier with the kind of
applying a you know, a distrust inducing incident from one
politician to another. What in that example, we use something

(53:24):
that really happened, like so and so politician lied about something,
you know, assuming that lie was real. Now I can't
trust politician B because politician A lied. What if the
initial thing was not even actually a lie. It's just
something where you're assuming they're not telling you the truth
because they don't agree with you, that we're hiding an
alien spacecraft somewhere.

Speaker 2 (53:43):
Yeah, it's this like imagined original sin that prevents any
kind of legitimate trust to ever take place. Another thing
I was thinking about in all of this. You know,
we've talked a good bit in over the past year
or so about low res ambiguous data. Yeah, it's like
it could be visual, it could be some other kind
of information, and certainly we can get even get out

(54:05):
of the realm of recorded information and into just sightings
and observations. You know, cases where you can make a
case for it. It's blurry, it could be a UFO
it's blurry, or you know, or we don't know exactly
what we're looking at. It could be an antennae on
the bottom of the ocean floor. And this is interesting

(54:26):
because I was looking back and there were various headlines
several years ago talking about an end of UFO ology
that arguing that, Okay, we're getting in this information age
full of ubiquitous visual data gathering. You know, we're just
we're just going to see this stuff dry up and
go away. But don't I don't see that happening, Like
there's always going to be low res ambiguous data.

Speaker 1 (54:48):
Well, yeah, that's right. I mean one thing you might
have assumed that as like everybody's got a camera in
their pocket, and the cameras have become sharper and they
get clearer images and stuff, You're not going to see
all these like blurry kind of like what is that
in the sky. No, it turns out like as the
resolution gets better and these images, in fact, they'll just
capture things that are further away or they're like still ambiguous,

(55:12):
just like what's that dot? And you know, in some
cases people actually can figure out like oh, you know,
that's a star, you know, or that is a mylar
balloon or something like that. In other cases, like you
can't figure it out. There's just a dot on your
image of the sky and you don't know what it is.
And it's in those situations where it's low resolution and
there's not enough image, there's not enough information to really

(55:35):
reach a solid conclusion, where this kind of these thoughts
can always bloom. There's always still the possibility you don't
know what it is, so why isn't it aliens?

Speaker 2 (55:44):
Or it's just the information is complex and you don't
have the background to understand it, or you don't have
the additional insight and layers to understand it. And therefore
it allows you to apply the script of the parent
normal to it in order to interpret it, the script
that is very malleable that can be shifted and applied

(56:07):
to any ambiguous data to produce the desired result.

Speaker 1 (56:11):
But it's funny even in this area of vieufology, I mean,
this is something I read about sometimes. I mean, cynicism
plays in here too, because often people will be able
to come in and say, oh, you know this image
that you were very excited about of like a thing
moving in the sky, I was able to calculate that
this is actually an artifact created by the camera system used,

(56:34):
and I can show you how Like, you know, a
lot of times people just be like, you know, why
would I believe you. You've been part of the UFO
cover up for years, You've been posting articles like that,
and so like, there is a kind of cynicism that
just prevents you from accepting what looks to me like
a pretty good explanation of a weird looking image. Yeah,
what this is really getting into, I think is that

(56:55):
we've just sort of, for a few minutes now been
dancing around this. But I think another big thing about
cynicism is that it functions as an excuse. Cynicism functions
as an excuse to excuse bad behavior on your own part.
For one thing, we've been mentioning this less but I
think this is absolutely true that if you get caught

(57:19):
doing something wrong that you really know is wrong, you
can't really make a defense of what you did. What
do people say? They say, everybody does it? Yeah, Yeah,
cynicism is just like projecting cynicism onto others excuses your
undeniable bad behavior because it's just what everybody does. Everybody's
like this. This of course in the realm of politics,

(57:41):
this happens all the time. When somebody's favorite politician, it's
really undeniable. You know, they get caught on camera doing
something really bad. If they can't deny it. What people say,
everybody does it. They're all, you're so naive, you think
the other ones are better than this, So it excuses
bad behavior. But then the other way it's an excuse
is that it excuses poor epistemic practices. When you don't

(58:05):
have you want to believe something and you don't have
good reasons too, and in fact people are giving you
very good reasons not to believe the thing you believe,
you can resort to cynicism so that you don't have
to pay attention to that. It's like, well, you're just
all part of it. You're all just all lying. Why
should I believe anything you say?

Speaker 2 (58:22):
Yeah, it's like it lowers the horizon of like the
moral universe around us, to the level of the of
whatever fallen star we're looking at.

Speaker 1 (58:30):
Yeah, yeah, we have gotten into a lot of dark
territory today, but next time we do want to focus
on the topic of how to avoid in combat cynicism.
So I think coming a little bit back into the light.

Speaker 2 (58:44):
All right, so join us on Thursday for that. Just
a reminder to everyone out there that Stuff to Blow
Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast, with
core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short form episode on
Wednesdays and on Fridays. We set aside most serious concerns
to just talk about a weird film on weird House.

Speaker 1 (59:00):
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. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is

(59:22):
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
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