April 24, 2025 • 50 mins
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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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey you welcome to do Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
By name is Robert.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with
the fourth and final part in our series on cynicism.
There has been a light at the end of the tunnel,
and we finally reached it. So in Part one, we
defined cynicism as the tendency to believe that people are bad, selfish,
and untrustworthy, and we distinguished this modern definition from other
(00:39):
concepts like the cynic philosophy of ancient Greece, which is
a whole different thing, and from similar but distinct concepts
like pessimism. We also looked at research on the correlates
of cynicism across a bunch of domains of life, from
health to career and all kinds of things, and discovered
that being highly cynical tends to have overwhelmingly negative effect
(01:00):
on a person's life. In Part two, we focused primarily
on the so called cynical genius illusion. The short version
of this is that while people might not necessarily like
highly cynical people for whatever reason, we tend to assume
that they are smart and competent in cognitive domains, conforming
(01:22):
to the Sherlock Holmes archetype. However, experiments showed that this
is not actually the case. On average, highly cynical people
are not smarter than everybody else, and if anything, the
correlation usually goes the other way, And so we talked
about possible reasons for this effect, and also talked about
the question of what, if anything, is the actual benefit
(01:43):
of generalized cynicism. It seems like one answer is that
if you are not very skilled at telling the difference
between a trustworthy situation and an untrustworthy one, generalized cynicism
may protect you from catastrophic misplacements of trust, but again
great cost to your well being and at the price
of many lost opportunities to benefit from trust and cooperation.
(02:07):
In Part three, we talked about the role of cynicism
in politics, including the idea that cynicism has been on
the rise in many democracies around the world for a
possible number of reasons, one influence maybe being the use
of social media. We also talked about research on the
phenomenon of political cynicism, in particular as distinct from just
(02:27):
general social cynicism or from simple distrust or skepticism of politicians,
and we got into some observed characteristics of how cynicism
manifests in political participation. We also talked about how people
may use a mask of cynical rhetoric about politics in
order to influence how they're perceived by others, maybe to
(02:50):
sort of cover up the fact that you maybe don't
know a lot about what you're talking about, and we
discussed the link between cynicism and a preference for conspiracy
based explanation.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
Another thing we discussed that ties into this episode a
little bit is the idea that escape from cynicism in
the modern sense, one way to escape from it would
be to push through to a point of true disenchantment
and essentially become an ancient cynic, a capital C cynic
in the philosophical sense. Now, we'll see how well that
(03:23):
idea pans out with what we have to talk about today.
But to be clear, we're not recommending this is a
standard solution to any cynicism you're wrestling with in your life.
It's more interesting from the standpoint of understanding what lowercase
cynicism and capital C cynicism is. So I think it's
(03:43):
an interesting take in that regard, but not necessarily something
you want to try for yourself. Like, the answer is
not to I think we can state pretty clearly here.
Don't try to become more cynical about life in order
to reach some point of equilibrium.
Speaker 3 (04:00):
Yeah, I think maybe I see what the author you
were citing when you brought this up is getting at
with the idea of a sort of total disenchantment leading
to a freedom to once again embrace virtue. I mean
that almost seems a kind of Buddhist in a way, like,
you know, like losing your love for the things of
the world, allowing you to find like different higher levels
(04:22):
of appreciation. But I question to what extent that kind
of enlightened disenchantment capital C cynicism can actually be reached
just by increasing your lowercase C cynicism along the standard dimension,
you know, like becoming even less and less trustful. I
don't know if that eventually gets you to capital C cynicism.
Speaker 4 (04:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:44):
I think its primary purpose is to help us understand
the connections between ancient cynicism and modern cynicism, rather than
give us an approach for fixing our own lives.
Speaker 3 (04:55):
Now, given everything that we've talked about so far. One
of the things, the main things we wanted to talk
about today was the question of where cynicism comes from.
What can we understand about its origins within a culture
and within a person, how it grows and spreads, and
thus how can it be counteracted. Is there anything we
really know about how to stop the growth of cynicism.
(05:19):
I think this is a field where, you know, we
don't have really strong conclusions yet, but there are some
good starting points based on research. And one paper that
I came across that addresses this question pretty directly was
published in twenty twenty three in the journal Trends in
Cognitive Sciences by a pair of researchers from the Stanford
(05:40):
Psychology Department named Eric Neuman and Jamil Zaki. And this
paper is called Toward a Social Psychology of Cynicism. So
the authors begin this paper by addressing what they called
the cynicism paradox. Cynicism quote tracks numerous negative outcomes, and
yet many people are cynical. And so this is really
(06:02):
something we've already been talking about this series, but kind
of with a different framing. We've been asking the question
if cynicism is clearly so bad for our lives? Is
there any compensating benefit? Because if it's harmful and lots
of people are highly cynical anyway, shouldn't you think there's
probably some kind of trade off that makes it worth
the cost. We've already mentioned several specific ways or scenarios
(06:26):
in which it might be adaptive, but then again, it
might just be one of those things that is just
plain bad for us but happens anyway, like, for example, depression.
You might be able to explain how depression grows out
of biological mechanisms that are evolved in order to be
adaptive for us, but you don't have to assume that
depression itself has benefits overall. It's just like something's gone
(06:51):
wrong and it's bad for us. It's possible. Cynicism is
usually the same way. But the authors here sort of
take the same idea and they frame it as this
paradox cynicism hurts the cynic and yet cynicism seems to
spread and bloom a new year after year. And so
the authors say, given the observation of the cynicism paradox,
(07:13):
research within social psychology should focus on a couple of
questions where cynicism comes from, and how it spreads, and
how can it be countered, diminished or alleviated. So first
the question what explains cynicism? Where does it come from?
First they address the possibility, what if the cynic is right.
We've talked about this from a number of angles. Maybe
(07:36):
cynicism is just an accurate assessment based on observations of
the world. In the words of the author's quote, perhaps
it reflects a realistic perception of the suffering caused by
human self interest. But we've already explored research casting serious
doubt on this, For example, the various experiments showing that
people tend to grossly overestimate the selfishness and treachery of strangers.
(08:00):
Most people in most types of situations are actually pretty trustworthy.
And the authors seem to agree with this conclusion, and
so instead they identify three ways that they think cynicism arises.
It's not necessarily that it is an accurate model of
the world. But instead quote, we will argue that people
(08:20):
often overestimate self interest, create it through their expectations, or
overstate their own to not appear naive. Now, the authors
here acknowledged that, of course cynicism can be and often
is responsive to observations.
Speaker 4 (08:38):
Of the real world.
Speaker 3 (08:40):
For example, this is an experimental finding. We become more
cynical when we witness people behaving selfishly. If you do
an experiment where you stage people catching somebody doing something
selfish and untrustworthy, that actually makes us less likely to trust.
So we've witnessed an example that trust, you know, did
(09:00):
not turn out well, and it affects our baseline in
a way, at least within the situation, we've become less trusting.
But jumping off of this, they say that we can easily,
because of various psychological phenomena, biases, and so forth, become
kind of trapped in an unrealistically cynical mindset that is
not a good model of how the world usually works
(09:22):
and brings with it all the harms we've talked about.
And you know, you can think about this in a
number of different psychological domains. Your initial tendency is based
on an observation, like you do see a betrayal or
an example of somebody acting selfishly, but then you form
an inaccurate, totalizing worldview based on that one salient example.
Speaker 2 (09:46):
Yeah, there's this really insightful table that they cite here
that I've found very interesting with these different categories of cynicism,
group cynicism, institutional cynicism, in general cynicism, and this kind
of model for how things might intensify. So, like one
(10:09):
example they include is a young colleague betrays an older
one in a team project. What does the older colleague conclude?
And so the initial cynicism is, well, young people are
self interested, and then that's the group's cynicism. Then the
institutional cynicism is people in the workplace are self interested,
and then the general cynicism is people are self interested.
(10:33):
And so you can imagine like a blossoming of cynicism
more or less along these these routes, you know, from
being highly specific to you know, a particular encounter, to
being increasing generalities about the way the world works.
Speaker 3 (10:50):
That's an interesting point. Yeah, And in fact, though, the
cynicism may be inaccurate at every single stage in this progression.
So like let's say I observe Johnny doing something selfish
in one instance, and I start by saying Johnny is
an untrustworthy person. That may not actually be true about Johnny.
Maybe I just caught him at his worst moment, But
it might be true about Johnny. Then I abstract it
(11:12):
to some group Johnny belongs to. For some reason, his
membership in a particular group is meaningful to me, and
so I see him as representative of that group and
apply the untrustworthiness to the whole group. And then I
could branch out even further to some institution in which
Johnny exists, and then possibly to all of humankind. But
at every single level, it's possible you are actually not
(11:34):
drawing a good generalization from observing one instance of behavior.
Speaker 2 (11:38):
This made me think about cynicism on The Simpsons, particularly
as it relates to Homer Simpson. There's a famous episode
from the Golden Age of Simpson's episodes in which we
kind of get an origin story for homer cynicism. It's
the City of New York Versus Homer, in which a
young and optimistic Homer Simpson experiences a number of betrayals
(12:02):
and hostilities upon visiting the Big Apple.
Speaker 3 (12:05):
We talked about this episode in our Weird House Cinema
on the Face Behind the Mask, because Peter Lourie has
the exact same experience.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
Yes, the exact same experience, and in this episode we
see how it leads to an extremely cynical view of
New York and New Yorkers. But you could also argue
that it perhaps underlines the general anger in cynicism that
comes to define Homer, at least in these early classic
seasons of the show.
Speaker 3 (12:32):
Yeah, though it is interesting how malleable Homer's character is,
and yet he still feels like a cohesive character, Like
sometimes Homer is very, very trusting and other times he's
very cynical.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
Yeah, he's changed a lot over the years. I mean
not in a character development way, but just in the
realities of the show being on television this long, with
this many different writers over the years. Various commentators have
discussed how, in the early sense, so certainly the golden
age of the Simpsons, you have this mix of cynicism
(13:04):
and heart that kind of balances everything out. But the
cynicism and melancholy have been observed to be particularly strong
during that first season, and then they move away from that,
and then eventually they kind of move away from homer
cynicism and anger in general and double down on his
frankness and his stupidity, so he becomes you know, it's
(13:27):
more about like the dumb jokes in the Gullible Homer
as we proceed. But if you look at the New
York episode, and you look at some of these episodes
from the from like the nineteen nineties, you can easily
fill out a chart watching how we have a situation
where Homer encounters selfish people in New York, and then
(13:49):
this fosters into a worldview that, well, all New Yorkers
are selfish, and then maybe all people are selfish as well.
Like you can imagine it being like the thing, it
blossoms out into Homer's general cynicism.
Speaker 3 (14:03):
Right, this is a great comparison. So, yeah, it begins
as the observation of an individual action or behavior, and
then generalizing to the person who did that, then the
group to whom that person belongs, and then to the
society at large, and then to all of humankind.
Speaker 2 (14:20):
Yeah, and tell you you're the type of person who's like,
of course I'm going to steal roadside sugar because anyone
else would do the same thing.
Speaker 3 (14:26):
Yes, So anyway, in this paper, the authors try to
formulate a model of how cynicism can spread at three
different levels of social interaction. So one is through interactions
(14:49):
at the interpersonal level between two people. The next is
at the intra group level within groups, and then finally
at the inter group level between in groups. So regarding
the interpersonal level of cynicism of formation, the authors raise
the question, what if at the interpersonal level, cynicism is
(15:11):
a self fulfilling prophecy, In other words, an initially false belief,
or at least a belief not based on evidence, whether
whether true or false, an initially false belief that influences
the behavior of the believer in such a way that
they make the world conform to the way they believe
it is. And psychological research has identified a bunch of
(15:35):
dynamics like this. Self fulfilling prophecies show up in all kinds.
Speaker 4 (15:39):
Of ways in our behavior.
Speaker 3 (15:40):
For example, some experiments have found that if you treat
somebody in a way that indicates you have high expectations
of their competence, it can actually make them more competent.
And obviously there would be limits to effects like this.
You know, you can't just, you know, like hand, somebody
who knows no thing about medicine a scalpel and say
(16:01):
I believe in you go do the surgery. You know,
they're probably not going to know what to do. But
within certain limits, of a plausible knowledge and behavior. You
can imagine how having somebody else show confidence in you
can make you more confident in yourself, maybe make you
less nervous, increase your performance certain types of jobs, or
(16:22):
maybe having somebody treat you as competent makes you more conscientious,
more careful to do a good job so as not
to disappoint them, and so forth, and so then the
author say quote, just like expectations about competence, cynical expectations
of moral character can become self fulfilling. So examples of
this remember the trust based investing game that we talked
(16:46):
about in previous episodes in the series, where I am
given some money and then I have the option to
either keep the money or hand it over to a stranger,
at which point the money gets quadrupled. So maybe I
initially get five dollars, if I hand it to the stranger,
it becomes twenty dollars. And then the stranger has the
option to either keep all of the money for themselves
(17:08):
or split the money and give me back ten dollars,
so we both get ten and I double my initial investment.
This was one of the experiments that found strangers almost
always honor the investors trust and give half the money back.
But people greatly underestimated how often that would happen. We
overestimate the selfishness and treachery of strangers.
Speaker 4 (17:29):
Anyway.
Speaker 3 (17:30):
The authors mentioned that in trust based games of this sort,
maybe not exactly this game, but something like it, if
one player treats the other with cynicism, the other player
actually becomes measurably less trustworthy in how they play the game.
In other words, if you treat me like you expect
me to be selfish, I actually become more selfish than
(17:53):
I would have been otherwise. And this dynamic has been
found in laboratory experiments, of course, but also found the
wild in real life scenarios. For example, studies of workplaces
that find when management treats workers with suspicion, like they
expect them to break the rules, and they're trying to,
you know, make sure to really crack down and make
(18:14):
sure you don't break the rules, it actually makes workers.
Speaker 4 (18:17):
More likely to break the rules. Quote.
Speaker 3 (18:20):
When cynical supervisors expect low compliance and tighten supervision, they
actually lower compliance.
Speaker 4 (18:28):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (18:28):
This of course might not be the case in every
workplace all the time, but it has been observed, and
it intuitively makes sense to me. You know, when a
person is treated with trust, they may feel incentivized to
rise to meet that trust, and when they're treated with
cynical suspicion, the mind rebels and says, no, go to hell.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
Yeah, like, if you actually put a sign up no
stealing pins or no you know, printing out of dungeons
and dragon supplements on the on the work printer, you
know we're gonna we're gonna be like, well, why not,
Why shouldn't I have pins? Well, I shouldn't I have
color printouts of my DND manuals come on?
Speaker 3 (19:06):
Or just more generally, I mean, I think a lot
of people will know the feeling of it does not
inspire you to be the best kind of worker. If
you have the boss constantly looking over your shoulder, that
just kind of makes you you feel like, well, okay, well,
why do I give a damn about this?
Speaker 2 (19:22):
You know, I wasn't gonna mention too much about diagenies
in this episode because I don't want to confuse things
too much, But there are some stories of diagenies where
people expect him to act like a dog in the
street and then they would like throw food to him
to feed him like a dog, but then he kind
of ups the ante and out dogs them by then
(19:43):
peeing on them like a dog, which we could maybe
apply to this scenario. It's like like, yeah, if you
think I'm a dog, watch how much of a dog
I can be.
Speaker 3 (19:53):
Okay, Another self fulfilling prophecy dynamic at the interpersonal level.
This one's actually even simpler person to person respect quote.
More generally, cynics assume the worst in others and accordingly
treat them with less respect. A recent paper uses lab
experiments and daily diary methods to show that cynics often
disrespect others. Since people dislike being disrespected, they often return
(20:18):
the disrespect. That's pretty straightforward. That makes sense to me.
So these self fulfilling prophecy dynamics both trap the cynic
in their cynical worldview by making those around them less
trustworthy and more unpleasant, thus increasing evidence for the cynic's
view of humankind. It's like, if you're acting, if you're
(20:39):
already cynical, you make your environment better evidence for cynical worldview.
And then also they spread cynicism like an infectious disease,
causing those who have dealings with the cynic to themselves
become more cynical.
Speaker 4 (20:56):
All right.
Speaker 3 (20:56):
So that's the interpersonal level. But the next level of
analysis is the InTru group level within groups, and here
the authors bring up an idea that I thought was
really interesting. That is the idea of pluralistic ignorance. Pluralistic
ignorance is a group psychology effect that emerges when people
(21:16):
mistakenly believe that everybody else thinks differently than they do.
A classic illustration of pluralistic ignorance is the story The
Emperor's New Clothes.
Speaker 2 (21:27):
Yeah, most people are probably familiar with the Hans Christian
Anderson telling of this from eighteen thirty seven, though I'm
to understand this was based in part on older tales,
and you can also connect it to related stories in
various cultures.
Speaker 3 (21:40):
Yeah, but the simplified version is, some con artists go
to the emperor and they say, we've got some beautiful
new garments for you, in fact, a magical outfit that
can only be seen by people who are intelligent. It's
invisible to the dim witted, and the con artists provide
the Emperor in fact with no clothes at all. But nobody,
(22:01):
including the emperor wants to admit that they can't see
the clothes and thus be thought a fool, so everybody
pretends the king has clothes on while he's actually just
walking around naked, and nobody is able to speak up
about this until finally a child points out the nudity,
and finally everybody realizes they've been tricked. This story illustrates
(22:22):
pluralistic ignorance because actually everybody privately thinks the Emperor is naked,
but they are afraid to say so because they think
they're the only one and nobody else is saying it.
This story does slightly complicate it by adding the detail
that they're afraid of being thought unintelligent, and that's not
necessarily part of pluralistic ignorance, but it is pluralistic ignorance
(22:46):
because everybody in the story just goes along pretending to
believe something that none of them actually privately believes.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
There's a great treatment of this on the television series
Arrested Development with the film The Ocean Walker, where all
the studio people surrounding it just continue to talk about
how great it was, but no one actually understood it.
But nobody wanted to be seen as the dummy who
doesn't get this amazing project.
Speaker 3 (23:14):
Great example, and you can think of examples like this
all throughout you know, it happens all the time. So
how could this actually be a factor in the propagation
of cynicism The author's right quote. A group can succumb
to the norm of self interest, which specifies that people
are and should be self interested. Members in such groups
(23:36):
present themselves as more self interested than they really are.
So what if most people in a group actually just
want to be trustworthy and cooperative, but there is a
let's say, a prominent voice within the group saying it's
a dog eat dog world. Everybody's just looking out for
number one. The speaker could manage to convince the group
(23:57):
that everyone else in the group thinks that way too.
And the person who is not very selfish and would
prefer mutual trust and cooperation, that person feels like they
can't really admit how they feel publicly because they would
be the only one and they would seem naive or silly,
or they would fear that people might think they were
(24:18):
misrepresenting themselves, you know, like your virtue signaling. We've heard
that kind of thing. And the authors point to a
study that looks into this I was published in two
thousand and one by Ratner and Miller, which this paper
did several experiments looking into this phenomenon. I looked it
up and one of the more persuasive experiments went like this, Okay,
(24:40):
if you anonymously privately ask people about whether they would
like to take money away from a research project funded
through the National Institutes of Health. Most people did not
want to take the money away from medical research when
asked in private. However, when it was made clear that
(25:01):
the research in question could not directly benefit certain participants personally.
For example, it's like to cure a disease that only
affects a group you do not belong to, people became
hesitant to speak up publicly in the group about their
opposition to cutting the grant, even though they privately still
supported the grant. So, to paraphrase, lots of people wanted
(25:25):
to protect medical research that could not benefit them personally,
but they were hesitant to publicly speak up about protecting
the research unless it could benefit them personally. Like this
hurts me, gives me confidence to speak in public, but
want to I just want to help other people that
(25:46):
might be a genuine private motivation, but people were afraid
to say that in public. And there could be a
number of explanations for this, but based on a few
characteristics of the findings, it was interpreted by the researchers
as the participants assuming a group norm of cynicism and
(26:07):
fearing being judged by cynical third parties. So if you
fear that the people watching you are cynical, you become
sheepish about publicly supporting something that doesn't benefit you personally,
even if you secretly believe it is good. And I
thought this was so interesting because it's sort of counterintuitive.
(26:27):
You know, we often think in public we want to
come off as good people, and so you know, you
would want to be seen doing something that would help
other people. But I absolutely think this phenomenon. It checks
out for me. I've observed this kind of dynamic before,
and assuming it is real, it's obviously not the only
psychological pressure on us in this kind of domain, like
(26:48):
there will be counter pressures pushing in the opposite direction
as well, because obviously sometimes people do speak up publicly
in supportive causes they have no personal stake in whether
that's simply because of strength of their desire to support
that cause. Maybe it's just strong enough to overcome this fear,
the fear of social pressure, of pluralistic ignorance, or maybe
(27:08):
there's just some other social psychological pressure sometimes pushing in
the opposite direction, maybe again, like the desire to appear
selfless and moral. But I can absolutely identify the feeling
of the fear of social disapproval based on the assumption
of cynical group norms. Sometimes something is happening that feels
(27:29):
really wrong, and I have an urge to point that out,
to say something about it, but nobody else around me
is saying anything, and I have the feeling like, well,
this is none of my business, and maybe I just
don't understand it well enough, and I'll look naive if
I say something. But actually, maybe lots of people are
secretly feeling this way because they falsely believe everybody else
(27:54):
endorses a cynical mind your own business mentality.
Speaker 2 (27:57):
I mean, it's very akin to the bystander phenomena in
some respects, the idea that oh, well, I'm not the
one to jump in and help. There's someone else who's
either more closely aligned with the situation or has the
expertise that I don't, and then therefore nobody does.
Speaker 3 (28:14):
Anything exactly right. But in the case of cynicism, pluralistic ignorance,
creating a false belief in group cynicism has the pernicious
effect of actually creating real, genuine cynicism over time. The
author's write quote, as cynicism rises in a group, it
can make non cnics act in more self interested ways,
(28:35):
which further reinforces group members level of cynicism. It's a
feedback loop.
Speaker 4 (28:40):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (28:41):
Yeah, as folks just essentially become more and more cynical
just to fit in with the group, and this has
a potentially transformative effect over time.
Speaker 3 (28:51):
Yeah, But trying to fit in with the group, even
if they are mistaken about how cynical the group is,
we're like overestimating the cynicism of the group and trying
to fit in with that false perception.
Speaker 4 (29:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (29:02):
And then finally, the authors look at the inter group
level cynicism between different groups, and this section involves meta perceptions,
essentially what you believe about how other people perceive you.
Some research has found that across many different cultures, groups
within each culture that maybe have antagonistic orientations, like opposite
(29:26):
political parties or just different groups that have some antagonism
tend to have false, overly negative intergroup meta perceptions. People
believe that the outgroup is more hostile to their in
group than the out group actually is, and this perception
gap can lead to actual intergroup cynicism and hostility via
(29:48):
the familiar mechanisms.
Speaker 4 (29:49):
If you think.
Speaker 3 (29:50):
People hate you, you treat them with distrust, and treating
people with distrust actually makes them like you less and
trust you less.
Speaker 4 (29:58):
Quote.
Speaker 3 (29:59):
False meta perceptions illustrate how people can become more cynical,
in part because they overestimate how polarized their fellow citizens are.
All right, So those are the mechanisms the authors identify
for how cynicism grows and spreads. But they say, from
these observations, we can actually offer some tentative suggestions for
(30:20):
how cynicism can be beaten back. I don't think they're
presenting this as like the ultimate remedy, like we know
everything about how to defeat cynicism, but there's some good
starting places here. So at the interpersonal level, they say,
studies show that people appreciate being trusted and seem to
actually become less self interested and less cynical. On average
(30:42):
when simply granted trust. So we have an interaction in
which you trust me with something. If you do that,
ion average will actually become a little bit less cynical
and a little bit less selfish. And the cool thing
about this is that it's transferable. So somebody trusts me,
I actually tend to become not only more likely to
trust that person back, but to trust an unrelated third person. Therefore,
(31:08):
the same way that acts and displays of cynicism can
create this toxic negative feedback loop that increases cynicism for
all parties involved, acts and displays of trust can probably
create a positive feedback loop that contagiously undermines cynicism within
the culture at large.
Speaker 2 (31:28):
So this is the real purpose of the uh leave
a penny, take a penny tray, right, I mean, it's
it's building a better world.
Speaker 4 (31:36):
You joke.
Speaker 3 (31:36):
But I think little things like that may indeed make
a difference. You know, I don't have evidence of that
in particular, but I think the little moments of trust
probably do not have to be huge, Like you don't
have to go out so far on a limb, just
going out a little bit to grant people trust. I
think actually surprises them often and has this effect of
(31:59):
undermining cynesism.
Speaker 2 (32:00):
Yeah, I think that might be the case.
Speaker 3 (32:03):
So if you can undermine cynicism by creating these little
moments of you know, just lots of pervasive, little moments
of granting trust, you that's a good thing to know.
But I guess the question is like, how do you
actually implement this? Because you want to affect you want
to primarily affect people who are high in cynicism, or
at least moderate in cynicism. If you are a person
(32:24):
who realizes that you are more cynical than you would
like to be, and you have like the level of
self consciousness and willpower to go out on a limb
and engage in little exercises of trading trust to seed
the ground for a better life, obviously that's great if
you have that self awareness, go for it. But a
lot of highly cynical people are probably not going to
do this on their own. So it probably helps for
(32:47):
less cynical people to kind of deliberately contrive situations of
friendly cooperation to infect people suffering from cynicism with opportunities
to be trusted and to see exams samples of trust
rewarded I don't know exactly the best way to do this. Obviously,
you can't like for cynical strangers to do trust falls
with you in the grocery store parking lot. But surely
(33:10):
there are ways to stage parts of your life so
as to create little points of trading off of trust
and positive social contagion.
Speaker 2 (33:21):
Yeah. We're going to get into some possible examples of
this in a bit, but I'll go ahead and mention
some of it here. These are from some of the
ideas of an author we've already mentioned, Jamil Zaki, who
wrote a book about overcoming cynicism Hope for Cynics, The
Surprising Science of Human Goodness that came out in twenty
twenty four. But one of the things that he discusses
(33:43):
is essentially the idea of conducting your own behavioral experiments
to produce on the whole positive evidence of human goodness.
So sort of in a way like leaving the door
open for little examples of trust and allowing that trust
to wander in again, not leaving the whole door open,
you know, not you know not like you know, writing
(34:04):
your social Security number on your arm and just seeing
if anything anybody does anything bad with it, but little
smaller acts things just sprinkle throughout your daily life, like, Oh,
here's a possibility to sprinkle a little trust out there
and see that trust returned and in doing so, giving
us more real life evidence of human goodness to counteract
(34:27):
this welling up of cynicism inside us.
Speaker 3 (34:30):
Yeah, and to place emphasis again on what you just
said and what we were just talking about it. It
doesn't have to be huge risks when you make little
bids for trust. It can be little things. Now, coming
back to the next level of analysis, it was the
intra group level. Remember this was the idea that pluralistic
ignorance can create within a group a false impression that
(34:52):
there is a norm of cynical self interest, that people
are and should be selfish, when really most people in
the group don't actually feel that way. They're just afraid
to speak up because they think maybe they're the only one.
We might be able to overcome this and other situations
of pluralistic ignorance if we create a culture we try
(35:13):
to personally demonstrate act out a culture in which people
have more courage to disagree with what they assume to
be the opinions of the larger group. It might turn
out that it actually is pluralistic ignorance. Maybe a lot
of people already agree with you, and they just didn't
want to be the only one to say something. And
this is especially important if the assumed group norm is
(35:35):
something poisonous, something that maybe is coming top down, like
it's a dog eat dog world. There's like a really
influential person over the group shouting this message. It's important
that somebody else is saying the opposite. Otherwise the message
shouted from the top can easily become assumed to be
the group norm even if it's not. But also the
(35:55):
authors point out that normative group pressure can work in
the opposite directtion. This maybe sounds a little bit grubbier
than some of the other ideas because this involves the
idea of, well, maybe you should employ peer pressure to
positive ends. But the author's write quote, just as non
cynics can behave cynically under a norm of self interest,
so can sinics become more trusting when they feel normative
(36:19):
pressure to do so. There are experiments showing this. Somebody
might have a kind of cynical baseline, but when there's
peer pressure around them to be more trusting, it kind
of works. It makes them a little bit more trusting.
Speaker 2 (36:30):
I mean, this is what the trust falls are all about.
Speaker 3 (36:32):
Yeah, yeah, exactly the trust fall. I don't know, as
a particular act might be overly tainted with the aroma
of corporate seminars, but do things like that, I mean,
there is a kind of kernel of wisdom at the
inception of the trust fall. So I don't know, do
we feel good about trying to intentionally use group peer
(36:54):
pressure to influence people? I don't know, Like, using it
to reduce cynicism seems like one of the better uses
of peer pressure than I can imagine.
Speaker 2 (37:02):
Yeah, plus, just given how nefarious and how just infectious
cynicism is in our lives, Like, yes, we should pull
every level we have against it.
Speaker 3 (37:13):
And then finally at the inter group level. Remember this
was the example where groups in society become increasingly distrustful
of one another, in part because you imagine that the
other group is more hostile to your group than they
actually are. And the solution here, the authors propose, is
just give people accurate information, because studies in these situations
(37:36):
have shown that interventions of just like showing people real
examples of members of the out group as opposed to
leaving it up to their imagination or using cherry picked
examples from hostile in group media.
Speaker 2 (37:51):
Or outright conspiracy theories exact oftentimes, Like that's the mode
of thinking that is involved in characterizing theosing viewpoint.
Speaker 3 (38:01):
Yeah, just seeing like real accurate representations of who the
out group is, like interacting with each other and seeing
what they're actually like. These types of interventions have been
found to reduce this kind of between group hostility and
perceptions of metaperceptions of hostility within the out group. Oh
(38:22):
are they actually as selfish and hostile as I imagined?
Now that I see them, it seems maybe not.
Speaker 4 (38:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (38:27):
So that's all I've got on this paper by Norman
and Zaki. But I think that is a very interesting
place to start. It's got there's a lot to work
with there.
Speaker 2 (38:35):
Yeah. Yeah, And I would say in general, for folks
who want more information about ways to become less cynical
and combat cynical cynical thought and cynicism in your lives,
Zaki's work is definitely worth following. And he's out there
in a lot of places talking about this stuff, writing
about it. Back in twenty twenty two, he did a
(38:56):
Ted talk on the topic, and you can look that
up wherever you get your Ted talks. There's a great
quote in that talk where he says, you might think
that cynicism is a system upgrade that allows you to
see who we really are. It's not. It traps us
in a version of the world we don't want to
live in and one we don't have to.
Speaker 3 (39:15):
That's put very well, and I think that's an important
thing to emphasize. It's like a lot of the literature
that we talked about, I think in part two of
this series, you know, with the cynical genius illusion that
like it's just framed as wisdom that seeing the world
cynically as being realistic. I mean maybe in certain scenarios
(39:37):
there are like very corrupt situations where cynicism is a
more accurate diagnosis of them. But most of the time
the world isn't like that. Cynicism actually makes you worse
at predicting other people's behavior. It's just like it's not
a good model of the world. It's not being real.
It's actually living an illusion, living within an illusion that
hurts you exactly.
Speaker 2 (39:56):
Yeah, Now, this this talk was interesting because I believe
it was accord in twenty twenty one, and so you know,
he definitely ties some of it into the global pandemic
and talking about the connection between cynicism and disasters, where
something disastrous can occur some sort of widespread scenario like
global pandemic, and it can lead to increased cynicism. And
(40:18):
he also talks a little bit about the danger of
slipping into what he calls a cynicism perma frost. I
suppose on the individual level, we're even on like a
larger societal level where if, like baseline, cynicism grows to
a certain level, it's just harder and harder for.
Speaker 4 (40:36):
Us to shake it.
Speaker 3 (40:37):
Yes, cynicism is self reinforcing and self perpetuating. To come
back to something from that paper, it is a self
fulfilling prophecy. It makes the world in its image.
Speaker 2 (40:58):
Now, Zaki's twenty twenty four book again his hope for cynics,
The Surprising Science of Human Goodness, and he of course,
in this book covers the topic at length, goes through
a lot of what we've been discussing here, but then
there's added information and insight as well. I recommend picking
it up if you want to learn more about how
to combat cynicism. But I want to go through some
(41:19):
of the ideas that he brings forth that essentially gives
you sort of a plan of attack. One of the
first things that he points out is that you have
to recognize the harm of cynicism. And we've been talking
about this, after all, if you don't understand all the
mental and physical health as well as social ramifications of
a cynical mindset, you might continue to think of it
(41:39):
as a path of cool and safe detachment, like this
is what we are, this is the world we live in.
Realizing first of all that it's harming you to think
this way, that's a good first step.
Speaker 4 (41:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (41:52):
Yeah, Cynicism is not the safe bet. It's not I
don't know, putting your money in CDs or something. It's like,
it's more kind of like letting it get oily and
leaving it next to the fire.
Speaker 4 (42:03):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (42:04):
The next thing he brings up is embracing hopeful skepticism
and questioning your assumptions. I really like this one, because
cynicism can I think, come to feel like it's a
comfortable sweater that you wear, and then if someone comes
around and says, get rid of that sweater, you're gonna
be like, well, this is this is what I wear.
This is basically my skin at this point. And so
the idea here is that hopeful skepticism is kind of
(42:27):
something that's going to fit you the same as that sweater,
but it's not going to constrain your soul, you know,
so you know, assume better of people in general, but
also you know, self analyze your cynical ideas, engage in
rational skepticism, which is to say, seek actual real world
evidence for your negative opinions and beliefs, and pay closer
(42:49):
attention to what you actually observe in the world.
Speaker 3 (42:52):
Oh yeah, So this is coming back to the distinction
we made in the last episode between cynicism and skepticism.
Whereas cynicism is just a bias towards negativity and distrust,
skepticism is trying to award your trust to things on
the basis of whether there's good reason to trust them
or not paying attention to evidence and trying as best
you can to ignore your biases, whereas cynicism is itself
(43:14):
a bias.
Speaker 2 (43:15):
And if you want to think about this as trust
but confirm fair enough however you want to think about it,
it also reminds me a lot of some of the
anti anxiety techniques I've learned about in recent years, such
as putting your thoughts on trial and asking yourself questions
like A. What am I afraid will happen? And b
what is likely to happen? Because we can often allow
(43:38):
our negative thought patterns to just run around unchecked in
our minds, like it's not at the forefront of our
thought We're trying to do other things, and it's just
in the background like a yapping dog. But if we stop,
if we identify our thoughts and then we apply reasoning
to those thoughts, we put those thoughts on trial and
say like, hey, you stop barking. Now, let's talk about
why you're barking and what you're barking about. Then you
(44:00):
can actually begin to make serious headway towards dismissing these
thoughts or at least diminishing their power. Saki also recommends
we conduct again our own behavioral experiments to open the
door for examples of trust to wander into our lives,
to practice trust. And this is this is a this
is one that's so big that it's going to sound
(44:22):
like overly naive just to say it, but focusing on
the positive. I mean, how many times have you heard
that it can it can almost sound like you should
smile more. He recommends engaging in positive gossip as opposed
to just negative gossip, to making an effort to finding
examples in your life and in the world of people
doing good to counteract the other stories. They're going to
(44:45):
maybe catch your attention more and certainly drift up towards
the top of the news feed more.
Speaker 4 (44:51):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (44:51):
In a way, this reminds me of that famous mister
Rogers quote about looking for the helpers. You know, I
believe he said quote. When I was a boy and
I would see scary things in the news, my mother
would say to me, look for the helpers, who will
always find people who are helping.
Speaker 3 (45:06):
Now, to answer the cynical thought arising in some people's heads,
you might think in reaction to that, like, oh, but
isn't that just sort of like turning away from reality,
Like isn't that not being realistic and wanting to live
in a happy, happy fantasyland.
Speaker 4 (45:21):
No.
Speaker 3 (45:22):
I think a lot of the research we've looked at
is like, this is a strategy for having a more
realistic view of the world. What we have a tendency
toward is an unrealistic view of the world based on
the high salience of negative events. So like you know,
nineteen positive events and one negative event event, the one
negative event defines our memory of what happened. And so
(45:46):
this is like trying to have a more realistic view
based on the actual real world prevalence of trust and positivity.
Speaker 2 (45:54):
Yeah, yeah, And I mean it really comes down to,
like make sure that you have a balanced diet of
information about people the world, and that can include a
media diet, it can also certainly include a real life
diet and how you're interacting with people. Like one example
from my own family, over the past year, we've started
watching the YouTube videos of Sam Bentley, who you can
(46:14):
find on wherever you get your videos. But this is
a guy who highlights positive social and environmental news from
around the world. And these are the kind of stories
that are generally never the headline. And it's not to
say that they should be, and it's not to say
that you should be only watching this sort of new
stream and not the other news streams, but you know,
(46:36):
their general positivity and hopefulness can provide a very necessary
counterbalance to the more cynical darkness that is just going
to well out of you in response to the coverage
the rest of the coverage out there. And again, even
if the coverage is fair and you know on the level,
I mean, still that's it's going to feed that cynicism
(46:56):
that is in all of us. That is, you know,
gon gonna potentially rise up if we don't keep it
in check.
Speaker 3 (47:02):
Yes, it is very important to be aware of and
informed about and have a realistic view of threats and
bad things happening. But if you want to be able
to respond to those in the best way possible, it's
actually important not to let a cynical mindset set in
which it just disempowers you. So it is important to
be aware of threats and dangers and not ignore them,
(47:26):
to have them front of mind in a way, but
be able to respond to them realistically and productively, rather
than just submitting to cynical surrender.
Speaker 2 (47:35):
Absolutely, now, we should be clear that none of this
is like a one and done solution. There's not like
a check sheet you can go through and at the
end of it be like, ah, well, there we go.
Cynicism defeated. In fact, Zaki here of the author in
his ted talk drives home that he still struggles with
cynicism himself all the time, and it is a struggle.
(47:56):
You can't completely squash the infection of modern cynicism, and
that's one of the cruel realities of the whole scenario.
Cynicism is just going to well up again and again,
potentially gaining foothold each time subconsciously, like it's just in
the background growing, and it requires deliberate effort generally to
counter its growth. So, you know, like any kind of maintenance,
(48:18):
except its maintenance on your outlook on the world, on
your psyche and your soul. And once again, none of
this is a proposed transition from cynicism into naivety, or
from cynicism into some sort of unhealthy optimism. It's a
transition from an unhealthy and ultimately unrealistically bleak outlook on
people in the world into something that is more balanced,
(48:40):
more reasonably optimistic, and healthier for you in multiple regards.
Speaker 3 (48:44):
Yeah, see the world as it really is. Trust when
you can and use those relationships of mutual trust to
make life better.
Speaker 2 (48:52):
All right, Well, we're gonna go ahead and wrap up
these episodes on cynicism right here. On an upnote, on
a hopeful note, optim mistic note, and then maybe give
you a little homework for ways that you can bring
less cynicism into your manifested life. We want to remind
everyone out there that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is
primarily a science and culture podcast, with core episodes on
(49:14):
Tuesdays and Thursdays, short form episodes on Wednesdays and on Fridays.
We set aside most serious concerns just talk about a
weird film on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3 (49:22):
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 stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (49:43):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.
Speaker 2 (50:00):
Predation Ratatatator
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey you welcome to do Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
By name is Robert.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with
the fourth and final part in our series on cynicism.
There has been a light at the end of the tunnel,
and we finally reached it. So in Part one, we
defined cynicism as the tendency to believe that people are bad, selfish,
and untrustworthy, and we distinguished this modern definition from other
(00:39):
concepts like the cynic philosophy of ancient Greece, which is
a whole different thing, and from similar but distinct concepts
like pessimism. We also looked at research on the correlates
of cynicism across a bunch of domains of life, from
health to career and all kinds of things, and discovered
that being highly cynical tends to have overwhelmingly negative effect
(01:00):
on a person's life. In Part two, we focused primarily
on the so called cynical genius illusion. The short version
of this is that while people might not necessarily like
highly cynical people for whatever reason, we tend to assume
that they are smart and competent in cognitive domains, conforming
(01:22):
to the Sherlock Holmes archetype. However, experiments showed that this
is not actually the case. On average, highly cynical people
are not smarter than everybody else, and if anything, the
correlation usually goes the other way, And so we talked
about possible reasons for this effect, and also talked about
the question of what, if anything, is the actual benefit
(01:43):
of generalized cynicism. It seems like one answer is that
if you are not very skilled at telling the difference
between a trustworthy situation and an untrustworthy one, generalized cynicism
may protect you from catastrophic misplacements of trust, but again
great cost to your well being and at the price
of many lost opportunities to benefit from trust and cooperation.
(02:07):
In Part three, we talked about the role of cynicism
in politics, including the idea that cynicism has been on
the rise in many democracies around the world for a
possible number of reasons, one influence maybe being the use
of social media. We also talked about research on the
phenomenon of political cynicism, in particular as distinct from just
(02:27):
general social cynicism or from simple distrust or skepticism of politicians,
and we got into some observed characteristics of how cynicism
manifests in political participation. We also talked about how people
may use a mask of cynical rhetoric about politics in
order to influence how they're perceived by others, maybe to
(02:50):
sort of cover up the fact that you maybe don't
know a lot about what you're talking about, and we
discussed the link between cynicism and a preference for conspiracy
based explanation.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
Another thing we discussed that ties into this episode a
little bit is the idea that escape from cynicism in
the modern sense, one way to escape from it would
be to push through to a point of true disenchantment
and essentially become an ancient cynic, a capital C cynic
in the philosophical sense. Now, we'll see how well that
(03:23):
idea pans out with what we have to talk about today.
But to be clear, we're not recommending this is a
standard solution to any cynicism you're wrestling with in your life.
It's more interesting from the standpoint of understanding what lowercase
cynicism and capital C cynicism is. So I think it's
(03:43):
an interesting take in that regard, but not necessarily something
you want to try for yourself. Like, the answer is
not to I think we can state pretty clearly here.
Don't try to become more cynical about life in order
to reach some point of equilibrium.
Speaker 3 (04:00):
Yeah, I think maybe I see what the author you
were citing when you brought this up is getting at
with the idea of a sort of total disenchantment leading
to a freedom to once again embrace virtue. I mean
that almost seems a kind of Buddhist in a way, like,
you know, like losing your love for the things of
the world, allowing you to find like different higher levels
(04:22):
of appreciation. But I question to what extent that kind
of enlightened disenchantment capital C cynicism can actually be reached
just by increasing your lowercase C cynicism along the standard dimension,
you know, like becoming even less and less trustful. I
don't know if that eventually gets you to capital C cynicism.
Speaker 4 (04:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:44):
I think its primary purpose is to help us understand
the connections between ancient cynicism and modern cynicism, rather than
give us an approach for fixing our own lives.
Speaker 3 (04:55):
Now, given everything that we've talked about so far. One
of the things, the main things we wanted to talk
about today was the question of where cynicism comes from.
What can we understand about its origins within a culture
and within a person, how it grows and spreads, and
thus how can it be counteracted. Is there anything we
really know about how to stop the growth of cynicism.
(05:19):
I think this is a field where, you know, we
don't have really strong conclusions yet, but there are some
good starting points based on research. And one paper that
I came across that addresses this question pretty directly was
published in twenty twenty three in the journal Trends in
Cognitive Sciences by a pair of researchers from the Stanford
(05:40):
Psychology Department named Eric Neuman and Jamil Zaki. And this
paper is called Toward a Social Psychology of Cynicism. So
the authors begin this paper by addressing what they called
the cynicism paradox. Cynicism quote tracks numerous negative outcomes, and
yet many people are cynical. And so this is really
(06:02):
something we've already been talking about this series, but kind
of with a different framing. We've been asking the question
if cynicism is clearly so bad for our lives? Is
there any compensating benefit? Because if it's harmful and lots
of people are highly cynical anyway, shouldn't you think there's
probably some kind of trade off that makes it worth
the cost. We've already mentioned several specific ways or scenarios
(06:26):
in which it might be adaptive, but then again, it
might just be one of those things that is just
plain bad for us but happens anyway, like, for example, depression.
You might be able to explain how depression grows out
of biological mechanisms that are evolved in order to be
adaptive for us, but you don't have to assume that
depression itself has benefits overall. It's just like something's gone
(06:51):
wrong and it's bad for us. It's possible. Cynicism is
usually the same way. But the authors here sort of
take the same idea and they frame it as this
paradox cynicism hurts the cynic and yet cynicism seems to
spread and bloom a new year after year. And so
the authors say, given the observation of the cynicism paradox,
(07:13):
research within social psychology should focus on a couple of
questions where cynicism comes from, and how it spreads, and
how can it be countered, diminished or alleviated. So first
the question what explains cynicism? Where does it come from?
First they address the possibility, what if the cynic is right.
We've talked about this from a number of angles. Maybe
(07:36):
cynicism is just an accurate assessment based on observations of
the world. In the words of the author's quote, perhaps
it reflects a realistic perception of the suffering caused by
human self interest. But we've already explored research casting serious
doubt on this, For example, the various experiments showing that
people tend to grossly overestimate the selfishness and treachery of strangers.
(08:00):
Most people in most types of situations are actually pretty trustworthy.
And the authors seem to agree with this conclusion, and
so instead they identify three ways that they think cynicism arises.
It's not necessarily that it is an accurate model of
the world. But instead quote, we will argue that people
(08:20):
often overestimate self interest, create it through their expectations, or
overstate their own to not appear naive. Now, the authors
here acknowledged that, of course cynicism can be and often
is responsive to observations.
Speaker 4 (08:38):
Of the real world.
Speaker 3 (08:40):
For example, this is an experimental finding. We become more
cynical when we witness people behaving selfishly. If you do
an experiment where you stage people catching somebody doing something
selfish and untrustworthy, that actually makes us less likely to trust.
So we've witnessed an example that trust, you know, did
(09:00):
not turn out well, and it affects our baseline in
a way, at least within the situation, we've become less trusting.
But jumping off of this, they say that we can easily,
because of various psychological phenomena, biases, and so forth, become
kind of trapped in an unrealistically cynical mindset that is
not a good model of how the world usually works
(09:22):
and brings with it all the harms we've talked about.
And you know, you can think about this in a
number of different psychological domains. Your initial tendency is based
on an observation, like you do see a betrayal or
an example of somebody acting selfishly, but then you form
an inaccurate, totalizing worldview based on that one salient example.
Speaker 2 (09:46):
Yeah, there's this really insightful table that they cite here
that I've found very interesting with these different categories of cynicism,
group cynicism, institutional cynicism, in general cynicism, and this kind
of model for how things might intensify. So, like one
(10:09):
example they include is a young colleague betrays an older
one in a team project. What does the older colleague conclude?
And so the initial cynicism is, well, young people are
self interested, and then that's the group's cynicism. Then the
institutional cynicism is people in the workplace are self interested,
and then the general cynicism is people are self interested.
(10:33):
And so you can imagine like a blossoming of cynicism
more or less along these these routes, you know, from
being highly specific to you know, a particular encounter, to
being increasing generalities about the way the world works.
Speaker 3 (10:50):
That's an interesting point. Yeah, And in fact, though, the
cynicism may be inaccurate at every single stage in this progression.
So like let's say I observe Johnny doing something selfish
in one instance, and I start by saying Johnny is
an untrustworthy person. That may not actually be true about Johnny.
Maybe I just caught him at his worst moment, But
it might be true about Johnny. Then I abstract it
(11:12):
to some group Johnny belongs to. For some reason, his
membership in a particular group is meaningful to me, and
so I see him as representative of that group and
apply the untrustworthiness to the whole group. And then I
could branch out even further to some institution in which
Johnny exists, and then possibly to all of humankind. But
at every single level, it's possible you are actually not
(11:34):
drawing a good generalization from observing one instance of behavior.
Speaker 2 (11:38):
This made me think about cynicism on The Simpsons, particularly
as it relates to Homer Simpson. There's a famous episode
from the Golden Age of Simpson's episodes in which we
kind of get an origin story for homer cynicism. It's
the City of New York Versus Homer, in which a
young and optimistic Homer Simpson experiences a number of betrayals
(12:02):
and hostilities upon visiting the Big Apple.
Speaker 3 (12:05):
We talked about this episode in our Weird House Cinema
on the Face Behind the Mask, because Peter Lourie has
the exact same experience.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
Yes, the exact same experience, and in this episode we
see how it leads to an extremely cynical view of
New York and New Yorkers. But you could also argue
that it perhaps underlines the general anger in cynicism that
comes to define Homer, at least in these early classic
seasons of the show.
Speaker 3 (12:32):
Yeah, though it is interesting how malleable Homer's character is,
and yet he still feels like a cohesive character, Like
sometimes Homer is very, very trusting and other times he's
very cynical.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
Yeah, he's changed a lot over the years. I mean
not in a character development way, but just in the
realities of the show being on television this long, with
this many different writers over the years. Various commentators have
discussed how, in the early sense, so certainly the golden
age of the Simpsons, you have this mix of cynicism
(13:04):
and heart that kind of balances everything out. But the
cynicism and melancholy have been observed to be particularly strong
during that first season, and then they move away from that,
and then eventually they kind of move away from homer
cynicism and anger in general and double down on his
frankness and his stupidity, so he becomes you know, it's
(13:27):
more about like the dumb jokes in the Gullible Homer
as we proceed. But if you look at the New
York episode, and you look at some of these episodes
from the from like the nineteen nineties, you can easily
fill out a chart watching how we have a situation
where Homer encounters selfish people in New York, and then
(13:49):
this fosters into a worldview that, well, all New Yorkers
are selfish, and then maybe all people are selfish as well.
Like you can imagine it being like the thing, it
blossoms out into Homer's general cynicism.
Speaker 3 (14:03):
Right, this is a great comparison. So, yeah, it begins
as the observation of an individual action or behavior, and
then generalizing to the person who did that, then the
group to whom that person belongs, and then to the
society at large, and then to all of humankind.
Speaker 2 (14:20):
Yeah, and tell you you're the type of person who's like,
of course I'm going to steal roadside sugar because anyone
else would do the same thing.
Speaker 3 (14:26):
Yes, So anyway, in this paper, the authors try to
formulate a model of how cynicism can spread at three
different levels of social interaction. So one is through interactions
(14:49):
at the interpersonal level between two people. The next is
at the intra group level within groups, and then finally
at the inter group level between in groups. So regarding
the interpersonal level of cynicism of formation, the authors raise
the question, what if at the interpersonal level, cynicism is
(15:11):
a self fulfilling prophecy, In other words, an initially false belief,
or at least a belief not based on evidence, whether
whether true or false, an initially false belief that influences
the behavior of the believer in such a way that
they make the world conform to the way they believe
it is. And psychological research has identified a bunch of
(15:35):
dynamics like this. Self fulfilling prophecies show up in all kinds.
Speaker 4 (15:39):
Of ways in our behavior.
Speaker 3 (15:40):
For example, some experiments have found that if you treat
somebody in a way that indicates you have high expectations
of their competence, it can actually make them more competent.
And obviously there would be limits to effects like this.
You know, you can't just, you know, like hand, somebody
who knows no thing about medicine a scalpel and say
(16:01):
I believe in you go do the surgery. You know,
they're probably not going to know what to do. But
within certain limits, of a plausible knowledge and behavior. You
can imagine how having somebody else show confidence in you
can make you more confident in yourself, maybe make you
less nervous, increase your performance certain types of jobs, or
(16:22):
maybe having somebody treat you as competent makes you more conscientious,
more careful to do a good job so as not
to disappoint them, and so forth, and so then the
author say quote, just like expectations about competence, cynical expectations
of moral character can become self fulfilling. So examples of
this remember the trust based investing game that we talked
(16:46):
about in previous episodes in the series, where I am
given some money and then I have the option to
either keep the money or hand it over to a stranger,
at which point the money gets quadrupled. So maybe I
initially get five dollars, if I hand it to the stranger,
it becomes twenty dollars. And then the stranger has the
option to either keep all of the money for themselves
(17:08):
or split the money and give me back ten dollars,
so we both get ten and I double my initial investment.
This was one of the experiments that found strangers almost
always honor the investors trust and give half the money back.
But people greatly underestimated how often that would happen. We
overestimate the selfishness and treachery of strangers.
Speaker 4 (17:29):
Anyway.
Speaker 3 (17:30):
The authors mentioned that in trust based games of this sort,
maybe not exactly this game, but something like it, if
one player treats the other with cynicism, the other player
actually becomes measurably less trustworthy in how they play the game.
In other words, if you treat me like you expect
me to be selfish, I actually become more selfish than
(17:53):
I would have been otherwise. And this dynamic has been
found in laboratory experiments, of course, but also found the
wild in real life scenarios. For example, studies of workplaces
that find when management treats workers with suspicion, like they
expect them to break the rules, and they're trying to,
you know, make sure to really crack down and make
(18:14):
sure you don't break the rules, it actually makes workers.
Speaker 4 (18:17):
More likely to break the rules. Quote.
Speaker 3 (18:20):
When cynical supervisors expect low compliance and tighten supervision, they
actually lower compliance.
Speaker 4 (18:28):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (18:28):
This of course might not be the case in every
workplace all the time, but it has been observed, and
it intuitively makes sense to me. You know, when a
person is treated with trust, they may feel incentivized to
rise to meet that trust, and when they're treated with
cynical suspicion, the mind rebels and says, no, go to hell.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
Yeah, like, if you actually put a sign up no
stealing pins or no you know, printing out of dungeons
and dragon supplements on the on the work printer, you
know we're gonna we're gonna be like, well, why not,
Why shouldn't I have pins? Well, I shouldn't I have
color printouts of my DND manuals come on?
Speaker 3 (19:06):
Or just more generally, I mean, I think a lot
of people will know the feeling of it does not
inspire you to be the best kind of worker. If
you have the boss constantly looking over your shoulder, that
just kind of makes you you feel like, well, okay, well,
why do I give a damn about this?
Speaker 2 (19:22):
You know, I wasn't gonna mention too much about diagenies
in this episode because I don't want to confuse things
too much, But there are some stories of diagenies where
people expect him to act like a dog in the
street and then they would like throw food to him
to feed him like a dog, but then he kind
of ups the ante and out dogs them by then
(19:43):
peeing on them like a dog, which we could maybe
apply to this scenario. It's like like, yeah, if you
think I'm a dog, watch how much of a dog
I can be.
Speaker 3 (19:53):
Okay, Another self fulfilling prophecy dynamic at the interpersonal level.
This one's actually even simpler person to person respect quote.
More generally, cynics assume the worst in others and accordingly
treat them with less respect. A recent paper uses lab
experiments and daily diary methods to show that cynics often
disrespect others. Since people dislike being disrespected, they often return
(20:18):
the disrespect. That's pretty straightforward. That makes sense to me.
So these self fulfilling prophecy dynamics both trap the cynic
in their cynical worldview by making those around them less
trustworthy and more unpleasant, thus increasing evidence for the cynic's
view of humankind. It's like, if you're acting, if you're
(20:39):
already cynical, you make your environment better evidence for cynical worldview.
And then also they spread cynicism like an infectious disease,
causing those who have dealings with the cynic to themselves
become more cynical.
Speaker 4 (20:56):
All right.
Speaker 3 (20:56):
So that's the interpersonal level. But the next level of
analysis is the InTru group level within groups, and here
the authors bring up an idea that I thought was
really interesting. That is the idea of pluralistic ignorance. Pluralistic
ignorance is a group psychology effect that emerges when people
(21:16):
mistakenly believe that everybody else thinks differently than they do.
A classic illustration of pluralistic ignorance is the story The
Emperor's New Clothes.
Speaker 2 (21:27):
Yeah, most people are probably familiar with the Hans Christian
Anderson telling of this from eighteen thirty seven, though I'm
to understand this was based in part on older tales,
and you can also connect it to related stories in
various cultures.
Speaker 3 (21:40):
Yeah, but the simplified version is, some con artists go
to the emperor and they say, we've got some beautiful
new garments for you, in fact, a magical outfit that
can only be seen by people who are intelligent. It's
invisible to the dim witted, and the con artists provide
the Emperor in fact with no clothes at all. But nobody,
(22:01):
including the emperor wants to admit that they can't see
the clothes and thus be thought a fool, so everybody
pretends the king has clothes on while he's actually just
walking around naked, and nobody is able to speak up
about this until finally a child points out the nudity,
and finally everybody realizes they've been tricked. This story illustrates
(22:22):
pluralistic ignorance because actually everybody privately thinks the Emperor is naked,
but they are afraid to say so because they think
they're the only one and nobody else is saying it.
This story does slightly complicate it by adding the detail
that they're afraid of being thought unintelligent, and that's not
necessarily part of pluralistic ignorance, but it is pluralistic ignorance
(22:46):
because everybody in the story just goes along pretending to
believe something that none of them actually privately believes.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
There's a great treatment of this on the television series
Arrested Development with the film The Ocean Walker, where all
the studio people surrounding it just continue to talk about
how great it was, but no one actually understood it.
But nobody wanted to be seen as the dummy who
doesn't get this amazing project.
Speaker 3 (23:14):
Great example, and you can think of examples like this
all throughout you know, it happens all the time. So
how could this actually be a factor in the propagation
of cynicism The author's right quote. A group can succumb
to the norm of self interest, which specifies that people
are and should be self interested. Members in such groups
(23:36):
present themselves as more self interested than they really are.
So what if most people in a group actually just
want to be trustworthy and cooperative, but there is a
let's say, a prominent voice within the group saying it's
a dog eat dog world. Everybody's just looking out for
number one. The speaker could manage to convince the group
(23:57):
that everyone else in the group thinks that way too.
And the person who is not very selfish and would
prefer mutual trust and cooperation, that person feels like they
can't really admit how they feel publicly because they would
be the only one and they would seem naive or silly,
or they would fear that people might think they were
(24:18):
misrepresenting themselves, you know, like your virtue signaling. We've heard
that kind of thing. And the authors point to a
study that looks into this I was published in two
thousand and one by Ratner and Miller, which this paper
did several experiments looking into this phenomenon. I looked it
up and one of the more persuasive experiments went like this, Okay,
(24:40):
if you anonymously privately ask people about whether they would
like to take money away from a research project funded
through the National Institutes of Health. Most people did not
want to take the money away from medical research when
asked in private. However, when it was made clear that
(25:01):
the research in question could not directly benefit certain participants personally.
For example, it's like to cure a disease that only
affects a group you do not belong to, people became
hesitant to speak up publicly in the group about their
opposition to cutting the grant, even though they privately still
supported the grant. So, to paraphrase, lots of people wanted
(25:25):
to protect medical research that could not benefit them personally,
but they were hesitant to publicly speak up about protecting
the research unless it could benefit them personally. Like this
hurts me, gives me confidence to speak in public, but
want to I just want to help other people that
(25:46):
might be a genuine private motivation, but people were afraid
to say that in public. And there could be a
number of explanations for this, but based on a few
characteristics of the findings, it was interpreted by the researchers
as the participants assuming a group norm of cynicism and
(26:07):
fearing being judged by cynical third parties. So if you
fear that the people watching you are cynical, you become
sheepish about publicly supporting something that doesn't benefit you personally,
even if you secretly believe it is good. And I
thought this was so interesting because it's sort of counterintuitive.
(26:27):
You know, we often think in public we want to
come off as good people, and so you know, you
would want to be seen doing something that would help
other people. But I absolutely think this phenomenon. It checks
out for me. I've observed this kind of dynamic before,
and assuming it is real, it's obviously not the only
psychological pressure on us in this kind of domain, like
(26:48):
there will be counter pressures pushing in the opposite direction
as well, because obviously sometimes people do speak up publicly
in supportive causes they have no personal stake in whether
that's simply because of strength of their desire to support
that cause. Maybe it's just strong enough to overcome this fear,
the fear of social pressure, of pluralistic ignorance, or maybe
(27:08):
there's just some other social psychological pressure sometimes pushing in
the opposite direction, maybe again, like the desire to appear
selfless and moral. But I can absolutely identify the feeling
of the fear of social disapproval based on the assumption
of cynical group norms. Sometimes something is happening that feels
(27:29):
really wrong, and I have an urge to point that out,
to say something about it, but nobody else around me
is saying anything, and I have the feeling like, well,
this is none of my business, and maybe I just
don't understand it well enough, and I'll look naive if
I say something. But actually, maybe lots of people are
secretly feeling this way because they falsely believe everybody else
(27:54):
endorses a cynical mind your own business mentality.
Speaker 2 (27:57):
I mean, it's very akin to the bystander phenomena in
some respects, the idea that oh, well, I'm not the
one to jump in and help. There's someone else who's
either more closely aligned with the situation or has the
expertise that I don't, and then therefore nobody does.
Speaker 3 (28:14):
Anything exactly right. But in the case of cynicism, pluralistic ignorance,
creating a false belief in group cynicism has the pernicious
effect of actually creating real, genuine cynicism over time. The
author's write quote, as cynicism rises in a group, it
can make non cnics act in more self interested ways,
(28:35):
which further reinforces group members level of cynicism. It's a
feedback loop.
Speaker 4 (28:40):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (28:41):
Yeah, as folks just essentially become more and more cynical
just to fit in with the group, and this has
a potentially transformative effect over time.
Speaker 3 (28:51):
Yeah, But trying to fit in with the group, even
if they are mistaken about how cynical the group is,
we're like overestimating the cynicism of the group and trying
to fit in with that false perception.
Speaker 4 (29:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (29:02):
And then finally, the authors look at the inter group
level cynicism between different groups, and this section involves meta perceptions,
essentially what you believe about how other people perceive you.
Some research has found that across many different cultures, groups
within each culture that maybe have antagonistic orientations, like opposite
(29:26):
political parties or just different groups that have some antagonism
tend to have false, overly negative intergroup meta perceptions. People
believe that the outgroup is more hostile to their in
group than the out group actually is, and this perception
gap can lead to actual intergroup cynicism and hostility via
(29:48):
the familiar mechanisms.
Speaker 4 (29:49):
If you think.
Speaker 3 (29:50):
People hate you, you treat them with distrust, and treating
people with distrust actually makes them like you less and
trust you less.
Speaker 4 (29:58):
Quote.
Speaker 3 (29:59):
False meta perceptions illustrate how people can become more cynical,
in part because they overestimate how polarized their fellow citizens are.
All right, So those are the mechanisms the authors identify
for how cynicism grows and spreads. But they say, from
these observations, we can actually offer some tentative suggestions for
(30:20):
how cynicism can be beaten back. I don't think they're
presenting this as like the ultimate remedy, like we know
everything about how to defeat cynicism, but there's some good
starting places here. So at the interpersonal level, they say,
studies show that people appreciate being trusted and seem to
actually become less self interested and less cynical. On average
(30:42):
when simply granted trust. So we have an interaction in
which you trust me with something. If you do that,
ion average will actually become a little bit less cynical
and a little bit less selfish. And the cool thing
about this is that it's transferable. So somebody trusts me,
I actually tend to become not only more likely to
trust that person back, but to trust an unrelated third person. Therefore,
(31:08):
the same way that acts and displays of cynicism can
create this toxic negative feedback loop that increases cynicism for
all parties involved, acts and displays of trust can probably
create a positive feedback loop that contagiously undermines cynicism within
the culture at large.
Speaker 2 (31:28):
So this is the real purpose of the uh leave
a penny, take a penny tray, right, I mean, it's
it's building a better world.
Speaker 4 (31:36):
You joke.
Speaker 3 (31:36):
But I think little things like that may indeed make
a difference. You know, I don't have evidence of that
in particular, but I think the little moments of trust
probably do not have to be huge, Like you don't
have to go out so far on a limb, just
going out a little bit to grant people trust. I
think actually surprises them often and has this effect of
(31:59):
undermining cynesism.
Speaker 2 (32:00):
Yeah, I think that might be the case.
Speaker 3 (32:03):
So if you can undermine cynicism by creating these little
moments of you know, just lots of pervasive, little moments
of granting trust, you that's a good thing to know.
But I guess the question is like, how do you
actually implement this? Because you want to affect you want
to primarily affect people who are high in cynicism, or
at least moderate in cynicism. If you are a person
(32:24):
who realizes that you are more cynical than you would
like to be, and you have like the level of
self consciousness and willpower to go out on a limb
and engage in little exercises of trading trust to seed
the ground for a better life, obviously that's great if
you have that self awareness, go for it. But a
lot of highly cynical people are probably not going to
do this on their own. So it probably helps for
(32:47):
less cynical people to kind of deliberately contrive situations of
friendly cooperation to infect people suffering from cynicism with opportunities
to be trusted and to see exams samples of trust
rewarded I don't know exactly the best way to do this. Obviously,
you can't like for cynical strangers to do trust falls
with you in the grocery store parking lot. But surely
(33:10):
there are ways to stage parts of your life so
as to create little points of trading off of trust
and positive social contagion.
Speaker 2 (33:21):
Yeah. We're going to get into some possible examples of
this in a bit, but I'll go ahead and mention
some of it here. These are from some of the
ideas of an author we've already mentioned, Jamil Zaki, who
wrote a book about overcoming cynicism Hope for Cynics, The
Surprising Science of Human Goodness that came out in twenty
twenty four. But one of the things that he discusses
(33:43):
is essentially the idea of conducting your own behavioral experiments
to produce on the whole positive evidence of human goodness.
So sort of in a way like leaving the door
open for little examples of trust and allowing that trust
to wander in again, not leaving the whole door open,
you know, not you know not like you know, writing
(34:04):
your social Security number on your arm and just seeing
if anything anybody does anything bad with it, but little
smaller acts things just sprinkle throughout your daily life, like, Oh,
here's a possibility to sprinkle a little trust out there
and see that trust returned and in doing so, giving
us more real life evidence of human goodness to counteract
(34:27):
this welling up of cynicism inside us.
Speaker 3 (34:30):
Yeah, and to place emphasis again on what you just
said and what we were just talking about it. It
doesn't have to be huge risks when you make little
bids for trust. It can be little things. Now, coming
back to the next level of analysis, it was the
intra group level. Remember this was the idea that pluralistic
ignorance can create within a group a false impression that
(34:52):
there is a norm of cynical self interest, that people
are and should be selfish, when really most people in
the group don't actually feel that way. They're just afraid
to speak up because they think maybe they're the only one.
We might be able to overcome this and other situations
of pluralistic ignorance if we create a culture we try
(35:13):
to personally demonstrate act out a culture in which people
have more courage to disagree with what they assume to
be the opinions of the larger group. It might turn
out that it actually is pluralistic ignorance. Maybe a lot
of people already agree with you, and they just didn't
want to be the only one to say something. And
this is especially important if the assumed group norm is
(35:35):
something poisonous, something that maybe is coming top down, like
it's a dog eat dog world. There's like a really
influential person over the group shouting this message. It's important
that somebody else is saying the opposite. Otherwise the message
shouted from the top can easily become assumed to be
the group norm even if it's not. But also the
(35:55):
authors point out that normative group pressure can work in
the opposite directtion. This maybe sounds a little bit grubbier
than some of the other ideas because this involves the
idea of, well, maybe you should employ peer pressure to
positive ends. But the author's write quote, just as non
cynics can behave cynically under a norm of self interest,
so can sinics become more trusting when they feel normative
(36:19):
pressure to do so. There are experiments showing this. Somebody
might have a kind of cynical baseline, but when there's
peer pressure around them to be more trusting, it kind
of works. It makes them a little bit more trusting.
Speaker 2 (36:30):
I mean, this is what the trust falls are all about.
Speaker 3 (36:32):
Yeah, yeah, exactly the trust fall. I don't know, as
a particular act might be overly tainted with the aroma
of corporate seminars, but do things like that, I mean,
there is a kind of kernel of wisdom at the
inception of the trust fall. So I don't know, do
we feel good about trying to intentionally use group peer
(36:54):
pressure to influence people? I don't know, Like, using it
to reduce cynicism seems like one of the better uses
of peer pressure than I can imagine.
Speaker 2 (37:02):
Yeah, plus, just given how nefarious and how just infectious
cynicism is in our lives, Like, yes, we should pull
every level we have against it.
Speaker 3 (37:13):
And then finally at the inter group level. Remember this
was the example where groups in society become increasingly distrustful
of one another, in part because you imagine that the
other group is more hostile to your group than they
actually are. And the solution here, the authors propose, is
just give people accurate information, because studies in these situations
(37:36):
have shown that interventions of just like showing people real
examples of members of the out group as opposed to
leaving it up to their imagination or using cherry picked
examples from hostile in group media.
Speaker 2 (37:51):
Or outright conspiracy theories exact oftentimes, Like that's the mode
of thinking that is involved in characterizing theosing viewpoint.
Speaker 3 (38:01):
Yeah, just seeing like real accurate representations of who the
out group is, like interacting with each other and seeing
what they're actually like. These types of interventions have been
found to reduce this kind of between group hostility and
perceptions of metaperceptions of hostility within the out group. Oh
(38:22):
are they actually as selfish and hostile as I imagined?
Now that I see them, it seems maybe not.
Speaker 4 (38:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (38:27):
So that's all I've got on this paper by Norman
and Zaki. But I think that is a very interesting
place to start. It's got there's a lot to work
with there.
Speaker 2 (38:35):
Yeah. Yeah, And I would say in general, for folks
who want more information about ways to become less cynical
and combat cynical cynical thought and cynicism in your lives,
Zaki's work is definitely worth following. And he's out there
in a lot of places talking about this stuff, writing
about it. Back in twenty twenty two, he did a
(38:56):
Ted talk on the topic, and you can look that
up wherever you get your Ted talks. There's a great
quote in that talk where he says, you might think
that cynicism is a system upgrade that allows you to
see who we really are. It's not. It traps us
in a version of the world we don't want to
live in and one we don't have to.
Speaker 3 (39:15):
That's put very well, and I think that's an important
thing to emphasize. It's like a lot of the literature
that we talked about, I think in part two of
this series, you know, with the cynical genius illusion that
like it's just framed as wisdom that seeing the world
cynically as being realistic. I mean maybe in certain scenarios
(39:37):
there are like very corrupt situations where cynicism is a
more accurate diagnosis of them. But most of the time
the world isn't like that. Cynicism actually makes you worse
at predicting other people's behavior. It's just like it's not
a good model of the world. It's not being real.
It's actually living an illusion, living within an illusion that
hurts you exactly.
Speaker 2 (39:56):
Yeah, Now, this this talk was interesting because I believe
it was accord in twenty twenty one, and so you know,
he definitely ties some of it into the global pandemic
and talking about the connection between cynicism and disasters, where
something disastrous can occur some sort of widespread scenario like
global pandemic, and it can lead to increased cynicism. And
(40:18):
he also talks a little bit about the danger of
slipping into what he calls a cynicism perma frost. I
suppose on the individual level, we're even on like a
larger societal level where if, like baseline, cynicism grows to
a certain level, it's just harder and harder for.
Speaker 4 (40:36):
Us to shake it.
Speaker 3 (40:37):
Yes, cynicism is self reinforcing and self perpetuating. To come
back to something from that paper, it is a self
fulfilling prophecy. It makes the world in its image.
Speaker 2 (40:58):
Now, Zaki's twenty twenty four book again his hope for cynics,
The Surprising Science of Human Goodness, and he of course,
in this book covers the topic at length, goes through
a lot of what we've been discussing here, but then
there's added information and insight as well. I recommend picking
it up if you want to learn more about how
to combat cynicism. But I want to go through some
(41:19):
of the ideas that he brings forth that essentially gives
you sort of a plan of attack. One of the
first things that he points out is that you have
to recognize the harm of cynicism. And we've been talking
about this, after all, if you don't understand all the
mental and physical health as well as social ramifications of
a cynical mindset, you might continue to think of it
(41:39):
as a path of cool and safe detachment, like this
is what we are, this is the world we live in.
Realizing first of all that it's harming you to think
this way, that's a good first step.
Speaker 4 (41:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (41:52):
Yeah, Cynicism is not the safe bet. It's not I
don't know, putting your money in CDs or something. It's like,
it's more kind of like letting it get oily and
leaving it next to the fire.
Speaker 4 (42:03):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (42:04):
The next thing he brings up is embracing hopeful skepticism
and questioning your assumptions. I really like this one, because
cynicism can I think, come to feel like it's a
comfortable sweater that you wear, and then if someone comes
around and says, get rid of that sweater, you're gonna
be like, well, this is this is what I wear.
This is basically my skin at this point. And so
the idea here is that hopeful skepticism is kind of
(42:27):
something that's going to fit you the same as that sweater,
but it's not going to constrain your soul, you know,
so you know, assume better of people in general, but
also you know, self analyze your cynical ideas, engage in
rational skepticism, which is to say, seek actual real world
evidence for your negative opinions and beliefs, and pay closer
(42:49):
attention to what you actually observe in the world.
Speaker 3 (42:52):
Oh yeah, So this is coming back to the distinction
we made in the last episode between cynicism and skepticism.
Whereas cynicism is just a bias towards negativity and distrust,
skepticism is trying to award your trust to things on
the basis of whether there's good reason to trust them
or not paying attention to evidence and trying as best
you can to ignore your biases, whereas cynicism is itself
(43:14):
a bias.
Speaker 2 (43:15):
And if you want to think about this as trust
but confirm fair enough however you want to think about it,
it also reminds me a lot of some of the
anti anxiety techniques I've learned about in recent years, such
as putting your thoughts on trial and asking yourself questions
like A. What am I afraid will happen? And b
what is likely to happen? Because we can often allow
(43:38):
our negative thought patterns to just run around unchecked in
our minds, like it's not at the forefront of our
thought We're trying to do other things, and it's just
in the background like a yapping dog. But if we stop,
if we identify our thoughts and then we apply reasoning
to those thoughts, we put those thoughts on trial and
say like, hey, you stop barking. Now, let's talk about
why you're barking and what you're barking about. Then you
(44:00):
can actually begin to make serious headway towards dismissing these
thoughts or at least diminishing their power. Saki also recommends
we conduct again our own behavioral experiments to open the
door for examples of trust to wander into our lives,
to practice trust. And this is this is a this
is one that's so big that it's going to sound
(44:22):
like overly naive just to say it, but focusing on
the positive. I mean, how many times have you heard
that it can it can almost sound like you should
smile more. He recommends engaging in positive gossip as opposed
to just negative gossip, to making an effort to finding
examples in your life and in the world of people
doing good to counteract the other stories. They're going to
(44:45):
maybe catch your attention more and certainly drift up towards
the top of the news feed more.
Speaker 4 (44:51):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (44:51):
In a way, this reminds me of that famous mister
Rogers quote about looking for the helpers. You know, I
believe he said quote. When I was a boy and
I would see scary things in the news, my mother
would say to me, look for the helpers, who will
always find people who are helping.
Speaker 3 (45:06):
Now, to answer the cynical thought arising in some people's heads,
you might think in reaction to that, like, oh, but
isn't that just sort of like turning away from reality,
Like isn't that not being realistic and wanting to live
in a happy, happy fantasyland.
Speaker 4 (45:21):
No.
Speaker 3 (45:22):
I think a lot of the research we've looked at
is like, this is a strategy for having a more
realistic view of the world. What we have a tendency
toward is an unrealistic view of the world based on
the high salience of negative events. So like you know,
nineteen positive events and one negative event event, the one
negative event defines our memory of what happened. And so
(45:46):
this is like trying to have a more realistic view
based on the actual real world prevalence of trust and positivity.
Speaker 2 (45:54):
Yeah, yeah, And I mean it really comes down to,
like make sure that you have a balanced diet of
information about people the world, and that can include a
media diet, it can also certainly include a real life
diet and how you're interacting with people. Like one example
from my own family, over the past year, we've started
watching the YouTube videos of Sam Bentley, who you can
(46:14):
find on wherever you get your videos. But this is
a guy who highlights positive social and environmental news from
around the world. And these are the kind of stories
that are generally never the headline. And it's not to
say that they should be, and it's not to say
that you should be only watching this sort of new
stream and not the other news streams, but you know,
(46:36):
their general positivity and hopefulness can provide a very necessary
counterbalance to the more cynical darkness that is just going
to well out of you in response to the coverage
the rest of the coverage out there. And again, even
if the coverage is fair and you know on the level,
I mean, still that's it's going to feed that cynicism
(46:56):
that is in all of us. That is, you know,
gon gonna potentially rise up if we don't keep it
in check.
Speaker 3 (47:02):
Yes, it is very important to be aware of and
informed about and have a realistic view of threats and
bad things happening. But if you want to be able
to respond to those in the best way possible, it's
actually important not to let a cynical mindset set in
which it just disempowers you. So it is important to
be aware of threats and dangers and not ignore them,
(47:26):
to have them front of mind in a way, but
be able to respond to them realistically and productively, rather
than just submitting to cynical surrender.
Speaker 2 (47:35):
Absolutely, now, we should be clear that none of this
is like a one and done solution. There's not like
a check sheet you can go through and at the
end of it be like, ah, well, there we go.
Cynicism defeated. In fact, Zaki here of the author in
his ted talk drives home that he still struggles with
cynicism himself all the time, and it is a struggle.
(47:56):
You can't completely squash the infection of modern cynicism, and
that's one of the cruel realities of the whole scenario.
Cynicism is just going to well up again and again,
potentially gaining foothold each time subconsciously, like it's just in
the background growing, and it requires deliberate effort generally to
counter its growth. So, you know, like any kind of maintenance,
(48:18):
except its maintenance on your outlook on the world, on
your psyche and your soul. And once again, none of
this is a proposed transition from cynicism into naivety, or
from cynicism into some sort of unhealthy optimism. It's a
transition from an unhealthy and ultimately unrealistically bleak outlook on
people in the world into something that is more balanced,
(48:40):
more reasonably optimistic, and healthier for you in multiple regards.
Speaker 3 (48:44):
Yeah, see the world as it really is. Trust when
you can and use those relationships of mutual trust to
make life better.
Speaker 2 (48:52):
All right, Well, we're gonna go ahead and wrap up
these episodes on cynicism right here. On an upnote, on
a hopeful note, optim mistic note, and then maybe give
you a little homework for ways that you can bring
less cynicism into your manifested life. We want to remind
everyone out there that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is
primarily a science and culture podcast, with core episodes on
(49:14):
Tuesdays and Thursdays, short form episodes on Wednesdays and on Fridays.
We set aside most serious concerns just talk about a
weird film on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3 (49:22):
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 stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (49:43):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.
Speaker 2 (50:00):
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