April 18, 2026 • 56 mins
In this classic 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. (part 2 of 4) (originally published 4/17/2025)
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. It's Saturday
Vault episode Cynicism, Part two, Originally published four seventeen, twenty
twenty five. This is part two of four Let's dive
right in.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
And I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with part
two in our series on cynicism, the tendency to believe
other people are selfish, untrustworthy, and immoral. In Part one,
we talked about what cynicism means and its modern usage,
and we contrasted that with similar but distinct concepts like pessimism,
(00:56):
and also with cynic philosophy, the latter being a school
of fullilosophy born in ancient Greece that emphasized moral integrity,
self sufficiency, and virtue, and achieved in part by shedding
pretensions like ignoring the pressure to conform and living in
accordance with our nature. The word cynic comes from the
(01:16):
Greek word for dog, and so a cynic philosopher in
the ancient sense might say that we can all learn
something from watching the honest way that a dog lives
according to its nature. This, of course, is quite different
from what we mean by cynicism today in common language,
which is a disposition of low social trust, the tendency
(01:36):
to believe, as we put it last time, that people
are bad, people are selfish, and morals are fake.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
Yeah. Yeah, ancient philosophic cynics be like a dog. Modern
cynics dog eat dog.
Speaker 3 (01:52):
Yes. Now. Last time we also talked a bit about
cynicism in literature, with my observation that really, like the
most cynical writing I could find anywhere was all in
the Bible, which I'm not sure exactly what to make
of that, but that is kind of surprising and counterintuitive perhaps,
But it's like, especially in the books of the prophets
(02:14):
in the Hebrew Bible, like Micah and Jeremiah, full of
just very eloquent, devastating condemnations of human nature. The heart
is deceitful above all things. There is none that doeth good, No,
not one, that sort of thing. We also discussed medical, psychological,
and sociological research on the correlates of cynicism, with the
(02:36):
overwhelming conclusion being that holding cynical beliefs about human nature
and low trust in others is quite harmful to us
in many different ways. It appears to be bad for
our health, mental and physical health. It is correlated with
all kinds of undesirable outcomes, including early death. We didn't
really get into this research last time, but you probably
(02:58):
won't be surprised to learn it is a sociated with
low quality social relationships. And despite the archetype of the ruthless,
cynical striver and achiever, it also tends on average to
make it harder for us to reach even our material
goals like making money and attaining positions of leadership, at
least in part because cynical people waste a lot of
(03:21):
time and resources trying to avoid being made a sucker
and miss out on opportunities to cooperate with others for
mutual benefit. So I think it's safe to say that
believing everyone is just in it for themselves and cannot
be trusted is in so many ways bad, bad, bad
for us. It's bad for our lives. But of course,
(03:42):
the somewhat heartwarming implied inverse of all this is the
evidence that it really does us good to cooperate and
trust people.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
Definite silver lining there to all all of this research
we've been doing here now.
Speaker 3 (03:55):
In the last episode, we also raised a number of
questions that we weren't able to answer yet, and we'll
come back to them throughout the series. I think we'll
look at at least one study today that sheds some
light on this. But these were questions like do more
cynical or less cynical people actually have a better predictive
model of the world, Like whose model of how other
(04:18):
people behave is more accurate? And in any given situation,
how can we know if we're being too trusting, too cynical,
or if we're striking just the most reasonable balance. And also,
given that it comes with so many clear downsides, what
if anything, is the benefit of cynicism.
Speaker 1 (04:38):
Well, I'm not sure this will actually help us answer
any of these questions, but then maybe it'll give us
just a little more elbow room to work with the concept.
Reading through Anscar Allen's cynicism book m I T that
I reverenced in the last episode, and he covers several
subsets of modern cynicism, and here are a few that
(05:00):
I thought might help us out. So one category is
insider cynics. So the cynicism of contemporary professionals who believe
that people are ultimately selfish, and these individuals do their
best to survive in their organizations by dealing with their
colleagues on those terms. So we might think of it
as a you know, I'm not here to make friends approach,
(05:22):
but you know, only to work or specifically to work,
with the idea being that maybe outside of that work
environment they are less cynical.
Speaker 3 (05:30):
Ah okay, well, I would certainly have questions about how
skilled people are actually are at like turning cynicism on
and off when switching between contexts. But you can certainly
see how that would be useful, maybe because you know,
it's quite reasonable to understand that, like certain professional environments
(05:50):
require a lot less trust, require you to be more
doubting of people. Maybe if you are, I don't know,
investigating murders or something like that, like you really need
to not just trust people.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
There are so many movies about murder detectives being able
to neatly separate their work life from their home life.
Speaker 3 (06:11):
Yeah, but so hopefully if you were in a job
like that, or if you're in just in kind of
a cutthrow business environment where everybody, you know, everybody's trying
to edge other people out in deals. You would hope
to be able to turn that off when you come
out of that and get into your relationships in life.
I guess it's questionable to what extent people can do
that very well.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
I would agree with that. Yes, another classification that he
singles out or the master cynics, so rich and powerful
contemporary cynics who hide their own cynicism by adopting the
values and beliefs of people they hold power over. In
a weird sense, this is kind of kind of a
puzzle because a person who's really cynical about politics would
(06:54):
no doubt assume that every politician is a master cynic,
that they're just when they're a handing and so forth,
they're just pretending to take on these values where deep
down they know the truth, Like I know that people
are just selfish and they're exploiting everyone as well.
Speaker 3 (07:11):
We're going to have to come back to the question
of cynicism in politics and political participation because I think
that raises all sorts of interesting questions.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
Yeah, and there's been a lot of research, a lot
of writing just on that area alone. Now, the third
of the categories that I'm going to reference here. There
are some additional ones that I'm not getting into, but
the third one I want to reference here is paternalistic cynicism,
And in this one holds a cynical view of human
motivations and seeks to capitalize on those motivations, but not
(07:39):
for personal gain, but for the greater good. And that
one made me think a little bit more and maybe
gives us a little more room to play when considering
the effectiveness or possible effectiveness of cynicism. I was thinking, like,
let's say you wanted to encourage a certain behavior in
the general public, and you're presented with two messaging options,
one that works based on a cynical view of human motivations,
(08:02):
you know, greed and self interest, while the other appeals
to the higher angels of their nature. Well, which is
more likely to work. It's going to depend on the messaging,
of course, and the exact details of the target audience,
you know, general audience versus you know, some narrow or audience.
But yeah, which worldview is a better starting place? I
(08:23):
feel like this might work as a good sort of
practical thought experiment because it entails making a choice about
how you're going to model the motivations of a given population.
But on the other hand, we kind of come back
to that sliding scale of cynicism. If one is cynical
enough about the intended audience, then would any messaging seem
like it would work, Like why are you even bothering?
If you're just assuming that everyone out there is just selfish,
(08:46):
you might not be able to get them to stop littering,
or to recycle, or to I don't know where seat belts.
Speaker 3 (08:53):
But maybe the paternalistic cynicism model is like you, you
must stop littering, and you must be kind to your
fellows human being or you will go to hell. Something
you know, like appealing to your base personal interest in
order to get you to do something that the messager
sees as good.
Speaker 1 (09:10):
Yeah, bring it back to fear right. Maybe I'm just
muddying the waters. But there's so many different areas you
can get into and discussions of modern cynicism. Rob.
Speaker 3 (09:19):
One thing you said in the last episode that I
thought was really insightful and I have kept thinking about
ever since we recorded that is that you said maybe
one of the appeals of cynicism is that expressions of
cynicism are cathartic statements like people suck. They when you
say things like that, or when somebody else says that
(09:40):
and you get to agree with them, it feels like
a psychological pressure release valve. By like making a statement
of that sort, you're sort of blowing off steam. And
of course this can be true even for people who
are not especially cynical on average, having these little moments
of situational cynicism. But I was thinking more about the
(10:01):
Catharsis element, and I wonder if this association of cynicism
with cathartic relief also tells us something about how people
can acquire generalized dispositional cynicism. Like what if the person
who is very cynical on average gets to be that
way by creating by like habituating themselves to a desire
(10:25):
for that momentary catharsis that you get from saying people suck.
Does that make any sense?
Speaker 1 (10:30):
Yeah, Like you dip your hand into the cynicism cookie
jar a few times too often and the crumbs begin
to stick. Yeah. I was thinking about this when I
was looking at some material related to cynicism in the workplace,
which is its own huge area of consideration that we're
not really going to get into in this episode, per se.
(10:51):
But I was just thinking about, Okay, if one's really
cynical regarding one's employers, one's corporate overlords, you might excuse
any amount of inaction or slacking based on the view that, well,
they don't really care about me, they're not invested in me,
they're not paying me enough, and so forth, all any
grievance you might imagine. And maybe, just maybe in small doses,
(11:15):
this gives you space to let things slide in ways
that ease your work burden or create space for something
else you want to do. And yeah, maybe it's a
situation where if you stick your hand into that cookie
jar too often, it does become your default view at
least of your work situation. And maybe it bleeds over
into other areas as well.
Speaker 3 (11:36):
That is an interesting possibility. So you're in a kind
of a pressure inducing scenario and you, for whatever reason,
you can get little moments of relief from that pressure
by resorting to cynical evaluations. And so does that create
a kind of addiction like you associate the moment of
(11:57):
cathartic cynicism with real axation of the pain or with
pleasure or even or something like that and you just
kind of keep pressing the pleasure button until that's just
what your personality is.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (12:10):
I don't have research to like back up that interpretation
of where cynicism comes from, but I think that is
an interesting possibility. I wonder if it ever sets in
that way.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
Yeah. Yeah, I also was thinking, you know, in terms
of dealing with this a corporation or a company, like
it's one thing to sort of initially think cynically about
like this faceless thing, this organization, But of course organizations
are made up of people, and so I wonder how
the cynicism might spread where you might generally have cynical
(12:42):
ideas about a company, but then those cynical ideas end
up applying to certain heads of that company. But then
it could potentially trickle down, and then where does it stop,
Like who stops being the face of the company. I
guess they have to be cynical enough. They have to
share your cynicism in order to be like your your
brothers in arms against against the company, that sort of thing.
Speaker 3 (13:02):
Yeah, yeah, you know, actually this sort of gets a
little bit into something I'm going to talk about in
the paper. I'm about to explain. But there are different environments.
There are different sort of environments and contexts that encourage
and reward different levels of cynicism, and so there can
be very like cynicism positive organizations, Like if you are
(13:25):
within a company that is very cruel and in which
you know you don't do very well by placing trust
in people, it can be quite reasonable to end up
responding with the generalized cynicism about interactions within that company.
Organizational culture is a thing. So anyway, so I want
(13:45):
to turn to a concept in psychological research on cynicism
that I found really interesting, and that is the so
called cynical genius illusion. So I was reading about this
in a paper by a couple of researchers that I
cited in part one of the series. These scientists are
(14:06):
Olga Stavrova, a professor of psychology at Tilburg University in
the Netherlands, and Daniel Illebracht at the University of Cologne
in Germany. These two published a paper in the year
twenty eighteen in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin,
and the paper was called the Cynical Genius Illusion, Exploring
and debunking lay beliefs about cynicism and competence. Now, they
(14:32):
begin by acknowledging a lot of the things we talked
about in the last episode. They define cynicism as, you know,
the main cognitive component of hostility. They're talking about it
pretty much in the same terms we are, I believe
that other people, you know, you should be suspicious of
their motives, that they that they are primarily motivated by
self interest, that they can't be trusted and will harm you.
(14:54):
And then they run through the long list of ways
that cynicism appears to be bad for us, bad for
our life in health, in relationships and ability to attain
goals and so forth. However, the authors complicate that picture
by noting that if you just look at popular culture
and literature and folk wisdom, cynicism does not seem to
(15:18):
have and on the whole negative reputation. To read from
their introduction here quote. Among nineteenth and twentieth century writers
in popular figures, cynicism has often been seen as a
sign of intelligence and wit. American writers Ambrose Bierce and
Lillian Hellman praised cynicism as an art of seeing the
(15:39):
true nature of things. Bernard Shaw referred to cynicism as
a quote power of accurate observation, and John Stuart Mill
noticed that quote it is thought essential to a man
who has any knowledge of the world to have an
extremely bad opinion of it. And as for the other
authors they named, I looked up some of the cynical quotes.
(16:01):
I can't believe I didn't think of Ambrose Beers as
a good source of literary cynicism in the last episode,
but in The Devil's Dictionary, Bierce defines a cynic as
someone quote whose faulty vision sees things as they are,
not as they ought to be. They also cited Lillian Hellman.
Her version of this was quote, cynicism is an unpleasant
(16:23):
way of saying the truth. And I do think there's
something interesting in Hellman's phrasing here, because of the emphasis
on tone. It is an unpleasant way of saying what
is true. So what is the difference between somebody just
quote being real and somebody being cynical. It might be
in the substance of what they say and how they think.
(16:45):
It might be like material substantive differences. But I think
sometimes we make that distinction based on whether there is
negative emotion in their expression, like if they are counseling
us against trust. Did they deliver that count with anger
or contempt? But anyway, so you've got all this literature
(17:06):
that equates cynicism with the kind of wisdom and you know,
like the power to see what is really going on. Also,
the authors here point out that if you draw up
a list of like cynical characters in popular culture, they
don't tend to be pitiable wretches dealing with setbacks imposed
(17:26):
by their lack of faith in humankind. More often, cynicism
in fictional characters is presented as gruff hard one realism
and wisdom. The cynical character has knowledge, insights, and powers
of deduction not available to their more trusting peers. So
(17:46):
think of Sherlock Holmes or The authors give the example
of House from how simd. I'm not a watcher of House,
but I'm familiar with the character.
Speaker 1 (17:56):
I mean, you could do a full stop after Sherlock,
because Sherlock, of course, in influences so many different similar
characters and cast a long shadow across across the English language,
and and fiction and other languages, but cast a long
shadow across our media. Yeah, yet at this and it
is interesting to think about Sherlock Holmes in these terms,
(18:17):
because yes, Sherlock Holmes is presented as being uh, you know,
somewhat emotionally detached, but not you know, certainly he's fighting
the good fight. He is on the side of the
good guy and will sometimes even you know, break the
rules a little bit or bend them in order to
make sure that justice is served. But on the other hand,
(18:38):
I think if you if you look closely enough at Sherlock,
I mean he's also a character who at times admits
that he's never loved anyone or has certainly never had
a romantic love in his life. He also struggles horribly
with addiction at one point. You know, so you know,
he's he's not an angel. But again, I guess this
part of his presentation, he's he's hard boiled. It's it's
(19:01):
it's hard one cynicism that he uses in order to
solve the crimes that he's presented with.
Speaker 3 (19:06):
Yeah, yeah, I mean I think that is actually generally true.
Cynical characters are often presented as suffering as a result
of their own cynicism, but not wrong because of it,
like that their cynicism is something that hurts them and
it makes them sad and lonely, but it also gives
them cognitive superiority. It gives them intelligence and wisdom and
(19:31):
power to see through the facade and see what's really happening. Yeah,
but anyway, So, based on this background of the cynical
geniuses in fiction and the sort of cynical wit and
wisdom from literature, the author is conducted a number of
different studies. They did four studies to explore common beliefs
(19:51):
about the link between cynicism and cognitive superiority and competence,
and then three more studies to look at whether they're
actually is a link. So do people in general think
that cynicism is a sign of knowledge, intellect, and competence.
Do cynics actually seem smarter? And are they actually smarter
(20:13):
and more competent than the rest of us?
Speaker 1 (20:15):
Well, Sherlock is above reproach, but yeah, I'm curious to
hear how it lights to real people.
Speaker 3 (20:21):
So the authors begin by acknowledging some existing research that
touches on these questions. For example, there was a study
by Evans and Venda Caalceda published in Personality and Social
Psychology Bulletin in twenty eighteen called the Reputational consequences of
generalized trust. And this study looked at what we was
(20:41):
just sort of a survey of what we tend to
think of people when we know that they are high
in trust or low in cynicism. The findings were that
high trust individuals are seen as moral and seen as sociable,
but also seen as less competent. And this kind of
makes sense as a as a familiar personality archetype, right, like,
(21:02):
Johnny is so trusting, he's a good guy, he's friendly,
but he doesn't know what he's doing. So if showing
generalized trust makes people think we're less competent, does that
imply that showing generalized distrust makes people think we're more competent. Perhaps. However,
(21:23):
the authors also found here that people see you as
more competent if you display what they call discriminate ability,
which is the ability to tell the difference between a
situation in which you should trust and situations in which
you should not. And this takes us back to the
question we mentioned in part one. Obviously, nobody either trusts
(21:44):
or distrusts in every situation, So how do you determine
how cynical it is reasonable to be in this situation?
And how do we know if we're off balance?
Speaker 1 (21:55):
Now?
Speaker 3 (21:55):
The authors also discuss reasons that people might think it
is why to be cynical one is pretty familiar better
safe than sorry, reasoning. They write, quote, in many domains,
the consequences of false negative errors eg. Believing that someone
is trustworthy when they really are not have often been
(22:16):
more costly than false positive errors, eg. Believing that someone
is untrustworthy when they really are trustworthy. Over human evolutionary history,
making the cognitive system of modern humans biased toward false alarms,
which is hard to argue with, right, Like, Yeah, in
this series, we are showing lots of evidence that it
(22:37):
is bad for you to be highly chronically cynical. And
yet it's true that more often if you distrust a
trustworthy person, the immediate consequences are fairly limited, but if
you trust an untrustworthy person, the consequences can be disastrous.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
Yeah, we talked about this a little bit in the
last episode Type one Errors and Cognition. You know, it's
like you've got to make your way across an open field,
and you know there's gonna be a time cost and
and probably like you know, an anxiety cost to checking
every bush along the way to make sure there's not
a tiger in there to jump out and get you.
(23:16):
But you know, the way our brains work and the
way we're hardwired, it's like we know that that's one
sort of risk I'm gonna lose some time, and I might,
you know, feel horrible the whole way, versus getting eaten
by a tiger. Yeah, Like one of those is like
a mutt like looms far larger in our short term
threat analysis.
Speaker 3 (23:36):
One side of the balance has an infinite cost on it. Yeah,
it's like kind of hard to outbalance that, even though
like wasting all your time and resources checking every bush
that that really does matter, like over time, that hugely
impacts your quality of life.
Speaker 1 (23:49):
Yeah, yeah, especially of course, you know when you get
into not only real tigers, but all the paper tigers
in one's life, you know.
Speaker 3 (23:56):
So anyway, they say that a general appreciation for the
merit of the better safe than sorry framework could lead
to the widespread notion that cynics are smarter people. They're
more knowledgeable and more competent. Now, continuing the background review,
(24:20):
the authors also get into existing research on whether there
is an actual link between cynicism and competence so now
we're asking not about how cynics are perceived, but about
what their relative competence level actually is. And this, I
guess comes back to another question we brought up in
Part one. Do cynics or nonsnics have a better predictive
(24:42):
model of the world? And one very interesting way of
studying this is the so called trust game. So here's
an example of a type of trust game. This was
described in a paper called why so cynical asymmetric feedback
underlies misguided skepticism regarding the trust worthiness of others. This
was by Debt Left, Fetchenhauer and David Dunning in the
(25:05):
journal Psychological Science in twenty ten, and it describes this
what is sometimes called an investing game, but they call
it a trust game, and it goes like this quote.
In the game, the trust is given money that can
be kept or handed to a completely random and anonymous stranger,
the trustee. If the trust hands his or her money over,
(25:28):
the amount of money is quadrupled eg. Five dollars becomes
twenty dollars, and trustees have two options. They can either
split the money evenly between themselves and the truster eg.
Give ten dollars back and keep ten dollars for themselves,
or they can keep all the money for themselves. So
(25:49):
the way the game works is I'm the truster. I'm
the person who gets to make the first decision. If
I trust you and you are trustworthy, we both benefit
and I double my money. I trust you and you
are not trustworthy, I get nothing. So the authors did
this experiment lots of times, and some interesting patterns came out.
Uh they found that trusters estimate the rate of trustworthiness
(26:13):
of anonymous strangers in the game. They estimate it will
be between forty five and sixty percent. So it seems
that most people think it's a little better than a
coin flip chance that the other person will honor their
trust and split the money for mutual benefit. In reality,
the trustees honored the trust and split the money around
(26:34):
eighty to ninety percent of the time. So people in
this game massively underestimated how trustworthy random strangers would be.
At least in the context of this game, anonymous strangers
were something like twenty to fifty percent more trustworthy and
cooperative than people expected them to be. Isn't that interesting?
(26:58):
That's crazy?
Speaker 1 (26:59):
Yeah, eighty ninety percent of the time that's higher than
I would have guessed. But but then again, it's like
I like to think that if someone offered me the
scenario and I was not too cynical and trusted that
it was not some sort of a scam, I would
be as trustworthy.
Speaker 3 (27:15):
Can I offer. I think maybe one thing that could
be working in this particular scenario is that it makes
sense to be wary of people who are offering to
double your money in financial transactions. But I think that
makes sense when like people come to you and they say, like, hey,
(27:38):
you know, you give me some money and I'll double it,
you should. I mean, if somebody says that they're not
telling you the truth almost always, so like there's a
good reason to be worried there. This is a different thing,
because the trustee in this game is not somebody who
is coming out of nowhere to offer you money if
you just give them some first. They're a random stranger
(27:58):
who is who has been pulled into this experiment designed
by somebody else. And so I think what this shows
is most of the time, if given the opportunity to
be trustworthy and cooperate, most people will, But also it
makes sense to be wary of people who are claiming
they're trying to help you cooperate, you know, for mutual benefit.
If they're coming out of nowhere with this, you know,
(28:21):
that's often going to be a scam. Does that make sense?
Speaker 1 (28:24):
Yeah, yeah, I think so.
Speaker 3 (28:25):
But anyway, so yeah, in the trust game, most people
are very trustworthy and players are on average way too
cynical about their fellow human being. They are missing out
on lots of opportunities to double their money. And this
is consistent with research by Miller in nineteen ninety eight
and ninety nine finding that people just tend to grossly
overestimate the selfishness and underestimate the trustworthiness of strangers. In
(28:51):
this particular paper, the authors note that cynicism might grow
from what they call asymmetric feedback, and the way that
works is this, when you trust somebody and you get betrayed,
you get very clear feedback that it was wrong to trust.
The downside of granting your trust is very apparent to you.
(29:14):
They walk away with the money, you get nothing, and
you know it's clear to you what happened. But when
you refrain from trusting people, the downsides are often invisible
to you because you don't actually see the lost opportunity
as a scenario that plays out in front of you.
You have to like imagine it as a counterfactual. It's
(29:35):
not concrete and in your face, like being betrayed is.
So you don't really get conditioned by feedback from instances
where you harmed yourself by withholding trust.
Speaker 1 (29:45):
Does that make sense, Yeah, yeah, it's kind of like
give like, here's a scenario. Let's imagine that you're just
really pedantic when looking at the checks when you go
out to eat with friends. You know, you're like, all right,
I want to see every his work. I got to
make one hundred percent sure this is fair. And maybe
it's because at some point someone really did stick you
(30:07):
over one of these situations, and so it maybe that
is more apparent, Like you're never going to forget that
that you were wronged in this way. But if you're
just overly pedantic when it comes to the bills, eventually
people might stop asking you to join them for dinner,
and that might be very invisible to you that that's happening.
Speaker 3 (30:28):
Yes, you don't realize. Yeah, it's just like things are
not as good now, and I don't know why I'm
feeling lonely yeah, or is a more direct comparison. If
you're not looking at the checks all the time, you
might not notice the times when somebody made a mistake
in your favor that just passed you never even noticed
that it just goes right by you. That that is
(30:50):
a good comparison. But anyway, what the study found is
that if you give subjects symmetric feedback about the trustworthiness
of others, it tended to deuce the subject's cynicism. So, like,
let's say you play the trust game, symmetric feedback would
be rob whether or not you decide to hand somebody
the five dollars and try to cooperate to quadruple it.
(31:13):
You get to find out what they would have done
either way, so you know, you get to keep playing
the game that way. And it turns out if you
play it that way, where people keep seeing, oh, I
kept the money, but they I saw that they would
have doubled my money if I just trusted them, and
you get to see that happen over and over. That
actually does decrease people's cynicism, which also is interesting and
(31:36):
that it gives you at least a little bit of
an idea where some elements of cynicism could be coming from.
It could be related in part to this asymmetric build
up of information. We get to see where trust fails
very clearly. But the opportunities we lose out on by
not granting trust are often just like, we don't even
(31:56):
realize what's happened. We don't even realize anything. We don't
even know what we're missing. Yeah, so this research does
not give us a complete picture, but I think some
evidence is starting to accumulate that the cynic does not
have a highly accurate internal model of the world. They
might in some scenarios, but generalized cynicism is not like
(32:18):
as some of these writers were saying, seeing things as
they really are. In fact, cynicism often causes us to
incorrectly predict the behavior of other people, assuming they will
be more selfish and treacherous than they really are. Now,
coming back to the main paper I was talking about,
Bastavrova and Elibracht, they note some other research on the
(32:39):
link between cynicism and competence. Again, contrary to the cynical
genius archetype, the authors are able to cite a long
list of studies looking at links between cynicism and various
types of cognitive performance and ability, and they find it's
exactly the opposite of what you might guess from the
Sherlock Holmes exam. Higher performance on various types of cognitive, academic,
(33:04):
and IQ tests is negatively correlated with cynicism. It is
instead positively correlated with increased tendency to trust. There are
a few confounding results here. It's not like every single
study has found this, but the vast majority have. Some
of the confounding results are. For example, they cite a
twenty thirteen study that found that higher IQ does not,
(33:27):
on average improve a person's ability to correctly predict who
will be trustworthy and who will not. So like you
do better on cognitive tests, that doesn't mean that if
we pair you up with you know, Johnny and Billy
in the in the trust game experiment, you can predict
whether Johnny or Billy you'll be more likely to help
(33:48):
you out. It just it doesn't help us in that regard.
Speaker 1 (33:50):
Yeah, it's like the compass is already pulling you in
one direction or another, and however higher IQ is, I mean,
that's just that's just the kind of mental energy that
ends up being wrapped around the initial impulse.
Speaker 3 (34:01):
Another thing to keep in mind here is that, of course,
while like various cognitive and IQ and academic tests can
they can tell you a lot of things about cognitive ability,
they don't tell you everything. So you know, they can
tell you about certain kinds of skills with reasoning, certain
kinds of intelligence. But there are always going to be
elements of intelligence that are not perfectly captured by these
(34:24):
sorts of tests. So the authors begin to develop a
possible hypothetical model to explain what's going on here. They say,
what if intelligence, knowledge, and competence don't really help you
very much in identifying who to trust in a given scenario.
They don't tell you really if Johnny or Billy, both
(34:46):
of whom you've just met, is more trustworthy, But instead
they help you evaluate the scenario itself to decide whether
to deploy a more cynical or a more trusting framework
given the environment. In the circumstances the author's right quote,
high levels of competence might allow individuals to correctly identify
(35:08):
the corruptness of their environment and adjust their level of
cynicism to match it. Following this reasoning, high competence individuals
might hold adaptable attitudes and recur to cynicism only when
it seems warranted, while their less competent counterparts might show
more cognitive rigidity and relying on the better safe than
(35:29):
sorry heuristic tend to endorse cynicism indiscriminately. So if this
model is correct, they're saying it can be efficient to
just remain in better safe than sorry mode when you
lack the ability to tell whether you're dealing with a corrupt,
untrustworthy environment or not.
Speaker 1 (35:48):
Yeah, yeah, just makes sense. We can all think of
examples where the scenario is very clear, like, Okay, even
if someone is out to get me, this is not
the environment where they can just really take me for
all I'm worth. I'm literally handing somebody a five dollar bill.
What are they going to do? They're going to run
away into the woods and keep my dollar fifty and
change that the risks seem low.
Speaker 3 (36:09):
So onto Stevrova and Illibrac's actual experiments, and I'll start
with the very short version of their findings. First of all,
they find yes on average across multiple experiments. Regular people
tend to believe that cynicism is a sign of cognitive
superiority in others. If you think people are bad, you
(36:30):
think people are selfish, and morals are fake. On balance,
people will tend to assume you are smarter and more competent,
especially at certain types of cognitive tasks, things involving like
logic and numbers and stuff. They're more likely to assign
you important cognitive tasks like doing mathematical calculations and logical
(36:51):
analysis of documents if they think you're cynical. And on
the other hand, the authors found in their experiments no,
on average, cynicism is not associated with cognitive superiority or
greater competence. They had three studies based on data from
about two hundred thousand subjects across thirty different countries and
showed that, on average, cynicism was negatively correlated with tests
(37:15):
of cognitive ability and tests of academic knowledge and competency.
So this included all kinds of things like reading comprehension,
mathematical skills, scientific literacy, technological literacy, and so forth. And
this negative association between cynicism and cognitive tests was true
even after controlling for confounding variables like age, gender, household income, wealth, test,
(37:38):
language proficiency, and Big Five personality traits. Now one major
distinction here is that they found that people who tested
higher incompetence tended to have attitudes of contingent trust. They
might be trusting by default, but were not rigid in
(37:59):
that regard become more cynical if it was warranted situationally
or based on the environment and cultural context, whereas people
scoring lower incompetence tended to accept an unconditionally cynical worldview.
In the words of the author is quote suggesting that
at low levels of competence, holding a cynical worldview might
(38:20):
represent an adaptive default strategy to avoid the potential costs
of falling prey to others cunning. Now, I wanted to
expand on these findings with a few notes. One of
the things about the early tests of people's perceptions of
cynicism a control they had here, is that the authors
didn't just ask about cognitive competence. They also asked about
(38:42):
social and moral competence, and quite along the lines you
might expect. People tended to think that low trust individuals
would be better at cognitive things like math, logic, and
critical thinking, but they thought that high trust individuals would
be better at social tasks like cheering up a depressed
friend or taking care of a stray animal. So it
wasn't just like across the board we think cynics are great.
(39:05):
We think cynics are better at everything. It's that people
tend to think cynics are better at certain types of
intelligence based skills, things like math and logic and so forth.
Speaker 1 (39:17):
So a lot of this is sounding kind of like
when you see somebody smoking a cigarette. You know, they
can look pretty cool, especially in movies, like but we
all we know deep down that like, well, the smoking
a cigarette doesn't actually make you cool, but we can't
help it. And likewise you might think, well who you know.
You might say, okay, doctor smoking a cigarette. I have questions.
(39:37):
Maybe this is not the doctor for me. But private
detective smoking a cigarette, Well, obviously that's the guy I
want looking after my interests.
Speaker 3 (39:46):
Oh do you mean like the smoking of the cigarette
implies like a rejection of the consensus about the health
effects of it, or just that it I mean, I
guess that often is suggested. It's like, I don't think
it's hurting me. I don't care what people say. I
guess there are two ways of going It's like it
would be cynical. I think it's part of a cynical
worldview to say, like, ah, these doctors who say it
causes cancer or heart disease, they don't know what they're
(40:08):
talking about. I can just smoke, it's fine. Or there's
the version that's like I don't care what happens to me,
which I think is a little bit different than cynicism.
Maybe though could go along with cynicism.
Speaker 1 (40:18):
Yeah, yeah, but.
Speaker 3 (40:19):
I follow you in general, because yeah, there's like, apart
from thinking that cynical people are smart, there is also
a tendency to think that cynical people are cool. Yeah,
that's uh. In fact, I've got a section where maybe
we'll get more into that in just a minute. Here.
Speaker 1 (40:34):
Scientific analysis of the coolness.
Speaker 3 (40:36):
Of another thing here is that they tried different like
wordings and types of questions across multiple replication attempts to
make sure that, like, the cynical genius effect was robust,
(40:57):
And it was robust, but the effects were modulated a
little bit by changes in phrasing, such as whether you
describe the opposite of cynicism as an idealistic versus a
positive view of human nature. Apparently people think being idealistic
about human nature is a little bit dumber than being
positive about human nature. It's always funny how just changing
(41:19):
the swapping a word out can have some effects there.
They also replicated these findings in different samples. So they
did some online surveys, international online surveys, and they did
some in person tests of university students in Germany. They
did some with British adults, and the cynical genius effect
appeared to varying degrees in all the groups tested here. However,
(41:40):
in some of these experiments, respondents got to rate essentially
how cynical they would like a person assigned to a
cognitive task to be, and the breakdown, to be clear,
was not toward a preference for extreme cynicism, but for
higher than average cynicism. So one example here is that
(42:02):
in a group of British adults selecting between hypothetical candidates
to solve intellectual problems, participants quote desired mix of cynical
and non cynical tendencies was fifty six percent cynical to
forty four percent non cynical. So on average, the group
they thought, we need somebody smart, we want somebody who
(42:22):
is a little bit more cynical than the media.
Speaker 1 (42:25):
That makes sense, you know, if you were able to
move the slider on your so like your android doctor,
your android lawyer, or whatever it happens to be. Yeah,
you want that the right mix of cynicism a little
more than the average person, but not not too much.
This will be interesting to get into later when we
start talking about like absolute cynicism and what where, what
(42:46):
that is and where we stand in relation to it.
Speaker 3 (42:49):
Yeah. So, as for the actual inverse link between cynicism
and competence, when broken down by test domain, I was
interested to see that the effect was strongest in reading
skills and weakest in information processing speed. So in these tests,
apparently highly cynical people holding up relatively okay with speed
(43:12):
of reasoning, doing a lot worse in like reading comprehension
and finally getting to the element of the paper. Comparing cynicism, competence,
and environment, the authors tested levels of cynicism cross referenced
with these cognitive tests in subjects across thirty different countries,
and they found that in countries that scored low in
(43:34):
corruption and high in rule of law according to an
international database called the World Governance Indicators, the effect we've
been talking about did hold true, but in countries with
high corruption and eroded rule of law, the effect was
greatly diminished. Quote the harsher the social climate, the more
(43:55):
these high competence people embraced a cynical worldview. So kind
of along the line of results we talked about in
the last episode, it hurts you materially to hold cynical
views unless those views are correct in the environment where
you operate. Along these lines, the authors discuss ways that
cynicism might be learned directly from personal experience. Despite the
(44:18):
fact that they tried to control for the influence of
variables like age, gender, and wealth, it's still possible that
quote higher levels of cognitive ability, academic competence, and education
might protect from adverse life experiences, not only as they
allow discovering potential fraud, but also as they increase the
(44:38):
chances of living in a safe and friendly environment, providing
more evidence for a positive than for a negative view
of human nature, and consequently preventing cynicism development. So that's
talking about the idea that like that education and cognitive skills,
they might not just be about how accurately you're seeing
the world around you. They might actually, over time influence
(45:02):
what the world around you. Is like on the other hand,
since cynicism entails generalized distrust, quote cynical versus less cynical,
individuals might be more distrustful of the opinions and knowledge
of others, a behavior that can eventually prevent them from
expanding their knowledge and understanding.
Speaker 1 (45:22):
Well, that that seems like it tracks the idea that
if you're you're cynical about at about potential information sources,
and you're more likely to sort of back your way
into a corner where you have very few informational sources
coming in and they're the only the only ones you're
going to accept are the ones that back up your
existing cynicism.
Speaker 3 (45:42):
Yes, but they say, of course, there is more work
to do exploring the different possible causal mechanisms here. So
this paper does find good, robust evidence for the cynical
genius illusion, that the illusion is widely present and it
is in fact an illusion, but the questions about why
are still largely open. One thing I wonder about a
(46:05):
lot of the cognitive tasks that subjects said they would
entrust to a cynical person more than a non cynical person.
I was looking through the inventory and a lot of
these tasks involved scrutiny of details, like crunching numbers, following
complex logic, analyzing scientific results, things like that, And I
(46:26):
wonder if the same pattern would hold for cognitive tasks
that people associate less with scrutiny of details and instead
with things like creativity and imagination. And to be clear,
the cynical genius effect would be an illusion even if
it were only applied to scrutinizing cognition. But I wonder
(46:46):
if the illusion is actually more specific to certain kinds
of cognition.
Speaker 1 (46:51):
Yeah, yeah, that very much, that Sherlock Holmes scenario.
Speaker 3 (46:55):
But also coming back to this question, we've asked several
times now, are there any benefit to generalize cynicism. It
comes with tons of harms for the cynic It hurts
you to be cynical, But are there any benefits? Well,
first of all, this paper does find if you're in
a really corrupt untrustworthy environment, obviously it does make more
(47:15):
sense to be more cynical. That's just like a correct
understanding of how your environment operates. Number two, even if
you're not in a more corrupt untrustworthy environment, If you
don't understand your environment and you're basically out of your depth.
Cynicism may protect you from catastrophic outcomes. It's like, I
(47:37):
don't really know what's going on here, don't know if
I can trust or not, so by default I'm not
going to trust. That's better safe than sorry. And then third,
I think this is going to be mainly related to
the cynical genius illusion. Having a reputation for cynicism may
have the effect of convincing people around you that you
are very smart and intellectually savvy, even though on average
(48:00):
the opposite is more likely to be true. So there's
a kind of social premium incentive to appear to be cynical.
It's in a lot of cases it's going to make
people think that you know something they don't, and you're
a wise and world weary and intelligent person.
Speaker 1 (48:17):
Yeah, Cynicism is often kind of a safe gambole at,
like a cocktail party or a mixer. Right if politics
should come up, which of course is bad manners anyway,
but if it were to come up, you might say
something that is just kind of a you know, a
blanket statement of cynicism, like Iowa politicians are all the same.
And then what people are gonna have to double down.
They're going to have to come back and try to
(48:39):
convince you. No, no, not all politicians. Some are great,
and they're going to look like the person who's naive
where you've already you know, mounted your cynicism high horse.
Speaker 3 (48:50):
We've talked about this before. Yeah, the the like all
politicians are the same as the kind of statement that
I think is just facially untrue, could not be true,
obviously wrong, but you feel foolish trying to argue with it. Yeah,
and I think that goes beyond politics. I mean just generally,
trying to argue with the cynic is so difficult. Statements
(49:12):
of cynicism often come with this a priori texture of factuality.
Just feel self evidently true with it, even when it's
obviously wrong, when it would be absurd for it to
be true. One more thing before I wrap up from
(49:37):
the Stavrovia and Elebrects study here talking about in their discussion,
they talk about why do we tend to assume highly
cynical people are smarter than the rest of us, even
though this is usually not the case. We touched on
this earlier, but the authors do offer a few ideas
based on common cognitive biases. In particular, they call out
(50:00):
negativity bias and loss aversion. Negativity bias is the observation
that we are more psychologically affected by negative things than
we are by positive things of equal intensity, and loss
a version is very similar. It's the finding that we're
more strongly motivated to avoid a loss than we are
(50:20):
to achieve a gain of the same value. So here's
an example. I find a five dollars bill on the sidewalk. Ah,
that's nice, quickly forget about it. Versus I drop a
five dollar bill down a storm drain. Are you know why?
Speaker 2 (50:35):
Me?
Speaker 1 (50:36):
Ah?
Speaker 3 (50:36):
I hate this. You know, It's like the dollar value
is exactly the same, but the loss is more memorable,
it's more salient and will cause a greater emotional reaction.
And I think for those reasons, like we are more
likely to learn something from it, to try to draw
a general inference that we will take and apply to
(50:58):
the rest of life from these moments of loss than
from gains of the exact same value.
Speaker 1 (51:03):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, I'd go as far as to
say that at the very least, you're more likely to
remember dropping that five than finding a ten. Yeah, And yeah,
there's probably been an interesting thought experiment to be had,
and just trying to determine at which point the find
value would be equal to a much lesser loss value.
Speaker 3 (51:23):
I think I think work on that exact question has
been done. I don't have it pulled up in front
of me, but I think we've looked at that before. Yeah,
I'm sure for some reason seeing the exact numbers is
going to be really funny. But anyway, so you apply
this these biases negativity, bias, and loss aversion to the
domain of trust and cynicism, and they could mean that
(51:45):
the pain of being betrayed is much greater than the
pleasure of having our trust rewarded, even given the exact
same original act of trust. And this is back to
the mental cherry picking that you mentioned the last time.
You know, you can always like think of these really
sticky examples of times when you shouldn't have trusted someone
(52:06):
or something. We may trust somebody twenty times, it works
out great nineteen times, but the one time it did
not work out is shocking and painful and we feel
so hurt. And so from this we form an idea
that people who do not trust easily have learned a
lot of valuable lessons. Therefore they are generally knowledgeable, wise,
(52:28):
and smart. Another explanation comes back to that study from
the background section that we talked about briefly about the
the invisibility of consequences in situations where we refrain from
from giving trust to our detriment. So again, you get
to see what happens when you trust and that trust
(52:48):
is betrayed. But when you withhold trust and you just
miss out on an opportunity to gain, you don't really
get to see that loss made concrete. It's just like
it's another path you could have taken, and you can go.
You can even go without thinking about it.
Speaker 1 (53:02):
Yeah, that's right. Unless you're visited by you know, Christmas
spirits or something, you're just not going to have any
alternate views.
Speaker 3 (53:08):
That's a really you know what. I think a Christmas
Carol is a great example here. That is something the
ghost of Christmas past has to come and make the
lost opportunities concrete. And then one last point the authors
make that I thought was a very interesting point. They raise,
what if the cynical genius illusion arises in part from
(53:29):
biases of storytelling. We fill our lives with fictional stories
fictional stories need to be entertaining. Stories are usually more
entertaining if danger and conflict are heightened, if villains are
meaner and more dangerous, if the stakes are high, if
(53:50):
no one can be trusted you can. You can hear
all these phrases in the Don la Fontaine movie trailer voice,
can't you you know? It's like, that's what stories are
made out of. Fictional storytelling selects four narratives about the
dangers of trust and the risk of betrayal because stories
like that are captivating to our attention and we want
(54:11):
to know what happens next. So hostile and treacherous worlds
may be more entertaining in a narrative. But it's possible
that we draw incorrect inferences from those fictional worlds. We
learn too much about how life works from unrealities that
are specifically crafted to hack our attention. And who are
(54:33):
the smart, savvy characters in these worlds. I think very
often they are cynics who are very reluctant to trust.
Speaker 1 (54:39):
That's right, That's a great point.
Speaker 3 (54:41):
So anyway, that's all I've got in the study for now.
But I think the cynical genius illusion is so interesting
I'm going to be thinking about this a lot in
the days and weeks to come.
Speaker 1 (54:49):
Yeah, this will be an interesting one to bring into
our weird house cinema discussions as we inevitably come around
to a film that has a cynic genius in it.
And I'm sure if I was to go back and
look at some of the titles we've covered, we've probably
encountered the encounter these sorts of characters before, probably played
by someone like Christopher Lee. Yes, all right, Well, on
(55:11):
that note, we're going to go ahead and close up
this episode, but we're going to come back with at
least one more episode on cynicism. Again, this is a
huge topic. In the next episode, I believe we're going
to get into cynicism, politics, and social media, so that
should be a fun discussion either way, tune in. We're
(55:32):
looking forward to getting into it. In the meantime, I'd
like to remind everyone that Stuff to Blow Your Mind
is primarily a science and culture podcast, with core episodes
on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We have a short form episode
on Wednesdays, and on Fridays. We set aside most serious
concerns to just talk about.
Speaker 3 (55:47):
A weird film on Weird House Cinema, Huge Things, As
always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway. If you
would like to get in touch with us with feedback
on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic
for the future, or just to say hello, you can
email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind
dot com.
Speaker 2 (56:11):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.
Hey, Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. It's Saturday
Vault episode Cynicism, Part two, Originally published four seventeen, twenty
twenty five. This is part two of four Let's dive
right in.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
And I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with part
two in our series on cynicism, the tendency to believe
other people are selfish, untrustworthy, and immoral. In Part one,
we talked about what cynicism means and its modern usage,
and we contrasted that with similar but distinct concepts like pessimism,
(00:56):
and also with cynic philosophy, the latter being a school
of fullilosophy born in ancient Greece that emphasized moral integrity,
self sufficiency, and virtue, and achieved in part by shedding
pretensions like ignoring the pressure to conform and living in
accordance with our nature. The word cynic comes from the
(01:16):
Greek word for dog, and so a cynic philosopher in
the ancient sense might say that we can all learn
something from watching the honest way that a dog lives
according to its nature. This, of course, is quite different
from what we mean by cynicism today in common language,
which is a disposition of low social trust, the tendency
(01:36):
to believe, as we put it last time, that people
are bad, people are selfish, and morals are fake.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
Yeah. Yeah, ancient philosophic cynics be like a dog. Modern
cynics dog eat dog.
Speaker 3 (01:52):
Yes. Now. Last time we also talked a bit about
cynicism in literature, with my observation that really, like the
most cynical writing I could find anywhere was all in
the Bible, which I'm not sure exactly what to make
of that, but that is kind of surprising and counterintuitive perhaps,
But it's like, especially in the books of the prophets
(02:14):
in the Hebrew Bible, like Micah and Jeremiah, full of
just very eloquent, devastating condemnations of human nature. The heart
is deceitful above all things. There is none that doeth good, No,
not one, that sort of thing. We also discussed medical, psychological,
and sociological research on the correlates of cynicism, with the
(02:36):
overwhelming conclusion being that holding cynical beliefs about human nature
and low trust in others is quite harmful to us
in many different ways. It appears to be bad for
our health, mental and physical health. It is correlated with
all kinds of undesirable outcomes, including early death. We didn't
really get into this research last time, but you probably
(02:58):
won't be surprised to learn it is a sociated with
low quality social relationships. And despite the archetype of the ruthless,
cynical striver and achiever, it also tends on average to
make it harder for us to reach even our material
goals like making money and attaining positions of leadership, at
least in part because cynical people waste a lot of
(03:21):
time and resources trying to avoid being made a sucker
and miss out on opportunities to cooperate with others for
mutual benefit. So I think it's safe to say that
believing everyone is just in it for themselves and cannot
be trusted is in so many ways bad, bad, bad
for us. It's bad for our lives. But of course,
(03:42):
the somewhat heartwarming implied inverse of all this is the
evidence that it really does us good to cooperate and
trust people.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
Definite silver lining there to all all of this research
we've been doing here now.
Speaker 3 (03:55):
In the last episode, we also raised a number of
questions that we weren't able to answer yet, and we'll
come back to them throughout the series. I think we'll
look at at least one study today that sheds some
light on this. But these were questions like do more
cynical or less cynical people actually have a better predictive
model of the world, Like whose model of how other
(04:18):
people behave is more accurate? And in any given situation,
how can we know if we're being too trusting, too cynical,
or if we're striking just the most reasonable balance. And also,
given that it comes with so many clear downsides, what
if anything, is the benefit of cynicism.
Speaker 1 (04:38):
Well, I'm not sure this will actually help us answer
any of these questions, but then maybe it'll give us
just a little more elbow room to work with the concept.
Reading through Anscar Allen's cynicism book m I T that
I reverenced in the last episode, and he covers several
subsets of modern cynicism, and here are a few that
(05:00):
I thought might help us out. So one category is
insider cynics. So the cynicism of contemporary professionals who believe
that people are ultimately selfish, and these individuals do their
best to survive in their organizations by dealing with their
colleagues on those terms. So we might think of it
as a you know, I'm not here to make friends approach,
(05:22):
but you know, only to work or specifically to work,
with the idea being that maybe outside of that work
environment they are less cynical.
Speaker 3 (05:30):
Ah okay, well, I would certainly have questions about how
skilled people are actually are at like turning cynicism on
and off when switching between contexts. But you can certainly
see how that would be useful, maybe because you know,
it's quite reasonable to understand that, like certain professional environments
(05:50):
require a lot less trust, require you to be more
doubting of people. Maybe if you are, I don't know,
investigating murders or something like that, like you really need
to not just trust people.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
There are so many movies about murder detectives being able
to neatly separate their work life from their home life.
Speaker 3 (06:11):
Yeah, but so hopefully if you were in a job
like that, or if you're in just in kind of
a cutthrow business environment where everybody, you know, everybody's trying
to edge other people out in deals. You would hope
to be able to turn that off when you come
out of that and get into your relationships in life.
I guess it's questionable to what extent people can do
that very well.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
I would agree with that. Yes, another classification that he
singles out or the master cynics, so rich and powerful
contemporary cynics who hide their own cynicism by adopting the
values and beliefs of people they hold power over. In
a weird sense, this is kind of kind of a
puzzle because a person who's really cynical about politics would
(06:54):
no doubt assume that every politician is a master cynic,
that they're just when they're a handing and so forth,
they're just pretending to take on these values where deep
down they know the truth, Like I know that people
are just selfish and they're exploiting everyone as well.
Speaker 3 (07:11):
We're going to have to come back to the question
of cynicism in politics and political participation because I think
that raises all sorts of interesting questions.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
Yeah, and there's been a lot of research, a lot
of writing just on that area alone. Now, the third
of the categories that I'm going to reference here. There
are some additional ones that I'm not getting into, but
the third one I want to reference here is paternalistic cynicism,
And in this one holds a cynical view of human
motivations and seeks to capitalize on those motivations, but not
(07:39):
for personal gain, but for the greater good. And that
one made me think a little bit more and maybe
gives us a little more room to play when considering
the effectiveness or possible effectiveness of cynicism. I was thinking, like,
let's say you wanted to encourage a certain behavior in
the general public, and you're presented with two messaging options,
one that works based on a cynical view of human motivations,
(08:02):
you know, greed and self interest, while the other appeals
to the higher angels of their nature. Well, which is
more likely to work. It's going to depend on the messaging,
of course, and the exact details of the target audience,
you know, general audience versus you know, some narrow or audience.
But yeah, which worldview is a better starting place? I
(08:23):
feel like this might work as a good sort of
practical thought experiment because it entails making a choice about
how you're going to model the motivations of a given population.
But on the other hand, we kind of come back
to that sliding scale of cynicism. If one is cynical
enough about the intended audience, then would any messaging seem
like it would work, Like why are you even bothering?
If you're just assuming that everyone out there is just selfish,
(08:46):
you might not be able to get them to stop littering,
or to recycle, or to I don't know where seat belts.
Speaker 3 (08:53):
But maybe the paternalistic cynicism model is like you, you
must stop littering, and you must be kind to your
fellows human being or you will go to hell. Something
you know, like appealing to your base personal interest in
order to get you to do something that the messager
sees as good.
Speaker 1 (09:10):
Yeah, bring it back to fear right. Maybe I'm just
muddying the waters. But there's so many different areas you
can get into and discussions of modern cynicism. Rob.
Speaker 3 (09:19):
One thing you said in the last episode that I
thought was really insightful and I have kept thinking about
ever since we recorded that is that you said maybe
one of the appeals of cynicism is that expressions of
cynicism are cathartic statements like people suck. They when you
say things like that, or when somebody else says that
(09:40):
and you get to agree with them, it feels like
a psychological pressure release valve. By like making a statement
of that sort, you're sort of blowing off steam. And
of course this can be true even for people who
are not especially cynical on average, having these little moments
of situational cynicism. But I was thinking more about the
(10:01):
Catharsis element, and I wonder if this association of cynicism
with cathartic relief also tells us something about how people
can acquire generalized dispositional cynicism. Like what if the person
who is very cynical on average gets to be that
way by creating by like habituating themselves to a desire
(10:25):
for that momentary catharsis that you get from saying people suck.
Does that make any sense?
Speaker 1 (10:30):
Yeah, Like you dip your hand into the cynicism cookie
jar a few times too often and the crumbs begin
to stick. Yeah. I was thinking about this when I
was looking at some material related to cynicism in the workplace,
which is its own huge area of consideration that we're
not really going to get into in this episode, per se.
(10:51):
But I was just thinking about, Okay, if one's really
cynical regarding one's employers, one's corporate overlords, you might excuse
any amount of inaction or slacking based on the view that, well,
they don't really care about me, they're not invested in me,
they're not paying me enough, and so forth, all any
grievance you might imagine. And maybe, just maybe in small doses,
(11:15):
this gives you space to let things slide in ways
that ease your work burden or create space for something
else you want to do. And yeah, maybe it's a
situation where if you stick your hand into that cookie
jar too often, it does become your default view at
least of your work situation. And maybe it bleeds over
into other areas as well.
Speaker 3 (11:36):
That is an interesting possibility. So you're in a kind
of a pressure inducing scenario and you, for whatever reason,
you can get little moments of relief from that pressure
by resorting to cynical evaluations. And so does that create
a kind of addiction like you associate the moment of
(11:57):
cathartic cynicism with real axation of the pain or with
pleasure or even or something like that and you just
kind of keep pressing the pleasure button until that's just
what your personality is.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (12:10):
I don't have research to like back up that interpretation
of where cynicism comes from, but I think that is
an interesting possibility. I wonder if it ever sets in
that way.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
Yeah. Yeah, I also was thinking, you know, in terms
of dealing with this a corporation or a company, like
it's one thing to sort of initially think cynically about
like this faceless thing, this organization, But of course organizations
are made up of people, and so I wonder how
the cynicism might spread where you might generally have cynical
(12:42):
ideas about a company, but then those cynical ideas end
up applying to certain heads of that company. But then
it could potentially trickle down, and then where does it stop,
Like who stops being the face of the company. I
guess they have to be cynical enough. They have to
share your cynicism in order to be like your your
brothers in arms against against the company, that sort of thing.
Speaker 3 (13:02):
Yeah, yeah, you know, actually this sort of gets a
little bit into something I'm going to talk about in
the paper. I'm about to explain. But there are different environments.
There are different sort of environments and contexts that encourage
and reward different levels of cynicism, and so there can
be very like cynicism positive organizations, Like if you are
(13:25):
within a company that is very cruel and in which
you know you don't do very well by placing trust
in people, it can be quite reasonable to end up
responding with the generalized cynicism about interactions within that company.
Organizational culture is a thing. So anyway, so I want
(13:45):
to turn to a concept in psychological research on cynicism
that I found really interesting, and that is the so
called cynical genius illusion. So I was reading about this
in a paper by a couple of researchers that I
cited in part one of the series. These scientists are
(14:06):
Olga Stavrova, a professor of psychology at Tilburg University in
the Netherlands, and Daniel Illebracht at the University of Cologne
in Germany. These two published a paper in the year
twenty eighteen in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin,
and the paper was called the Cynical Genius Illusion, Exploring
and debunking lay beliefs about cynicism and competence. Now, they
(14:32):
begin by acknowledging a lot of the things we talked
about in the last episode. They define cynicism as, you know,
the main cognitive component of hostility. They're talking about it
pretty much in the same terms we are, I believe
that other people, you know, you should be suspicious of
their motives, that they that they are primarily motivated by
self interest, that they can't be trusted and will harm you.
(14:54):
And then they run through the long list of ways
that cynicism appears to be bad for us, bad for
our life in health, in relationships and ability to attain
goals and so forth. However, the authors complicate that picture
by noting that if you just look at popular culture
and literature and folk wisdom, cynicism does not seem to
(15:18):
have and on the whole negative reputation. To read from
their introduction here quote. Among nineteenth and twentieth century writers
in popular figures, cynicism has often been seen as a
sign of intelligence and wit. American writers Ambrose Bierce and
Lillian Hellman praised cynicism as an art of seeing the
(15:39):
true nature of things. Bernard Shaw referred to cynicism as
a quote power of accurate observation, and John Stuart Mill
noticed that quote it is thought essential to a man
who has any knowledge of the world to have an
extremely bad opinion of it. And as for the other
authors they named, I looked up some of the cynical quotes.
(16:01):
I can't believe I didn't think of Ambrose Beers as
a good source of literary cynicism in the last episode,
but in The Devil's Dictionary, Bierce defines a cynic as
someone quote whose faulty vision sees things as they are,
not as they ought to be. They also cited Lillian Hellman.
Her version of this was quote, cynicism is an unpleasant
(16:23):
way of saying the truth. And I do think there's
something interesting in Hellman's phrasing here, because of the emphasis
on tone. It is an unpleasant way of saying what
is true. So what is the difference between somebody just
quote being real and somebody being cynical. It might be
in the substance of what they say and how they think.
(16:45):
It might be like material substantive differences. But I think
sometimes we make that distinction based on whether there is
negative emotion in their expression, like if they are counseling
us against trust. Did they deliver that count with anger
or contempt? But anyway, so you've got all this literature
(17:06):
that equates cynicism with the kind of wisdom and you know,
like the power to see what is really going on. Also,
the authors here point out that if you draw up
a list of like cynical characters in popular culture, they
don't tend to be pitiable wretches dealing with setbacks imposed
(17:26):
by their lack of faith in humankind. More often, cynicism
in fictional characters is presented as gruff hard one realism
and wisdom. The cynical character has knowledge, insights, and powers
of deduction not available to their more trusting peers. So
(17:46):
think of Sherlock Holmes or The authors give the example
of House from how simd. I'm not a watcher of House,
but I'm familiar with the character.
Speaker 1 (17:56):
I mean, you could do a full stop after Sherlock,
because Sherlock, of course, in influences so many different similar
characters and cast a long shadow across across the English language,
and and fiction and other languages, but cast a long
shadow across our media. Yeah, yet at this and it
is interesting to think about Sherlock Holmes in these terms,
(18:17):
because yes, Sherlock Holmes is presented as being uh, you know,
somewhat emotionally detached, but not you know, certainly he's fighting
the good fight. He is on the side of the
good guy and will sometimes even you know, break the
rules a little bit or bend them in order to
make sure that justice is served. But on the other hand,
(18:38):
I think if you if you look closely enough at Sherlock,
I mean he's also a character who at times admits
that he's never loved anyone or has certainly never had
a romantic love in his life. He also struggles horribly
with addiction at one point. You know, so you know,
he's he's not an angel. But again, I guess this
part of his presentation, he's he's hard boiled. It's it's
(19:01):
it's hard one cynicism that he uses in order to
solve the crimes that he's presented with.
Speaker 3 (19:06):
Yeah, yeah, I mean I think that is actually generally true.
Cynical characters are often presented as suffering as a result
of their own cynicism, but not wrong because of it,
like that their cynicism is something that hurts them and
it makes them sad and lonely, but it also gives
them cognitive superiority. It gives them intelligence and wisdom and
(19:31):
power to see through the facade and see what's really happening. Yeah,
but anyway, So, based on this background of the cynical
geniuses in fiction and the sort of cynical wit and
wisdom from literature, the author is conducted a number of
different studies. They did four studies to explore common beliefs
(19:51):
about the link between cynicism and cognitive superiority and competence,
and then three more studies to look at whether they're
actually is a link. So do people in general think
that cynicism is a sign of knowledge, intellect, and competence.
Do cynics actually seem smarter? And are they actually smarter
(20:13):
and more competent than the rest of us?
Speaker 1 (20:15):
Well, Sherlock is above reproach, but yeah, I'm curious to
hear how it lights to real people.
Speaker 3 (20:21):
So the authors begin by acknowledging some existing research that
touches on these questions. For example, there was a study
by Evans and Venda Caalceda published in Personality and Social
Psychology Bulletin in twenty eighteen called the Reputational consequences of
generalized trust. And this study looked at what we was
(20:41):
just sort of a survey of what we tend to
think of people when we know that they are high
in trust or low in cynicism. The findings were that
high trust individuals are seen as moral and seen as sociable,
but also seen as less competent. And this kind of
makes sense as a as a familiar personality archetype, right, like,
(21:02):
Johnny is so trusting, he's a good guy, he's friendly,
but he doesn't know what he's doing. So if showing
generalized trust makes people think we're less competent, does that
imply that showing generalized distrust makes people think we're more competent. Perhaps. However,
(21:23):
the authors also found here that people see you as
more competent if you display what they call discriminate ability,
which is the ability to tell the difference between a
situation in which you should trust and situations in which
you should not. And this takes us back to the
question we mentioned in part one. Obviously, nobody either trusts
(21:44):
or distrusts in every situation, So how do you determine
how cynical it is reasonable to be in this situation?
And how do we know if we're off balance?
Speaker 1 (21:55):
Now?
Speaker 3 (21:55):
The authors also discuss reasons that people might think it
is why to be cynical one is pretty familiar better
safe than sorry, reasoning. They write, quote, in many domains,
the consequences of false negative errors eg. Believing that someone
is trustworthy when they really are not have often been
(22:16):
more costly than false positive errors, eg. Believing that someone
is untrustworthy when they really are trustworthy. Over human evolutionary history,
making the cognitive system of modern humans biased toward false alarms,
which is hard to argue with, right, Like, Yeah, in
this series, we are showing lots of evidence that it
(22:37):
is bad for you to be highly chronically cynical. And
yet it's true that more often if you distrust a
trustworthy person, the immediate consequences are fairly limited, but if
you trust an untrustworthy person, the consequences can be disastrous.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
Yeah, we talked about this a little bit in the
last episode Type one Errors and Cognition. You know, it's
like you've got to make your way across an open field,
and you know there's gonna be a time cost and
and probably like you know, an anxiety cost to checking
every bush along the way to make sure there's not
a tiger in there to jump out and get you.
(23:16):
But you know, the way our brains work and the
way we're hardwired, it's like we know that that's one
sort of risk I'm gonna lose some time, and I might,
you know, feel horrible the whole way, versus getting eaten
by a tiger. Yeah, Like one of those is like
a mutt like looms far larger in our short term
threat analysis.
Speaker 3 (23:36):
One side of the balance has an infinite cost on it. Yeah,
it's like kind of hard to outbalance that, even though
like wasting all your time and resources checking every bush
that that really does matter, like over time, that hugely
impacts your quality of life.
Speaker 1 (23:49):
Yeah, yeah, especially of course, you know when you get
into not only real tigers, but all the paper tigers
in one's life, you know.
Speaker 3 (23:56):
So anyway, they say that a general appreciation for the
merit of the better safe than sorry framework could lead
to the widespread notion that cynics are smarter people. They're
more knowledgeable and more competent. Now, continuing the background review,
(24:20):
the authors also get into existing research on whether there
is an actual link between cynicism and competence so now
we're asking not about how cynics are perceived, but about
what their relative competence level actually is. And this, I
guess comes back to another question we brought up in
Part one. Do cynics or nonsnics have a better predictive
(24:42):
model of the world? And one very interesting way of
studying this is the so called trust game. So here's
an example of a type of trust game. This was
described in a paper called why so cynical asymmetric feedback
underlies misguided skepticism regarding the trust worthiness of others. This
was by Debt Left, Fetchenhauer and David Dunning in the
(25:05):
journal Psychological Science in twenty ten, and it describes this
what is sometimes called an investing game, but they call
it a trust game, and it goes like this quote.
In the game, the trust is given money that can
be kept or handed to a completely random and anonymous stranger,
the trustee. If the trust hands his or her money over,
(25:28):
the amount of money is quadrupled eg. Five dollars becomes
twenty dollars, and trustees have two options. They can either
split the money evenly between themselves and the truster eg.
Give ten dollars back and keep ten dollars for themselves,
or they can keep all the money for themselves. So
(25:49):
the way the game works is I'm the truster. I'm
the person who gets to make the first decision. If
I trust you and you are trustworthy, we both benefit
and I double my money. I trust you and you
are not trustworthy, I get nothing. So the authors did
this experiment lots of times, and some interesting patterns came out.
Uh they found that trusters estimate the rate of trustworthiness
(26:13):
of anonymous strangers in the game. They estimate it will
be between forty five and sixty percent. So it seems
that most people think it's a little better than a
coin flip chance that the other person will honor their
trust and split the money for mutual benefit. In reality,
the trustees honored the trust and split the money around
(26:34):
eighty to ninety percent of the time. So people in
this game massively underestimated how trustworthy random strangers would be.
At least in the context of this game, anonymous strangers
were something like twenty to fifty percent more trustworthy and
cooperative than people expected them to be. Isn't that interesting?
(26:58):
That's crazy?
Speaker 1 (26:59):
Yeah, eighty ninety percent of the time that's higher than
I would have guessed. But but then again, it's like
I like to think that if someone offered me the
scenario and I was not too cynical and trusted that
it was not some sort of a scam, I would
be as trustworthy.
Speaker 3 (27:15):
Can I offer. I think maybe one thing that could
be working in this particular scenario is that it makes
sense to be wary of people who are offering to
double your money in financial transactions. But I think that
makes sense when like people come to you and they say, like, hey,
(27:38):
you know, you give me some money and I'll double it,
you should. I mean, if somebody says that they're not
telling you the truth almost always, so like there's a
good reason to be worried there. This is a different thing,
because the trustee in this game is not somebody who
is coming out of nowhere to offer you money if
you just give them some first. They're a random stranger
(27:58):
who is who has been pulled into this experiment designed
by somebody else. And so I think what this shows
is most of the time, if given the opportunity to
be trustworthy and cooperate, most people will, But also it
makes sense to be wary of people who are claiming
they're trying to help you cooperate, you know, for mutual benefit.
If they're coming out of nowhere with this, you know,
(28:21):
that's often going to be a scam. Does that make sense?
Speaker 1 (28:24):
Yeah, yeah, I think so.
Speaker 3 (28:25):
But anyway, so yeah, in the trust game, most people
are very trustworthy and players are on average way too
cynical about their fellow human being. They are missing out
on lots of opportunities to double their money. And this
is consistent with research by Miller in nineteen ninety eight
and ninety nine finding that people just tend to grossly
overestimate the selfishness and underestimate the trustworthiness of strangers. In
(28:51):
this particular paper, the authors note that cynicism might grow
from what they call asymmetric feedback, and the way that
works is this, when you trust somebody and you get betrayed,
you get very clear feedback that it was wrong to trust.
The downside of granting your trust is very apparent to you.
(29:14):
They walk away with the money, you get nothing, and
you know it's clear to you what happened. But when
you refrain from trusting people, the downsides are often invisible
to you because you don't actually see the lost opportunity
as a scenario that plays out in front of you.
You have to like imagine it as a counterfactual. It's
(29:35):
not concrete and in your face, like being betrayed is.
So you don't really get conditioned by feedback from instances
where you harmed yourself by withholding trust.
Speaker 1 (29:45):
Does that make sense, Yeah, yeah, it's kind of like
give like, here's a scenario. Let's imagine that you're just
really pedantic when looking at the checks when you go
out to eat with friends. You know, you're like, all right,
I want to see every his work. I got to
make one hundred percent sure this is fair. And maybe
it's because at some point someone really did stick you
(30:07):
over one of these situations, and so it maybe that
is more apparent, Like you're never going to forget that
that you were wronged in this way. But if you're
just overly pedantic when it comes to the bills, eventually
people might stop asking you to join them for dinner,
and that might be very invisible to you that that's happening.
Speaker 3 (30:28):
Yes, you don't realize. Yeah, it's just like things are
not as good now, and I don't know why I'm
feeling lonely yeah, or is a more direct comparison. If
you're not looking at the checks all the time, you
might not notice the times when somebody made a mistake
in your favor that just passed you never even noticed
that it just goes right by you. That that is
(30:50):
a good comparison. But anyway, what the study found is
that if you give subjects symmetric feedback about the trustworthiness
of others, it tended to deuce the subject's cynicism. So, like,
let's say you play the trust game, symmetric feedback would
be rob whether or not you decide to hand somebody
the five dollars and try to cooperate to quadruple it.
(31:13):
You get to find out what they would have done
either way, so you know, you get to keep playing
the game that way. And it turns out if you
play it that way, where people keep seeing, oh, I
kept the money, but they I saw that they would
have doubled my money if I just trusted them, and
you get to see that happen over and over. That
actually does decrease people's cynicism, which also is interesting and
(31:36):
that it gives you at least a little bit of
an idea where some elements of cynicism could be coming from.
It could be related in part to this asymmetric build
up of information. We get to see where trust fails
very clearly. But the opportunities we lose out on by
not granting trust are often just like, we don't even
(31:56):
realize what's happened. We don't even realize anything. We don't
even know what we're missing. Yeah, so this research does
not give us a complete picture, but I think some
evidence is starting to accumulate that the cynic does not
have a highly accurate internal model of the world. They
might in some scenarios, but generalized cynicism is not like
(32:18):
as some of these writers were saying, seeing things as
they really are. In fact, cynicism often causes us to
incorrectly predict the behavior of other people, assuming they will
be more selfish and treacherous than they really are. Now,
coming back to the main paper I was talking about,
Bastavrova and Elibracht, they note some other research on the
(32:39):
link between cynicism and competence. Again, contrary to the cynical
genius archetype, the authors are able to cite a long
list of studies looking at links between cynicism and various
types of cognitive performance and ability, and they find it's
exactly the opposite of what you might guess from the
Sherlock Holmes exam. Higher performance on various types of cognitive, academic,
(33:04):
and IQ tests is negatively correlated with cynicism. It is
instead positively correlated with increased tendency to trust. There are
a few confounding results here. It's not like every single
study has found this, but the vast majority have. Some
of the confounding results are. For example, they cite a
twenty thirteen study that found that higher IQ does not,
(33:27):
on average improve a person's ability to correctly predict who
will be trustworthy and who will not. So like you
do better on cognitive tests, that doesn't mean that if
we pair you up with you know, Johnny and Billy
in the in the trust game experiment, you can predict
whether Johnny or Billy you'll be more likely to help
(33:48):
you out. It just it doesn't help us in that regard.
Speaker 1 (33:50):
Yeah, it's like the compass is already pulling you in
one direction or another, and however higher IQ is, I mean,
that's just that's just the kind of mental energy that
ends up being wrapped around the initial impulse.
Speaker 3 (34:01):
Another thing to keep in mind here is that, of course,
while like various cognitive and IQ and academic tests can
they can tell you a lot of things about cognitive ability,
they don't tell you everything. So you know, they can
tell you about certain kinds of skills with reasoning, certain
kinds of intelligence. But there are always going to be
elements of intelligence that are not perfectly captured by these
(34:24):
sorts of tests. So the authors begin to develop a
possible hypothetical model to explain what's going on here. They say,
what if intelligence, knowledge, and competence don't really help you
very much in identifying who to trust in a given scenario.
They don't tell you really if Johnny or Billy, both
(34:46):
of whom you've just met, is more trustworthy, But instead
they help you evaluate the scenario itself to decide whether
to deploy a more cynical or a more trusting framework
given the environment. In the circumstances the author's right quote,
high levels of competence might allow individuals to correctly identify
(35:08):
the corruptness of their environment and adjust their level of
cynicism to match it. Following this reasoning, high competence individuals
might hold adaptable attitudes and recur to cynicism only when
it seems warranted, while their less competent counterparts might show
more cognitive rigidity and relying on the better safe than
(35:29):
sorry heuristic tend to endorse cynicism indiscriminately. So if this
model is correct, they're saying it can be efficient to
just remain in better safe than sorry mode when you
lack the ability to tell whether you're dealing with a corrupt,
untrustworthy environment or not.
Speaker 1 (35:48):
Yeah, yeah, just makes sense. We can all think of
examples where the scenario is very clear, like, Okay, even
if someone is out to get me, this is not
the environment where they can just really take me for
all I'm worth. I'm literally handing somebody a five dollar bill.
What are they going to do? They're going to run
away into the woods and keep my dollar fifty and
change that the risks seem low.
Speaker 3 (36:09):
So onto Stevrova and Illibrac's actual experiments, and I'll start
with the very short version of their findings. First of all,
they find yes on average across multiple experiments. Regular people
tend to believe that cynicism is a sign of cognitive
superiority in others. If you think people are bad, you
(36:30):
think people are selfish, and morals are fake. On balance,
people will tend to assume you are smarter and more competent,
especially at certain types of cognitive tasks, things involving like
logic and numbers and stuff. They're more likely to assign
you important cognitive tasks like doing mathematical calculations and logical
(36:51):
analysis of documents if they think you're cynical. And on
the other hand, the authors found in their experiments no,
on average, cynicism is not associated with cognitive superiority or
greater competence. They had three studies based on data from
about two hundred thousand subjects across thirty different countries and
showed that, on average, cynicism was negatively correlated with tests
(37:15):
of cognitive ability and tests of academic knowledge and competency.
So this included all kinds of things like reading comprehension,
mathematical skills, scientific literacy, technological literacy, and so forth. And
this negative association between cynicism and cognitive tests was true
even after controlling for confounding variables like age, gender, household income, wealth, test,
(37:38):
language proficiency, and Big Five personality traits. Now one major
distinction here is that they found that people who tested
higher incompetence tended to have attitudes of contingent trust. They
might be trusting by default, but were not rigid in
(37:59):
that regard become more cynical if it was warranted situationally
or based on the environment and cultural context, whereas people
scoring lower incompetence tended to accept an unconditionally cynical worldview.
In the words of the author is quote suggesting that
at low levels of competence, holding a cynical worldview might
(38:20):
represent an adaptive default strategy to avoid the potential costs
of falling prey to others cunning. Now, I wanted to
expand on these findings with a few notes. One of
the things about the early tests of people's perceptions of
cynicism a control they had here, is that the authors
didn't just ask about cognitive competence. They also asked about
(38:42):
social and moral competence, and quite along the lines you
might expect. People tended to think that low trust individuals
would be better at cognitive things like math, logic, and
critical thinking, but they thought that high trust individuals would
be better at social tasks like cheering up a depressed
friend or taking care of a stray animal. So it
wasn't just like across the board we think cynics are great.
(39:05):
We think cynics are better at everything. It's that people
tend to think cynics are better at certain types of
intelligence based skills, things like math and logic and so forth.
Speaker 1 (39:17):
So a lot of this is sounding kind of like
when you see somebody smoking a cigarette. You know, they
can look pretty cool, especially in movies, like but we
all we know deep down that like, well, the smoking
a cigarette doesn't actually make you cool, but we can't
help it. And likewise you might think, well who you know.
You might say, okay, doctor smoking a cigarette. I have questions.
(39:37):
Maybe this is not the doctor for me. But private
detective smoking a cigarette, Well, obviously that's the guy I
want looking after my interests.
Speaker 3 (39:46):
Oh do you mean like the smoking of the cigarette
implies like a rejection of the consensus about the health
effects of it, or just that it I mean, I
guess that often is suggested. It's like, I don't think
it's hurting me. I don't care what people say. I
guess there are two ways of going It's like it
would be cynical. I think it's part of a cynical
worldview to say, like, ah, these doctors who say it
causes cancer or heart disease, they don't know what they're
(40:08):
talking about. I can just smoke, it's fine. Or there's
the version that's like I don't care what happens to me,
which I think is a little bit different than cynicism.
Maybe though could go along with cynicism.
Speaker 1 (40:18):
Yeah, yeah, but.
Speaker 3 (40:19):
I follow you in general, because yeah, there's like, apart
from thinking that cynical people are smart, there is also
a tendency to think that cynical people are cool. Yeah,
that's uh. In fact, I've got a section where maybe
we'll get more into that in just a minute. Here.
Speaker 1 (40:34):
Scientific analysis of the coolness.
Speaker 3 (40:36):
Of another thing here is that they tried different like
wordings and types of questions across multiple replication attempts to
make sure that, like, the cynical genius effect was robust,
(40:57):
And it was robust, but the effects were modulated a
little bit by changes in phrasing, such as whether you
describe the opposite of cynicism as an idealistic versus a
positive view of human nature. Apparently people think being idealistic
about human nature is a little bit dumber than being
positive about human nature. It's always funny how just changing
(41:19):
the swapping a word out can have some effects there.
They also replicated these findings in different samples. So they
did some online surveys, international online surveys, and they did
some in person tests of university students in Germany. They
did some with British adults, and the cynical genius effect
appeared to varying degrees in all the groups tested here. However,
(41:40):
in some of these experiments, respondents got to rate essentially
how cynical they would like a person assigned to a
cognitive task to be, and the breakdown, to be clear,
was not toward a preference for extreme cynicism, but for
higher than average cynicism. So one example here is that
(42:02):
in a group of British adults selecting between hypothetical candidates
to solve intellectual problems, participants quote desired mix of cynical
and non cynical tendencies was fifty six percent cynical to
forty four percent non cynical. So on average, the group
they thought, we need somebody smart, we want somebody who
(42:22):
is a little bit more cynical than the media.
Speaker 1 (42:25):
That makes sense, you know, if you were able to
move the slider on your so like your android doctor,
your android lawyer, or whatever it happens to be. Yeah,
you want that the right mix of cynicism a little
more than the average person, but not not too much.
This will be interesting to get into later when we
start talking about like absolute cynicism and what where, what
(42:46):
that is and where we stand in relation to it.
Speaker 3 (42:49):
Yeah. So, as for the actual inverse link between cynicism
and competence, when broken down by test domain, I was
interested to see that the effect was strongest in reading
skills and weakest in information processing speed. So in these tests,
apparently highly cynical people holding up relatively okay with speed
(43:12):
of reasoning, doing a lot worse in like reading comprehension
and finally getting to the element of the paper. Comparing cynicism, competence,
and environment, the authors tested levels of cynicism cross referenced
with these cognitive tests in subjects across thirty different countries,
and they found that in countries that scored low in
(43:34):
corruption and high in rule of law according to an
international database called the World Governance Indicators, the effect we've
been talking about did hold true, but in countries with
high corruption and eroded rule of law, the effect was
greatly diminished. Quote the harsher the social climate, the more
(43:55):
these high competence people embraced a cynical worldview. So kind
of along the line of results we talked about in
the last episode, it hurts you materially to hold cynical
views unless those views are correct in the environment where
you operate. Along these lines, the authors discuss ways that
cynicism might be learned directly from personal experience. Despite the
(44:18):
fact that they tried to control for the influence of
variables like age, gender, and wealth, it's still possible that
quote higher levels of cognitive ability, academic competence, and education
might protect from adverse life experiences, not only as they
allow discovering potential fraud, but also as they increase the
(44:38):
chances of living in a safe and friendly environment, providing
more evidence for a positive than for a negative view
of human nature, and consequently preventing cynicism development. So that's
talking about the idea that like that education and cognitive skills,
they might not just be about how accurately you're seeing
the world around you. They might actually, over time influence
(45:02):
what the world around you. Is like on the other hand,
since cynicism entails generalized distrust, quote cynical versus less cynical,
individuals might be more distrustful of the opinions and knowledge
of others, a behavior that can eventually prevent them from
expanding their knowledge and understanding.
Speaker 1 (45:22):
Well, that that seems like it tracks the idea that
if you're you're cynical about at about potential information sources,
and you're more likely to sort of back your way
into a corner where you have very few informational sources
coming in and they're the only the only ones you're
going to accept are the ones that back up your
existing cynicism.
Speaker 3 (45:42):
Yes, but they say, of course, there is more work
to do exploring the different possible causal mechanisms here. So
this paper does find good, robust evidence for the cynical
genius illusion, that the illusion is widely present and it
is in fact an illusion, but the questions about why
are still largely open. One thing I wonder about a
(46:05):
lot of the cognitive tasks that subjects said they would
entrust to a cynical person more than a non cynical person.
I was looking through the inventory and a lot of
these tasks involved scrutiny of details, like crunching numbers, following
complex logic, analyzing scientific results, things like that, And I
(46:26):
wonder if the same pattern would hold for cognitive tasks
that people associate less with scrutiny of details and instead
with things like creativity and imagination. And to be clear,
the cynical genius effect would be an illusion even if
it were only applied to scrutinizing cognition. But I wonder
(46:46):
if the illusion is actually more specific to certain kinds
of cognition.
Speaker 1 (46:51):
Yeah, yeah, that very much, that Sherlock Holmes scenario.
Speaker 3 (46:55):
But also coming back to this question, we've asked several
times now, are there any benefit to generalize cynicism. It
comes with tons of harms for the cynic It hurts
you to be cynical, But are there any benefits? Well,
first of all, this paper does find if you're in
a really corrupt untrustworthy environment, obviously it does make more
(47:15):
sense to be more cynical. That's just like a correct
understanding of how your environment operates. Number two, even if
you're not in a more corrupt untrustworthy environment, If you
don't understand your environment and you're basically out of your depth.
Cynicism may protect you from catastrophic outcomes. It's like, I
(47:37):
don't really know what's going on here, don't know if
I can trust or not, so by default I'm not
going to trust. That's better safe than sorry. And then third,
I think this is going to be mainly related to
the cynical genius illusion. Having a reputation for cynicism may
have the effect of convincing people around you that you
are very smart and intellectually savvy, even though on average
(48:00):
the opposite is more likely to be true. So there's
a kind of social premium incentive to appear to be cynical.
It's in a lot of cases it's going to make
people think that you know something they don't, and you're
a wise and world weary and intelligent person.
Speaker 1 (48:17):
Yeah, Cynicism is often kind of a safe gambole at,
like a cocktail party or a mixer. Right if politics
should come up, which of course is bad manners anyway,
but if it were to come up, you might say
something that is just kind of a you know, a
blanket statement of cynicism, like Iowa politicians are all the same.
And then what people are gonna have to double down.
They're going to have to come back and try to
(48:39):
convince you. No, no, not all politicians. Some are great,
and they're going to look like the person who's naive
where you've already you know, mounted your cynicism high horse.
Speaker 3 (48:50):
We've talked about this before. Yeah, the the like all
politicians are the same as the kind of statement that
I think is just facially untrue, could not be true,
obviously wrong, but you feel foolish trying to argue with it. Yeah,
and I think that goes beyond politics. I mean just generally,
trying to argue with the cynic is so difficult. Statements
(49:12):
of cynicism often come with this a priori texture of factuality.
Just feel self evidently true with it, even when it's
obviously wrong, when it would be absurd for it to
be true. One more thing before I wrap up from
(49:37):
the Stavrovia and Elebrects study here talking about in their discussion,
they talk about why do we tend to assume highly
cynical people are smarter than the rest of us, even
though this is usually not the case. We touched on
this earlier, but the authors do offer a few ideas
based on common cognitive biases. In particular, they call out
(50:00):
negativity bias and loss aversion. Negativity bias is the observation
that we are more psychologically affected by negative things than
we are by positive things of equal intensity, and loss
a version is very similar. It's the finding that we're
more strongly motivated to avoid a loss than we are
(50:20):
to achieve a gain of the same value. So here's
an example. I find a five dollars bill on the sidewalk. Ah,
that's nice, quickly forget about it. Versus I drop a
five dollar bill down a storm drain. Are you know why?
Speaker 2 (50:35):
Me?
Speaker 1 (50:36):
Ah?
Speaker 3 (50:36):
I hate this. You know, It's like the dollar value
is exactly the same, but the loss is more memorable,
it's more salient and will cause a greater emotional reaction.
And I think for those reasons, like we are more
likely to learn something from it, to try to draw
a general inference that we will take and apply to
(50:58):
the rest of life from these moments of loss than
from gains of the exact same value.
Speaker 1 (51:03):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, I'd go as far as to
say that at the very least, you're more likely to
remember dropping that five than finding a ten. Yeah, And yeah,
there's probably been an interesting thought experiment to be had,
and just trying to determine at which point the find
value would be equal to a much lesser loss value.
Speaker 3 (51:23):
I think I think work on that exact question has
been done. I don't have it pulled up in front
of me, but I think we've looked at that before. Yeah,
I'm sure for some reason seeing the exact numbers is
going to be really funny. But anyway, so you apply
this these biases negativity, bias, and loss aversion to the
domain of trust and cynicism, and they could mean that
(51:45):
the pain of being betrayed is much greater than the
pleasure of having our trust rewarded, even given the exact
same original act of trust. And this is back to
the mental cherry picking that you mentioned the last time.
You know, you can always like think of these really
sticky examples of times when you shouldn't have trusted someone
(52:06):
or something. We may trust somebody twenty times, it works
out great nineteen times, but the one time it did
not work out is shocking and painful and we feel
so hurt. And so from this we form an idea
that people who do not trust easily have learned a
lot of valuable lessons. Therefore they are generally knowledgeable, wise,
(52:28):
and smart. Another explanation comes back to that study from
the background section that we talked about briefly about the
the invisibility of consequences in situations where we refrain from
from giving trust to our detriment. So again, you get
to see what happens when you trust and that trust
(52:48):
is betrayed. But when you withhold trust and you just
miss out on an opportunity to gain, you don't really
get to see that loss made concrete. It's just like
it's another path you could have taken, and you can go.
You can even go without thinking about it.
Speaker 1 (53:02):
Yeah, that's right. Unless you're visited by you know, Christmas
spirits or something, you're just not going to have any
alternate views.
Speaker 3 (53:08):
That's a really you know what. I think a Christmas
Carol is a great example here. That is something the
ghost of Christmas past has to come and make the
lost opportunities concrete. And then one last point the authors
make that I thought was a very interesting point. They raise,
what if the cynical genius illusion arises in part from
(53:29):
biases of storytelling. We fill our lives with fictional stories
fictional stories need to be entertaining. Stories are usually more
entertaining if danger and conflict are heightened, if villains are
meaner and more dangerous, if the stakes are high, if
(53:50):
no one can be trusted you can. You can hear
all these phrases in the Don la Fontaine movie trailer voice,
can't you you know? It's like, that's what stories are
made out of. Fictional storytelling selects four narratives about the
dangers of trust and the risk of betrayal because stories
like that are captivating to our attention and we want
(54:11):
to know what happens next. So hostile and treacherous worlds
may be more entertaining in a narrative. But it's possible
that we draw incorrect inferences from those fictional worlds. We
learn too much about how life works from unrealities that
are specifically crafted to hack our attention. And who are
(54:33):
the smart, savvy characters in these worlds. I think very
often they are cynics who are very reluctant to trust.
Speaker 1 (54:39):
That's right, That's a great point.
Speaker 3 (54:41):
So anyway, that's all I've got in the study for now.
But I think the cynical genius illusion is so interesting
I'm going to be thinking about this a lot in
the days and weeks to come.
Speaker 1 (54:49):
Yeah, this will be an interesting one to bring into
our weird house cinema discussions as we inevitably come around
to a film that has a cynic genius in it.
And I'm sure if I was to go back and
look at some of the titles we've covered, we've probably
encountered the encounter these sorts of characters before, probably played
by someone like Christopher Lee. Yes, all right, Well, on
(55:11):
that note, we're going to go ahead and close up
this episode, but we're going to come back with at
least one more episode on cynicism. Again, this is a
huge topic. In the next episode, I believe we're going
to get into cynicism, politics, and social media, so that
should be a fun discussion either way, tune in. We're
(55:32):
looking forward to getting into it. In the meantime, I'd
like to remind everyone that Stuff to Blow Your Mind
is primarily a science and culture podcast, with core episodes
on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We have a short form episode
on Wednesdays, and on Fridays. We set aside most serious
concerns to just talk about.
Speaker 3 (55:47):
A weird film on Weird House Cinema, Huge Things, As
always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway. If you
would like to get in touch with us with feedback
on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic
for the future, or just to say hello, you can
email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind
dot com.
Speaker 2 (56:11):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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