May 2, 2026 • 50 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 4 of 4) (originally published 4/24/2025)
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb. It is Saturday, so we have a
vault episode for you. This is going to be part
four of four in our Cynicism series. This one originally
published four twenty four, twenty twenty five. Let's jump right in.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert.
Speaker 3 (00:37):
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with
the fourth and final part in our series on cinicism.
There has been a light at the end of the
tunnel and we finally reached it. So in Part one,
we defined cynicism as the tendency to believe that people
are bad, selfish, and untrustworthy, and we distinguished this modern
(00:59):
deion from other concepts like the cynic philosophy of ancient Greece,
which is a whole different thing, and from similar but
distinct concepts like pessimism. We also looked at research on
the correlates of cynicism across a bunch of domains of life,
from health to career and all kinds of things, and
discovered that being highly cynical tends to have overwhelmingly negative
(01:21):
effects on a person's life. In Part two, we focused
primarily on the so called cynical genius illusion. The short
version of this is that while people might not necessarily
like highly cynical people for whatever reason, we tend to
assume that they are smart and competent in cognitive domains,
(01:43):
conforming to the Sherlock Holmes archetype. However, experiments showed that
this is not actually the case. On average, highly cynical
people are not smarter than everybody else, and if anything,
the correlation usually goes the other way, And so we
talked about possible reasons for this fact, and also talked
about the question of what, if anything, is the actual
(02:04):
benefit of generalized cynicism. It seems like one answer is
that if you are not very skilled at telling the
difference between a trustworthy situation and an untrustworthy one, generalized
cynicism may protect you from catastrophic misplacements of trust, but
again at great cost to your well being and at
the price of many lost opportunities to benefit from trust
(02:27):
and cooperation. In Part three, we talked about the role
of cynicism in politics, including the idea that cynicism has
been on the rise in many democracies around the world
for a possible number of reasons, one influence maybe being
the use of social media. We also talked about research
on the phenomenon of political cynicism, in particular as distinct
(02:48):
from just general social cynicism or from simple distrust or
skepticism of politicians, and we got into some observed characteristics
of how cynicism manifests in political participation. We also talked
about how people may use a mask of cynical rhetoric
about politics in order to influence how they're perceived by others,
(03:11):
maybe to sort of cover up the fact that you
maybe don't know a lot about what you're talking about,
and we discuss the link between cynicism and a preference
for conspiracy based explanations.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
Another thing we discussed that ties into this episode a
little bit is the idea that escape from cynicism in
the modern sense, one way to escape from it would
be to push through to a point of true disenchantment
and essentially become an ancient cynic, a capital C cynic
in the philosophical sense. Now, we'll see how well that
(03:45):
idea pans out with what we have to talk about today.
But to be clear, we're not recommending this as a
standard solution to any cynicism you're wrestling with in your life.
It's more interesting from the standpoint of understanding what lowercase
cynicism and capital C cynicism is. So I think it's
(04:05):
an interesting take in that regard, but not necessarily something
you want to try for yourself. Like, the answer is
not to I think we can. We can state pretty
clearly here, don't try to become more cynical about life
in order to reach some point of equilibrium.
Speaker 3 (04:22):
Yeah, I think maybe I see what the author you
were citing when you brought this up is getting at
with the idea of a sort of total disenchantment leading
to a freedom to once again embrace virtue. I mean
that almost seems a kind of Buddhist in a way, like,
you know, like losing your love for the things of
the world, allowing you to find like different higher levels
(04:44):
of appreciation. But I question to what extent that kind
of enlightened disenchantment capital C cynicism can actually be reached
just by increasing your lowercase C cynicism along the standard dimension,
you know, like becoming even less and less trustful. I
don't know if that eventually gets you to capital C cynicism.
Speaker 4 (05:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
I think its primary purpose is to help us understand
the connections between ancient cynicism and modern cynicism, rather than
give us an approach for fixing our own lives.
Speaker 3 (05:17):
Now, given everything that we've talked about so far, one
of the things the main things we wanted to talk
about today was the question of where cynicism comes from.
What can we understand about its origins within a culture
and within a person, how it grows and spreads, and
thus how can it be counteracted. Is there anything we
really know about how to stop the growth of cynicism.
(05:41):
I think this is a field where we don't have
really strong conclusions yet, but there are some good starting
points based on research. And one paper that I came
across that addresses this question pretty directly was published in
twenty twenty three in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences
by a pair of researchers from the Stanford Psychology Department
(06:03):
named Eric Neuman and Jamil Zaki. And this paper is
called Toward a Social Psychology of Cynicism. So the authors
begin this paper by addressing what they called the cynicism paradox.
Cynicism quote tracks numerous negative outcomes, and yet many people
are cynical. And so this is really something we've already
(06:25):
been talking about this series, but kind of with a
different framing. We've been asking the question, if cynicism is
clearly so bad for our lives, is there any compensating benefit?
Because if it's harmful and lots of people are highly
cynical anyway, shouldn't you think there's probably some kind of
trade off that makes it worth the cost. We've already
(06:46):
mentioned several specific ways or scenarios in which it might
be adaptive, but then again, it might just be one
of those things that is just plain bad for us
but happens anyway, Like, for example, depression. You might be
able to explain how depression grows out of biological mechanisms
that are evolved in order to be adaptive for us,
(07:06):
but you don't have to assume that depression itself has
benefits overall. It's just like something's gone wrong and it's
bad for us. It's possible cynicism is usually the same way.
But the authors here sort of take the same idea
and they frame it as this paradox, cynicism hurts the
cynic and yet cynicism seems to spread and bloom a
(07:28):
new year after year. And so the authors say, given
the observation of the cynicism paradox, research within social psychology
should focus on a couple of questions. Where cynicism comes from,
and how it spreads, and how can it be countered,
diminished or alleviated. So first the question what explains cynicism?
(07:50):
Where does it come from? First they address the possibility,
what if the cynic is right. We've talked about this
from a number of angles. Maybe cynicism is just an
accurate assessment based on observations of the world. In the
words of the authors quote, perhaps it reflects a realistic
perception of the suffering caused by human self interest. But
(08:11):
we've already explored research casting serious doubt on this, for example,
the various experiments showing that people tend to grossly overestimate
the selfishness and treachery of strangers. Most people in most
types of situations are actually pretty trustworthy. And the authors
seem to agree with this conclusion, and so instead they
(08:32):
identify three ways that they think cynicism arises it's not
necessarily that it is an accurate model of the world.
But instead quote we will argue that people often overestimate
self interest, create it through their expectations, or overstate their
own to not appear naive. Now, the authors here acknowledged that,
(08:54):
of course cynicism can be and often is, responsive to
observation of the real world. For example, this is an
experimental finding. We become more cynical when we witness people
behaving selfishly. If you do an experiment where you stage
people catching somebody doing something selfish and untrustworthy, that actually
(09:17):
makes us less likely to trust. So we've witnessed an
example that trust, you know, did not turn out well,
and it affects our baseline in a way, at least
within the situation, we become less trusting. But jumping off
of this, they say that we can easily, because of
various psychological phenomena, biases, and so forth, become kind of
(09:37):
trapped in an unrealistically cynical mindset that is not a
good model of how the world usually works and brings
with it all the harms we've talked about. And you know,
you can think about this in a number of different
psychological domains. Your initial tendency is based on an observation,
like you do see a betrayal or an example of
(09:59):
somebody acting selfishly, but then you form an inaccurate, totalizing
worldview based on that one salient example.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
Yeah, there's this really insightful table that they cite here
that I found very interesting with these different categories of cynicism,
group cynicism, institutional cynicism, and general cynicism, and this kind
of model for how things might intensify. So, like one
(10:31):
example they include is a young colleague betrays an older
one in a team project. What does the older colleague conclude?
And so the initial cynicism is, well, young people are
self interested, and then that's the group cynicism. Then the
institutional cynicism is people in the workplace are self interested,
and then the general cynicism is people are self interested.
(10:54):
And so you can you can imagine like a blossoming
of cynicism more or less along these routes, you know,
from being highly specific to you know, a particular encounter,
to being increasing generalities about the way the world works.
Speaker 3 (11:12):
That's an interesting point. Yeah, And in fact, though the
cynicism may be inaccurate at every single stage in this progression.
So like, let's say I observe Johnny doing something selfish
in one instance, and I start by saying Johnny is
an untrustworthy person. That may not actually be true about Johnny.
Maybe I just caught him at his worst moment, but
it might be true about Johnny. Then I abstract it
(11:34):
to some group Johnny belongs to. For some reason, his
membership in a particular group is meaningful to me, and
so I see him as representative of that group and
apply the untrustworthiness to the whole group. And then I
could branch out even further to some institution in which
Johnny exists, and then possibly to all of humankind. But
at every single level, it's possible you are actually not
(11:56):
drawing a good generalization from observing one instance of behavior.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
This made me think about cynicism on The Simpsons, particularly
as it relates to Homer Simpson. There's a famous episode
from the Golden Age of Simpson's episodes in which we
kind of get an origin story for homer cynicism. It's
the City of New York versus Homer, in which a
young and optimistic Homer Simpson experiences a number of betrayals
(12:24):
and hostilities upon visiting the Big Apple.
Speaker 3 (12:26):
We talked about this episode in our Weird House Cinema
on the Face behind the Mask, because Peter Lourie has
the exact same experience.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
Yes, the exact same experience, and in this episode we
see how it leads to an extremely cynical view of
New York and New Yorkers. But you could also argue
that it perhaps underlines the general anger in cynicism that
comes to define Homer, at least in these early classic
seasons of the show.
Speaker 3 (12:54):
Yeah, though it is interesting how malleable Homer's character is,
and yet he still feels like a cohesive character, like
sometimes Homer is very, very trusting and other times he's
very cynical.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
Yeah, he's changed a lot over the years. I mean
not in a character development way, but just in the
realities of the show being on television this long, with
this many different writers over over the years, various commentators
have discussed how in the early Simpsons, or certainly the
golden age of the Simpsons, you have this mix of
(13:25):
cynicism and heart that kind of balances everything out. But
the cynicism and melancholy have been observed to be particularly
strong during that first season, and then they move away
from that, and then eventually they kind of move away
from homer cynicism and anger in general and double down
on his frankness and his stupidity, so he becomes you know,
(13:48):
it's more about like the dumb jokes and the gullible
Homer as we proceed. But if you if you look
at the New York episode, and you look at some
of these episodes from from the from like the nineteen nineties,
you can easily fill out a chart watching how we
have a situation where Homer encounters selfish people in New York,
(14:10):
and then this fosters into a worldview that, well, all
New Yorkers are selfish, and then maybe all people are
selfish as well. You can imagine it being like the
thing that blossoms out into Homer's general cynicism.
Speaker 3 (14:25):
Right, this is a great comparison. So, yeah, it begins
as the observation of an individual action or behavior and
then generalizing to the person who did that, then the
group to whom that person belongs, and then to the
society at large, and then to all of humankind.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
Yeah, and tell you you're the type of person who's
like of course I'm going to steal roadside sugar because
anyone else would do the same thing.
Speaker 4 (14:48):
Yes, so anyway.
Speaker 3 (15:00):
In this paper, the authors try to formulate a model
of how cynicism can spread at three different levels of
social interaction. So one is through interactions at the interpersonal
level between two people, the next is at the intra
group level within groups, and then finally at the intergroup
(15:21):
level between groups. So regarding the interpersonal level of cynicism
of formation, the authors raise the question what if at
the interpersonal level, cynicism is a self fulfilling prophecy In
other words, an initially false belief, or at least a
belief not based on evidence, whether whether true or false,
(15:44):
an initially false belief that influences the behavior of the
believer in such a way that they make the world
conform to the way they believe it is. And psychological
research has identified a bunch of dynamics like this. Self
fulfilling prophecies show up in all kinds of ways in
our behavior. For example, some experiments have found that if
(16:05):
you treat somebody in a way that indicates you have
high expectations of their competence, it can actually make them
more competent, And obviously there would be limits to effects
like this. You know, you can't just, you know, like
hand somebody who knows nothing about medicine a scalpel and
say I believe in you, go do the surgery. You
know they're probably not going to know what to do,
(16:27):
but within certain limits of a plausible knowledge and behavior,
you can imagine how having somebody else show confidence in
you can make you more confident in yourself, maybe make
you less nervous, increase your performance certain types of jobs,
or maybe having somebody treat you as competent makes you
more conscientious, more careful to do a good job so
(16:50):
as not to disappoint them, and so forth, and so
then the authors say, quote, just like expectations about competence
cynical expectations of moral character and become self fulfilling. So
examples of this remember the trust based investing game that
we talked about in previous episodes in the series, where
(17:11):
I am given some money and then I have the
option to either keep the money or hand it over
to a stranger, at which point the money gets quadrupled.
So maybe I initially get five dollars if I hand
it to the stranger, it becomes twenty dollars, and then
the stranger has the option to either keep all of
the money for themselves or split the money and give
(17:31):
me back ten dollars, so we both get ten and
I double my initial investment. This was one of the
experiments that found strangers almost always honor the investors trust
and give half the money back, but people greatly underestimated
how often that would happen. We overestimate the selfishness and
treachery of strangers anyway. The authors mentioned that in trust
(17:54):
based games of this sort, maybe not exactly this game,
but something like it, if one player treats the other
with cynicism, the other player actually becomes measurably less trustworthy
in how they play the game. In other words, if
you treat me like you expect me to be selfish,
I actually become more selfish than I would have been otherwise.
(18:17):
And this dynamic has been found in laboratory experiments, of course,
but also found in the wild in real life scenarios.
For example, studies of workplaces that find when management treats
workers with suspicion like they expect them to break the
rules and they're trying to you know, make sure to
really crack down and make sure you don't break the rules.
(18:38):
It actually makes workers more likely to break the rules.
Speaker 4 (18:41):
Quote.
Speaker 3 (18:42):
When cynical supervisors expect low compliance and titan supervision, they
actually lower compliance. This, of course might not be the
case in every workplace all the time, but it has
been observed and it intuitively makes sense to me. You know,
when a person is treated with trust, they may feel
incentivized to rise to meet that trust, And when they're
(19:04):
treated with cynical suspicion, the mind rebels and says, no,
go to hell.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
Yeah, Like, if you actually put a sign up no
stealing pins or no you know, printing out of dungeons
and dragon supplements on the on the work printer, you know,
we're gonna we're gonna be like, well why not, Why
shouldn't I have pins? Why shouldn't I have color printouts
of my dn D manuals come on?
Speaker 3 (19:27):
Or just more generally, I mean, I think a lot
of people will know the feeling of it does not
inspire you to be the best kind of worker. If
you have the boss constantly looking over your shoulder, that
just kind of makes you you feel like, well, okay,
well why do I give a damn about this?
Speaker 1 (19:43):
You know, I wasn't gonna mention too much about diagenies
in this episode because I don't want to confuse things
too much. But there are there are some stories of
diagenies where people expect him to act like a dog
in the street, and then they would like throw food
to defeed him like a dog, but then he kind
of ups the ante and and outdogs them by then
(20:05):
peeing on them like a dog, which we could maybe
apply to this scenario. It's like, like, yeah, if you
think I'm a dog, watch how much of a dog
I can be?
Speaker 3 (20:15):
Okay, Another self fulfilling prophecy dynamic at the interpersonal level.
This one's actually even simpler, person to person respect quote.
More generally, cynics assume the worst in others and accordingly
treat them with less respect. A recent paper uses lab
experiments and daily diary methods to show that cynics often
disrespect others. Since people dislike being disrespected, they often return
(20:40):
the disrespect. That's pretty straightforward. That makes sense to me.
So these self fulfilling prophecy dynamics both trap the cynic
in their cynical worldview by making those around them less
trustworthy and more unpleasant, thus increasing evidence for the cynic's
view of humankind. It's like, if you're acting, if you're
(21:01):
already cynical, you make your environment better evidence for a
cynical worldview. And then also they spread cynicism like an
infectious disease, causing those who have dealings with the cynic
to themselves become more cynical. All right, So that's the
interpersonal level. But the next level of analysis is the
(21:22):
intra group level within groups, and here the authors bring
up an idea that I thought was really interesting. That
is the idea of pluralistic ignorance. Pluralistic ignorance is a
group psychology effect that emerges when people mistakenly believe that
everybody else thinks differently than they do. A classic illustration
(21:46):
of pluralistic ignorance is the story The Emperor's New Clothes.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
Yeah, most people are probably familiar with the Hans Christian
Anderson telling of this from eighteen thirty seven, though I'm
to understand this was based in part on older tales,
and you can also connect it to related stories in
various cultures.
Speaker 3 (22:02):
Yeah, but the simplified version is some con artists go
to the Emperor, and they say, we've got some beautiful
new garments for you, in fact, a magical outfit that
can only be seen by people who are intelligent. It's
invisible to the dim witted, and the con artists provide
the emperor in fact with no clothes at all. But nobody,
(22:23):
including the Emperor, wants to admit that they can't see
the clothes and thus be thought a fool, so everybody
pretends the king has clothes on while he's actually just
walking around naked, and nobody is able to speak up
about this until finally a child points out the nudity,
and finally everybody realizes they've been tricked. This story illustrates
(22:43):
pluralistic ignorance because actually everybody privately thinks the Emperor is naked,
but they are afraid to say so because they think
they're the only one and nobody else is saying it.
This story does slightly complicate it by adding the detail
that they're afraid of being thought unintelligent, and that's not
necessarily part of pluralistic ignorance, but it is pluralistic ignorance
(23:08):
because everybody in the story just goes along pretending to
believe something that none of them actually privately believes.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
There's a great treatment of this on the television series
Arrested Development with the film project The Ocean Walker, where
all the studio people surrounding it just continue to talk
about how great it was, but no one actually understood it.
But nobody wanted to be seen as the dummy who
doesn't get this amazing project.
Speaker 3 (23:36):
Great example, and you can think of examples like this
all throughout you know, it happens all the time. So
how could this actually be a factor in the propagation
of cynicism the author's right quote. A group can succumb
to the norm of self interest, which specifies that people
are and should be self interested. Members in such groups
(23:58):
present themselves as more elf interested then they really are.
So what if most people in a group actually just
want to be trustworthy and cooperative, but there is a
let's say, a prominent voice within the group saying it's
a dog eat dog world. Everybody's just looking out for
number one. The speaker could manage to convince the group
(24:19):
that everyone else in the group thinks this way too,
and the person who is not very selfish and would
prefer mutual trust and cooperation, that person feels like they
can't really admit how they feel publicly because they would
be the only one and they would seem naive or silly,
or they would fear that people might think they were
(24:40):
misrepresenting themselves, you know, like your virtue signaling. We've heard
that kind of thing. And the authors point to a
study that looks into this. I was published in two
thousand and one by Ratner and Miller, which this paper
did several experiments looking into this phenomenon. I looked it
up in One of the more persuasive experiments went like this, Okay,
(25:02):
if you anonymously privately ask people about whether they would
like to take money away from a research project funded
through the National Institutes of Health. Most people did not
want to take the money away from medical research when
asked in private. However, when it was made clear that
(25:23):
the research in question could not directly benefit certain participants personally.
For example, it's like to cure a disease that only
affects a group you do not belong to, people became
hesitant to speak up publicly in the group about their
opposition to cutting the grant, even though they privately still
supported the grant. So to paraphrase. Lots of people wanted
(25:47):
to protect medical research that could not benefit them personally,
but they were hesitant to publicly speak up about protecting
the research unless it could benefit them personally. This hurts me,
gives me confidence to speak in public, but want to
I just want to help other people. That might be
(26:08):
a genuine private motivation, but people were afraid to say
that in public. And there could be a number of
explanations for this, but based on a few characteristics of
the findings, it was interpreted by the researchers as the
participants assuming a group norm of cynicism and fearing being
(26:30):
judged by cynical third parties. So if you fear that
the people watching you are cynical, you become sheepish about
publicly supporting something that doesn't benefit you personally, even if
you secretly believe it is good. And I thought this
was so interesting because it's sort of counterintuitive. You know,
we often think in public we want to come off
(26:51):
as good people, and so you know, you would want
to be seen doing something that would help other people.
But I absolutely think this phenomenon it checks out for me.
I've observed this kind of dynamic before and assuming it
is real. It's obviously not the only psychological pressure on
us in this kind of domain, like there will be
(27:11):
counter pressures pushing in the opposite direction as well, because
obviously sometimes people do speak up publicly in supportive causes
they have no personal stake in. Whether that's simply because
of the strength of their desire to support that cause.
Maybe it's just strong enough to overcome this fear, the
fear of social pressure, of pluralistic ignorance, or maybe there's
just some other social psychological pressure sometimes pushing in the
(27:34):
opposite direction, maybe again like the desire to appear selfless
and moral. But I can absolutely identify the feeling of
the fear of social disapproval based on the assumption of
cynical group norms. Sometimes something is happening that feels really wrong,
and I have an urge to point that out, to
(27:56):
say something about it, but nobody else around me is
saying anything, and I have the feeling like, well, this
is none of my business, and maybe I just don't
understand it well enough, and I'll look naive if I
say something. But actually, maybe lots of people are secretly
feeling this way because they falsely believe everybody else endorses
(28:16):
a cynical mind your own business mentality.
Speaker 1 (28:19):
I mean, it's very akin to the bystander phenomena in
some respects, the idea that, oh, well, I'm not the
one to jump in and help. There's someone else who's
either more closely aligned with the situation or has the
expertise that I don't, and then therefore nobody does.
Speaker 3 (28:36):
Anything exactly right. But in the case of cynicism, pluralistic ignorance,
creating a false belief in group cynicism has the pernicious
effect of actually creating real, genuine cynicism over time. The
author's write quote, as cynicism rises in a group, it
can make noncinics act in more self interested ways, which
(28:58):
further reinforces group members level of cynicism. It's a feedback loop.
Speaker 1 (29:02):
Wow. Yeah, as folks just essentially become more and more
cynical just to fit in with the group, and this
has a potentially transformative effect over time.
Speaker 3 (29:13):
Yeah, but trying to fit in with the group, even
if they are mistaken about how cynical the group is,
we're like overestimating the cynicism of the group and trying
to fit in with that false perception.
Speaker 1 (29:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (29:24):
And then finally, the authors look at the inter group
level cynicism between different groups, and this section involves meta perceptions,
essentially what you believe about how other people perceive you.
Some research has found that across many different cultures, groups
within each culture that maybe have antagonistic orientations like opposite
(29:48):
political parties or you know, just different groups that have
some antagonism, tend to have false overly negative intergroup meta perceptions.
People believe that the out group is more hostile to
their in group than the outgroup actually is, and this
perception gap can lead to actual intergroup cynicism and hostility
(30:10):
via the familiar mechanisms. If you think people hate you,
you treat them with distrust, and treating people with distrust
actually makes them like you less and trust you less. Quote,
false metaperceptions illustrate how people can become more cynical in
part because they overestimate how polarized their fellow citizens are.
(30:30):
All right, So those are the mechanisms the authors identify
for how cynicism grows and spreads. But they say, from
these observations, we can actually offer some tentative suggestions for
how cynicism can be beaten back. I don't think they're
presenting this as like the ultimate remedy, like we know
everything about how to defeat cynicism, but there's some good
(30:51):
starting places here. So at the interpersonal level, they say,
studies show that people appreciate being trusted and seem to
actually become less self interested and less cynical on average
when simply granted trust. So we have an interaction in
which you trust me with something. If you do that,
(31:11):
ion average will actually become a little bit less cynical
and a little bit less selfish. And the cool thing
about this is that it's transferable. So somebody trusts me,
I actually tend to become not only more likely to
trust that person back, but to trust an unrelated third person. Therefore,
the same way that acts and displays of cynicism can
(31:33):
create this toxic negative feedback loop that increases cynicism for
all parties involved, acts and displays of trust can probably
create a positive feedback loop that contagiously undermines cynicism within
the culture at large.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
So this is the real purpose of the leave a penny,
Take a penny tray, right, I mean, it's it's building
a better world.
Speaker 4 (31:58):
You joke.
Speaker 3 (31:58):
But I think little things like that may indeed make
a difference. You know, I don't have evidence of that
in particular, but I think the little moments of trust
probably do not have to be huge, Like you don't
have to go out so far on a limb. Just
going out a little bit to grant people trust I
think actually surprises them often and has this effect of
(32:20):
undermining cynicism.
Speaker 1 (32:22):
Yeah, I think that might be the case.
Speaker 3 (32:25):
So if you can undermine cynicism by creating these little
moments of you know, just lots of pervasive, little moments
of granting trust, you know, that's a good thing to know.
But I guess the question is like, how do you
actually implement this? Because you want to affect you want
to primarily affect people who are high in cynicism, or
at least moderate in cynicism. If you are a person
(32:46):
who realizes that you are more cynical than you would
like to be, and you have like the level of
self consciousness and willpower to go out on a limb
and engage in little exercises of trading trust to seed
the ground for a life, obviously, that's great if you
have that self awareness, go for it. But a lot
of highly cynical people are probably not going to do
this on their own, so it probably helps for less
(33:10):
cynical people to kind of deliberately contrive situations of friendly
cooperation to infect people suffering from cynicism with opportunities to
be trusted and to see examples of trust rewarded. I
don't know exactly the best way to do this, obviously,
you can't, like you, force cynical strangers to do trust
falls with you in the grocery store parking a lot.
(33:31):
But surely there are ways to stage parts of your
life so as to create little points of trading off
of trust and positive social contagion.
Speaker 1 (33:43):
Yeah. We're going to get into some possible examples of
this in a bit, but I'll go ahead and mention
some of it here. These are from some of the
ideas of an author we've already mentioned, Jamil Zaki, who
wrote a book about overcoming cynicism, Hope for Cynics, The
Surprising Eyes of Human Goodness that came out in twenty
twenty four. But one of the things that he discusses
(34:05):
is essentially the idea of conducting your own behavioral experiments
to produce on the whole positive evidence of human goodness.
So sort of in a way like leaving the door
open for little examples of trust and allowing that trust
to wander in again, not leaving the whole door open,
you know, not you know not like you know, writing
(34:26):
your social Security number on your arm and just seeing
if anything anybody does anything bad with it. But little
smaller acts, things just sprinkle throughout your daily life, like, oh,
here's a possibility to sprinkle a little trust out there
and see that trust returned and in doing so, giving
us more real life evidence of human goodness to counteract
(34:49):
this welling up of cynicism inside us.
Speaker 3 (34:52):
Yeah, and to place emphasis again on what you just
said and what we were just talking about it. It
doesn't have to be huge risks when you make little
bids for trust. It can be little things. Now, coming
back to the next level of analysis, it was the
intra group level. Remember this was the idea that pluralistic
ignorance can create within a group a false impression that
(35:14):
there is a norm of cynical self interest, that people
are and should be selfish, when really most people in
the group don't actually feel that way. They're just afraid
to speak up because they think maybe they're the only one.
We might be able to overcome this and other situations
of pluralistic ignorance if we create a culture, we try
(35:35):
to personally demonstrate, act out a culture in which people
have more courage to disagree with what they assume to
be the opinions of the larger group. It might turn
out that it actually is pluralistic ignorance. Maybe a lot
of people already agree with you, and they just didn't
want to be the only one to say something. And
this is especially important if the assumed group norm is
(35:57):
something poisonous, something that maybe is coming top down, like
it's a dog eat dog world. There's like a really
influential person over the group shouting this message. It's important
that somebody else is saying the opposite. Otherwise the message
shouted from the top can easily become assumed to be
the group norm even if it's not. But also the
(36:17):
authors point out that normative group pressure can work in
the opposite direction. This maybe sounds a little bit grubbier
than some of the other ideas because this involves the
idea of, well, maybe you should employ peer pressure to
positive ends. But the author's write quote just as non
Cynics can behave cynically under a norm of self interest.
So can sinics become more trusting when they feel normative
(36:41):
pressure to do so? There are experiments showing this. Somebody
might have a kind of cynical baseline, but when there's
peer pressure around them to be more trusting, it kind
of works. It makes them a little bit more trusting.
Speaker 1 (36:52):
I mean, this is what the trust falls are all about.
Speaker 3 (36:54):
Yeah, yeah, exactly the trust fall. I don't know, as
a particular act might be overly tainted with the aroma
of corporate seminars, but things like that, I mean, there
is a kind of kernel of wisdom at the inception
of the trust fall. So I don't know, do we
feel good about trying to intentionally use group peer pressure
(37:16):
to influence people? I don't know, Like, using it to
reduce cynicism seems like one of the better uses of
peer pressure than I can imagine.
Speaker 1 (37:24):
Yeah, Plus, just given how nefarious and how just infectious
cynicism is in our lives, Like, yes, we should pull
every level we have against it.
Speaker 3 (37:35):
And then finally at the inter group level. Remember this
was the example where groups in society become increasingly distrustful
of one another, in part because you imagine that the
other group is more hostile to your group than they
actually are. And the solution here, the authors propose, is
just give people accurate information, because studies in these situations
(37:58):
have shown that interventions of just like showing people real
examples of members of the out group, as opposed to
leaving it up to their imagination or you know, using
cherry picked examples from hostile in group media.
Speaker 1 (38:13):
Or outright conspiracy theories exactly oftentimes, like that's the mode
of thinking that is involved in characterizing the opposing viewpoint.
Speaker 3 (38:23):
Yeah, just seeing like real accurate representations of who the
out group is, like interacting with each other and seeing
what they're actually like. These types of interventions have been
found to reduce this kind of between group hostility and
perceptions of metaperceptions of hostility within the out group. Oh
(38:44):
are they actually as selfish and hostile as I imagined?
Now that I see them, it seems maybe not.
Speaker 1 (38:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (38:49):
So that's all I've got on this paper by Norman
and Zaki. But I think that is a very interesting
place to start. It's got there's a lot to work
with there.
Speaker 1 (38:57):
Yeah. Yeah, And I would say in general, for folks
who want more information about ways to become less cynical
and combat cynical, cynical thought and cynicism in your lives.
Zaki's work is definitely worth following, and he's out there
in a lot of places talking about this stuff writing
about it. Back in twenty twenty two, he did a
(39:18):
TED talk on the topic, and you can look that
up wherever you get your TED talks. There's a great
quote in that talk where he says, you might think
that cynicism is a system upgrade that allows you to
see who we really are. It's not. It traps us
in a version of the world we don't want to
live in and one we don't have to.
Speaker 3 (39:37):
That's put very well, and I think that's an important
thing to emphasize. It's like a lot of the literature
that we talked about, I think in part two of
this series, you know, with the cynical genius illusion that
like it's just framed as wisdom, that seeing the world
cynically as being realistic. I mean, maybe in certain scenarios
(39:59):
there are like very corrupt situations where cynicism is a
more accurate diagnosis of them. Most of the time, the
world isn't like that cynicism actually makes you worse at
predicting other people's behavior. It's just like, it's not a
good model of the world. It's not being real. It's
actually living an illusion, living within an illusion that hurts
you exactly.
Speaker 1 (40:18):
Yeah, Now, this talk was interesting because I believe it
was recorded in twenty twenty one, and so you know,
he definitely ties some of it into the global pandemic
and talking about the connection between cynicism and disasters, where
something disastrous can occur some sort of widespread scenario like
global pandemic, and it can lead to increased cynicism. And
(40:40):
he also talks a little bit about the danger of
slipping into what he calls a cynicism perma frost. I
suppose on the individual level, we're even on like a
larger societal level where if, like baseline, cynicism grows to
a certain level, it's just harder and harder for us
to shake it.
Speaker 3 (40:59):
Yes, cynicism is self reinforcing and self perpetuating. To come
back to something from that paper, it is a self
fulfilling prophecy. It makes the world in its image.
Speaker 1 (41:20):
Now, Zaki's twenty twenty four book again his hope for
cynics the Surprising Science of Human Goodness, and he, of course,
in this book covers the topic at length, goes through
a lot of what we've been discussing here, but then
there's added information and insight as well. I recommend picking
it up if you want to learn more about how
to combat cynicism, but I want to go through some
(41:41):
of the ideas that he brings forth that essentially gives
you sort of a plan of attack. One of the
first things that he points out is that you have
to recognize the harm of cynicism. And we've been talking
about this, after all, if you don't understand all the
mental and physical health as well as social ramifications of
a cynical mindset, you might and I continue to think
(42:01):
of it as a path of cool and safe detachment,
like this is what we are, this is the world
we live in. Realizing first of all that it's harming
you to think this way, that's a good first step.
Speaker 4 (42:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (42:14):
Yeah, Cynicism is not the safe bet. It's not i
don't know, putting your money in CDs or something. It's like,
it's more kind of like letting it get oily and
leaving it. Next to the fire.
Speaker 1 (42:25):
Yes. The next thing he brings up is embracing hopeful
skepticism and questioning your assumptions. I really like this one
because cynicism can I think, come to feel like it's
a comfortable sweater that you wear, and then if someone
comes around and says, get rid of that sweater, you're
gonna be like, well, this is this is what I wear.
This is basically my skin at this point. And so
(42:46):
the idea here is that hopeful skepticism is kind of
something that's going to fit you the same as that sweater,
but it's not going to constrain your soul, you know,
So you know, assume better of people in general, but
also self analyze your cynical ideas, engage in rational skepticism,
which is to say, seek actual real world evidence for
(43:08):
your negative opinions and beliefs and pay closer attention to
what you actually observe in the world.
Speaker 3 (43:14):
Oh yeah, So this is coming back to the distinction
we made in the last episode between cynicism and skepticism.
Whereas cynicism is just a bias toward negativity and distrust,
skepticism is trying to award your trust to things on
the basis of whether there's good reason to trust them
or not paying attention to evidence and trying as best
you can to ignore your biases, whereas cynicism is itself
(43:36):
a bias, and.
Speaker 1 (43:37):
If you want to think about this as trust but
confirm fair enough, however you want to think about it.
It also reminds me a lot of some of the
anti anxiety techniques I've learned about in recent years, such
as putting your thoughts on trial and asking yourself questions
like A what am I afraid will happen? And b
what is likely to happen? Because we can often allow
(44:00):
our negative thought patterns to just run around unchecked in
our minds, like it's not at the forefront of our
thought We're trying to do other things and it's just
in the background like a yapping dog. But if we stop,
if we identify our thoughts and then we apply reasoning
to those thoughts, we put those thoughts on trial and
say like, hey, you stop barking. Now, let's talk about
why you're barking and what you're barking about. Then you
(44:22):
can actually begin to make serious headway towards dismissing these
thoughts or at least diminishing their power. Zaki also recommends
we conduct again our own behavioral experiments to open the
door for examples of trust to wander into our lives,
to practice trust. And this is this is a this
is one that's so big that it's going to sound
(44:44):
like overly naive just to say it, but focusing on
the positive. I mean, how many times have you heard that?
It can it can almost sound like you should smile more.
He recommends engaging in positive gossip as opposed to just
negative gossip, to making an effort to finding exams semples
in your life and in the world of people doing
good to counteract the other stories. They're going to maybe
(45:07):
catch your attention more and certainly drift up towards the
top of the news feed more. In a way, this
reminds me of that famous mister Rogers quote about looking
for the helpers. You know, I believe he said quote.
When I was a boy and I would see scary
things in the news, my mother would say to me,
look for the helpers. You will always find people who
are helping.
Speaker 3 (45:28):
Now, to answer the cynical thought arising in some people's heads,
you might think, in reaction to that, like, Oh, but
isn't that just sort of like turning away from reality, Like,
isn't that not being realistic and wanting to live in
a happy, happy fantasy land.
Speaker 1 (45:43):
No.
Speaker 3 (45:43):
I think a lot of the research we've looked at
is like this is a strategy for having a more
realistic view of the world. What we have a tendency
toward is an unrealistic view of the world based on
the high salience of negative events. So like you know,
nineteen positive events and one negative event event, the one
negative event defines our memory of what happened. And so
(46:08):
this is like trying to have a more realistic view
based on the actual real world prevalence of trust and positivity.
Speaker 1 (46:16):
Yeah. Yeah, And I mean it really comes down to,
like make sure that you have a balanced diet of
information about people in the world, and that can include
a media diet, it can also certainly include a real
life diet and how you're interacting with people. Like one
example from my own family, over the past year, we've
started watching the YouTube videos of Sam Bentley, who you
(46:36):
can find on wherever you get your videos. But this
is a guy who highlights positive social and environmental news
from around the world and these are the kind of
stories that are generally never the headline. And it's not
to say that they should be, and it's not to
say that you should be only watching this sort of
new stream and not the other news streams, but you
(46:58):
know their general positivity and hope fullness can provide a
very necessary counterbalance to the more cynical darkness that is
just going to well out of you in response to
the coverage the rest of the coverage out there. And again,
even if the coverage is fair and you know, on
the level, I mean, still it's going to feed that
cynicism that is in all of us, that is going
(47:21):
to potentially rise up if we don't keep it in check.
Speaker 3 (47:24):
Yes, it is very important to be aware of and
informed about and have a realistic view of threats and
bad things happening, But if you want to be able
to respond to those in the best way possible, it's
actually important not to let a cynical mindset set in
which it just disempowers you. So it is important to
be aware of threats and dangers and not like ignore them,
(47:48):
to like have them front of mind in a way,
but be able to respond to them realistically and productively.
Rather than just submitting to cynical surrender.
Speaker 1 (47:57):
Absolutely, Now, we should be clear that none of this
is like a one and done solution. There's not like
a checksheet you can go through and at the end
of it be like, ah, well, there we go, cynicism defeated.
In fact, Zaki here of the author in his TED talk,
drives home that he still struggles with cynicism himself all
the time. And it is a struggle. You can't completely
(48:19):
squash the infection of modern cynicism. And that's one of
the cruel realities of the whole scenario. Cynicism is just
going to well up again and again, potentially gaining foothold
each time subconsciously, like it's just in the background growing,
and it requires deliberate effort generally to counter its growth. So,
you know, like any kind of maintenance, except its maintenance
(48:42):
on your outlook on the world, on your psyche and
your soul. And once again, none of this is a
proposed transition from cynicism into naivety, or from cynicism into
some sort of unhealthy optimism. It's a transition from an
unhealthy and ultimately unrealistically bleak outlook on people in the
world into something that is more balanced, more reasonably optimistic,
(49:03):
and healthier for you in multiple regards.
Speaker 3 (49:06):
Yeah, see the world as it really is. Trust when
you can and use those relationships of mutual trust to
make life better.
Speaker 1 (49:14):
All right, Well, we're going to go ahead and wrap
up these episodes on cynicism right here on an upnote,
on a hopeful note, on optimistic note, and then maybe
give you a little homework for ways that you can
bring less cynicism into your manifested life. We want to
remind everyone out there that Stuff to Blow Your Mind
is primarily a science and culture podcast, with core episodes
(49:36):
on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short form episodes on Wednesdays and
on Fridays. We set aside most serious concerns just talk
about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3 (49:44):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact Stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com.
Speaker 2 (50:05):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb. It is Saturday, so we have a
vault episode for you. This is going to be part
four of four in our Cynicism series. This one originally
published four twenty four, twenty twenty five. Let's jump right in.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert.
Speaker 3 (00:37):
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with
the fourth and final part in our series on cinicism.
There has been a light at the end of the
tunnel and we finally reached it. So in Part one,
we defined cynicism as the tendency to believe that people
are bad, selfish, and untrustworthy, and we distinguished this modern
(00:59):
deion from other concepts like the cynic philosophy of ancient Greece,
which is a whole different thing, and from similar but
distinct concepts like pessimism. We also looked at research on
the correlates of cynicism across a bunch of domains of life,
from health to career and all kinds of things, and
discovered that being highly cynical tends to have overwhelmingly negative
(01:21):
effects on a person's life. In Part two, we focused
primarily on the so called cynical genius illusion. The short
version of this is that while people might not necessarily
like highly cynical people for whatever reason, we tend to
assume that they are smart and competent in cognitive domains,
(01:43):
conforming to the Sherlock Holmes archetype. However, experiments showed that
this is not actually the case. On average, highly cynical
people are not smarter than everybody else, and if anything,
the correlation usually goes the other way, And so we
talked about possible reasons for this fact, and also talked
about the question of what, if anything, is the actual
(02:04):
benefit of generalized cynicism. It seems like one answer is
that if you are not very skilled at telling the
difference between a trustworthy situation and an untrustworthy one, generalized
cynicism may protect you from catastrophic misplacements of trust, but
again at great cost to your well being and at
the price of many lost opportunities to benefit from trust
(02:27):
and cooperation. In Part three, we talked about the role
of cynicism in politics, including the idea that cynicism has
been on the rise in many democracies around the world
for a possible number of reasons, one influence maybe being
the use of social media. We also talked about research
on the phenomenon of political cynicism, in particular as distinct
(02:48):
from just general social cynicism or from simple distrust or
skepticism of politicians, and we got into some observed characteristics
of how cynicism manifests in political participation. We also talked
about how people may use a mask of cynical rhetoric
about politics in order to influence how they're perceived by others,
(03:11):
maybe to sort of cover up the fact that you
maybe don't know a lot about what you're talking about,
and we discuss the link between cynicism and a preference
for conspiracy based explanations.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
Another thing we discussed that ties into this episode a
little bit is the idea that escape from cynicism in
the modern sense, one way to escape from it would
be to push through to a point of true disenchantment
and essentially become an ancient cynic, a capital C cynic
in the philosophical sense. Now, we'll see how well that
(03:45):
idea pans out with what we have to talk about today.
But to be clear, we're not recommending this as a
standard solution to any cynicism you're wrestling with in your life.
It's more interesting from the standpoint of understanding what lowercase
cynicism and capital C cynicism is. So I think it's
(04:05):
an interesting take in that regard, but not necessarily something
you want to try for yourself. Like, the answer is
not to I think we can. We can state pretty
clearly here, don't try to become more cynical about life
in order to reach some point of equilibrium.
Speaker 3 (04:22):
Yeah, I think maybe I see what the author you
were citing when you brought this up is getting at
with the idea of a sort of total disenchantment leading
to a freedom to once again embrace virtue. I mean
that almost seems a kind of Buddhist in a way, like,
you know, like losing your love for the things of
the world, allowing you to find like different higher levels
(04:44):
of appreciation. But I question to what extent that kind
of enlightened disenchantment capital C cynicism can actually be reached
just by increasing your lowercase C cynicism along the standard dimension,
you know, like becoming even less and less trustful. I
don't know if that eventually gets you to capital C cynicism.
Speaker 4 (05:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
I think its primary purpose is to help us understand
the connections between ancient cynicism and modern cynicism, rather than
give us an approach for fixing our own lives.
Speaker 3 (05:17):
Now, given everything that we've talked about so far, one
of the things the main things we wanted to talk
about today was the question of where cynicism comes from.
What can we understand about its origins within a culture
and within a person, how it grows and spreads, and
thus how can it be counteracted. Is there anything we
really know about how to stop the growth of cynicism.
(05:41):
I think this is a field where we don't have
really strong conclusions yet, but there are some good starting
points based on research. And one paper that I came
across that addresses this question pretty directly was published in
twenty twenty three in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences
by a pair of researchers from the Stanford Psychology Department
(06:03):
named Eric Neuman and Jamil Zaki. And this paper is
called Toward a Social Psychology of Cynicism. So the authors
begin this paper by addressing what they called the cynicism paradox.
Cynicism quote tracks numerous negative outcomes, and yet many people
are cynical. And so this is really something we've already
(06:25):
been talking about this series, but kind of with a
different framing. We've been asking the question, if cynicism is
clearly so bad for our lives, is there any compensating benefit?
Because if it's harmful and lots of people are highly
cynical anyway, shouldn't you think there's probably some kind of
trade off that makes it worth the cost. We've already
(06:46):
mentioned several specific ways or scenarios in which it might
be adaptive, but then again, it might just be one
of those things that is just plain bad for us
but happens anyway, Like, for example, depression. You might be
able to explain how depression grows out of biological mechanisms
that are evolved in order to be adaptive for us,
(07:06):
but you don't have to assume that depression itself has
benefits overall. It's just like something's gone wrong and it's
bad for us. It's possible cynicism is usually the same way.
But the authors here sort of take the same idea
and they frame it as this paradox, cynicism hurts the
cynic and yet cynicism seems to spread and bloom a
(07:28):
new year after year. And so the authors say, given
the observation of the cynicism paradox, research within social psychology
should focus on a couple of questions. Where cynicism comes from,
and how it spreads, and how can it be countered,
diminished or alleviated. So first the question what explains cynicism?
(07:50):
Where does it come from? First they address the possibility,
what if the cynic is right. We've talked about this
from a number of angles. Maybe cynicism is just an
accurate assessment based on observations of the world. In the
words of the authors quote, perhaps it reflects a realistic
perception of the suffering caused by human self interest. But
(08:11):
we've already explored research casting serious doubt on this, for example,
the various experiments showing that people tend to grossly overestimate
the selfishness and treachery of strangers. Most people in most
types of situations are actually pretty trustworthy. And the authors
seem to agree with this conclusion, and so instead they
(08:32):
identify three ways that they think cynicism arises it's not
necessarily that it is an accurate model of the world.
But instead quote we will argue that people often overestimate
self interest, create it through their expectations, or overstate their
own to not appear naive. Now, the authors here acknowledged that,
(08:54):
of course cynicism can be and often is, responsive to
observation of the real world. For example, this is an
experimental finding. We become more cynical when we witness people
behaving selfishly. If you do an experiment where you stage
people catching somebody doing something selfish and untrustworthy, that actually
(09:17):
makes us less likely to trust. So we've witnessed an
example that trust, you know, did not turn out well,
and it affects our baseline in a way, at least
within the situation, we become less trusting. But jumping off
of this, they say that we can easily, because of
various psychological phenomena, biases, and so forth, become kind of
(09:37):
trapped in an unrealistically cynical mindset that is not a
good model of how the world usually works and brings
with it all the harms we've talked about. And you know,
you can think about this in a number of different
psychological domains. Your initial tendency is based on an observation,
like you do see a betrayal or an example of
(09:59):
somebody acting selfishly, but then you form an inaccurate, totalizing
worldview based on that one salient example.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
Yeah, there's this really insightful table that they cite here
that I found very interesting with these different categories of cynicism,
group cynicism, institutional cynicism, and general cynicism, and this kind
of model for how things might intensify. So, like one
(10:31):
example they include is a young colleague betrays an older
one in a team project. What does the older colleague conclude?
And so the initial cynicism is, well, young people are
self interested, and then that's the group cynicism. Then the
institutional cynicism is people in the workplace are self interested,
and then the general cynicism is people are self interested.
(10:54):
And so you can you can imagine like a blossoming
of cynicism more or less along these routes, you know,
from being highly specific to you know, a particular encounter,
to being increasing generalities about the way the world works.
Speaker 3 (11:12):
That's an interesting point. Yeah, And in fact, though the
cynicism may be inaccurate at every single stage in this progression.
So like, let's say I observe Johnny doing something selfish
in one instance, and I start by saying Johnny is
an untrustworthy person. That may not actually be true about Johnny.
Maybe I just caught him at his worst moment, but
it might be true about Johnny. Then I abstract it
(11:34):
to some group Johnny belongs to. For some reason, his
membership in a particular group is meaningful to me, and
so I see him as representative of that group and
apply the untrustworthiness to the whole group. And then I
could branch out even further to some institution in which
Johnny exists, and then possibly to all of humankind. But
at every single level, it's possible you are actually not
(11:56):
drawing a good generalization from observing one instance of behavior.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
This made me think about cynicism on The Simpsons, particularly
as it relates to Homer Simpson. There's a famous episode
from the Golden Age of Simpson's episodes in which we
kind of get an origin story for homer cynicism. It's
the City of New York versus Homer, in which a
young and optimistic Homer Simpson experiences a number of betrayals
(12:24):
and hostilities upon visiting the Big Apple.
Speaker 3 (12:26):
We talked about this episode in our Weird House Cinema
on the Face behind the Mask, because Peter Lourie has
the exact same experience.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
Yes, the exact same experience, and in this episode we
see how it leads to an extremely cynical view of
New York and New Yorkers. But you could also argue
that it perhaps underlines the general anger in cynicism that
comes to define Homer, at least in these early classic
seasons of the show.
Speaker 3 (12:54):
Yeah, though it is interesting how malleable Homer's character is,
and yet he still feels like a cohesive character, like
sometimes Homer is very, very trusting and other times he's
very cynical.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
Yeah, he's changed a lot over the years. I mean
not in a character development way, but just in the
realities of the show being on television this long, with
this many different writers over over the years, various commentators
have discussed how in the early Simpsons, or certainly the
golden age of the Simpsons, you have this mix of
(13:25):
cynicism and heart that kind of balances everything out. But
the cynicism and melancholy have been observed to be particularly
strong during that first season, and then they move away
from that, and then eventually they kind of move away
from homer cynicism and anger in general and double down
on his frankness and his stupidity, so he becomes you know,
(13:48):
it's more about like the dumb jokes and the gullible
Homer as we proceed. But if you if you look
at the New York episode, and you look at some
of these episodes from from the from like the nineteen nineties,
you can easily fill out a chart watching how we
have a situation where Homer encounters selfish people in New York,
(14:10):
and then this fosters into a worldview that, well, all
New Yorkers are selfish, and then maybe all people are
selfish as well. You can imagine it being like the
thing that blossoms out into Homer's general cynicism.
Speaker 3 (14:25):
Right, this is a great comparison. So, yeah, it begins
as the observation of an individual action or behavior and
then generalizing to the person who did that, then the
group to whom that person belongs, and then to the
society at large, and then to all of humankind.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
Yeah, and tell you you're the type of person who's
like of course I'm going to steal roadside sugar because
anyone else would do the same thing.
Speaker 4 (14:48):
Yes, so anyway.
Speaker 3 (15:00):
In this paper, the authors try to formulate a model
of how cynicism can spread at three different levels of
social interaction. So one is through interactions at the interpersonal
level between two people, the next is at the intra
group level within groups, and then finally at the intergroup
(15:21):
level between groups. So regarding the interpersonal level of cynicism
of formation, the authors raise the question what if at
the interpersonal level, cynicism is a self fulfilling prophecy In
other words, an initially false belief, or at least a
belief not based on evidence, whether whether true or false,
(15:44):
an initially false belief that influences the behavior of the
believer in such a way that they make the world
conform to the way they believe it is. And psychological
research has identified a bunch of dynamics like this. Self
fulfilling prophecies show up in all kinds of ways in
our behavior. For example, some experiments have found that if
(16:05):
you treat somebody in a way that indicates you have
high expectations of their competence, it can actually make them
more competent, And obviously there would be limits to effects
like this. You know, you can't just, you know, like
hand somebody who knows nothing about medicine a scalpel and
say I believe in you, go do the surgery. You
know they're probably not going to know what to do,
(16:27):
but within certain limits of a plausible knowledge and behavior,
you can imagine how having somebody else show confidence in
you can make you more confident in yourself, maybe make
you less nervous, increase your performance certain types of jobs,
or maybe having somebody treat you as competent makes you
more conscientious, more careful to do a good job so
(16:50):
as not to disappoint them, and so forth, and so
then the authors say, quote, just like expectations about competence
cynical expectations of moral character and become self fulfilling. So
examples of this remember the trust based investing game that
we talked about in previous episodes in the series, where
(17:11):
I am given some money and then I have the
option to either keep the money or hand it over
to a stranger, at which point the money gets quadrupled.
So maybe I initially get five dollars if I hand
it to the stranger, it becomes twenty dollars, and then
the stranger has the option to either keep all of
the money for themselves or split the money and give
(17:31):
me back ten dollars, so we both get ten and
I double my initial investment. This was one of the
experiments that found strangers almost always honor the investors trust
and give half the money back, but people greatly underestimated
how often that would happen. We overestimate the selfishness and
treachery of strangers anyway. The authors mentioned that in trust
(17:54):
based games of this sort, maybe not exactly this game,
but something like it, if one player treats the other
with cynicism, the other player actually becomes measurably less trustworthy
in how they play the game. In other words, if
you treat me like you expect me to be selfish,
I actually become more selfish than I would have been otherwise.
(18:17):
And this dynamic has been found in laboratory experiments, of course,
but also found in the wild in real life scenarios.
For example, studies of workplaces that find when management treats
workers with suspicion like they expect them to break the
rules and they're trying to you know, make sure to
really crack down and make sure you don't break the rules.
(18:38):
It actually makes workers more likely to break the rules.
Speaker 4 (18:41):
Quote.
Speaker 3 (18:42):
When cynical supervisors expect low compliance and titan supervision, they
actually lower compliance. This, of course might not be the
case in every workplace all the time, but it has
been observed and it intuitively makes sense to me. You know,
when a person is treated with trust, they may feel
incentivized to rise to meet that trust, And when they're
(19:04):
treated with cynical suspicion, the mind rebels and says, no,
go to hell.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
Yeah, Like, if you actually put a sign up no
stealing pins or no you know, printing out of dungeons
and dragon supplements on the on the work printer, you know,
we're gonna we're gonna be like, well why not, Why
shouldn't I have pins? Why shouldn't I have color printouts
of my dn D manuals come on?
Speaker 3 (19:27):
Or just more generally, I mean, I think a lot
of people will know the feeling of it does not
inspire you to be the best kind of worker. If
you have the boss constantly looking over your shoulder, that
just kind of makes you you feel like, well, okay,
well why do I give a damn about this?
Speaker 1 (19:43):
You know, I wasn't gonna mention too much about diagenies
in this episode because I don't want to confuse things
too much. But there are there are some stories of
diagenies where people expect him to act like a dog
in the street, and then they would like throw food
to defeed him like a dog, but then he kind
of ups the ante and and outdogs them by then
(20:05):
peeing on them like a dog, which we could maybe
apply to this scenario. It's like, like, yeah, if you
think I'm a dog, watch how much of a dog
I can be?
Speaker 3 (20:15):
Okay, Another self fulfilling prophecy dynamic at the interpersonal level.
This one's actually even simpler, person to person respect quote.
More generally, cynics assume the worst in others and accordingly
treat them with less respect. A recent paper uses lab
experiments and daily diary methods to show that cynics often
disrespect others. Since people dislike being disrespected, they often return
(20:40):
the disrespect. That's pretty straightforward. That makes sense to me.
So these self fulfilling prophecy dynamics both trap the cynic
in their cynical worldview by making those around them less
trustworthy and more unpleasant, thus increasing evidence for the cynic's
view of humankind. It's like, if you're acting, if you're
(21:01):
already cynical, you make your environment better evidence for a
cynical worldview. And then also they spread cynicism like an
infectious disease, causing those who have dealings with the cynic
to themselves become more cynical. All right, So that's the
interpersonal level. But the next level of analysis is the
(21:22):
intra group level within groups, and here the authors bring
up an idea that I thought was really interesting. That
is the idea of pluralistic ignorance. Pluralistic ignorance is a
group psychology effect that emerges when people mistakenly believe that
everybody else thinks differently than they do. A classic illustration
(21:46):
of pluralistic ignorance is the story The Emperor's New Clothes.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
Yeah, most people are probably familiar with the Hans Christian
Anderson telling of this from eighteen thirty seven, though I'm
to understand this was based in part on older tales,
and you can also connect it to related stories in
various cultures.
Speaker 3 (22:02):
Yeah, but the simplified version is some con artists go
to the Emperor, and they say, we've got some beautiful
new garments for you, in fact, a magical outfit that
can only be seen by people who are intelligent. It's
invisible to the dim witted, and the con artists provide
the emperor in fact with no clothes at all. But nobody,
(22:23):
including the Emperor, wants to admit that they can't see
the clothes and thus be thought a fool, so everybody
pretends the king has clothes on while he's actually just
walking around naked, and nobody is able to speak up
about this until finally a child points out the nudity,
and finally everybody realizes they've been tricked. This story illustrates
(22:43):
pluralistic ignorance because actually everybody privately thinks the Emperor is naked,
but they are afraid to say so because they think
they're the only one and nobody else is saying it.
This story does slightly complicate it by adding the detail
that they're afraid of being thought unintelligent, and that's not
necessarily part of pluralistic ignorance, but it is pluralistic ignorance
(23:08):
because everybody in the story just goes along pretending to
believe something that none of them actually privately believes.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
There's a great treatment of this on the television series
Arrested Development with the film project The Ocean Walker, where
all the studio people surrounding it just continue to talk
about how great it was, but no one actually understood it.
But nobody wanted to be seen as the dummy who
doesn't get this amazing project.
Speaker 3 (23:36):
Great example, and you can think of examples like this
all throughout you know, it happens all the time. So
how could this actually be a factor in the propagation
of cynicism the author's right quote. A group can succumb
to the norm of self interest, which specifies that people
are and should be self interested. Members in such groups
(23:58):
present themselves as more elf interested then they really are.
So what if most people in a group actually just
want to be trustworthy and cooperative, but there is a
let's say, a prominent voice within the group saying it's
a dog eat dog world. Everybody's just looking out for
number one. The speaker could manage to convince the group
(24:19):
that everyone else in the group thinks this way too,
and the person who is not very selfish and would
prefer mutual trust and cooperation, that person feels like they
can't really admit how they feel publicly because they would
be the only one and they would seem naive or silly,
or they would fear that people might think they were
(24:40):
misrepresenting themselves, you know, like your virtue signaling. We've heard
that kind of thing. And the authors point to a
study that looks into this. I was published in two
thousand and one by Ratner and Miller, which this paper
did several experiments looking into this phenomenon. I looked it
up in One of the more persuasive experiments went like this, Okay,
(25:02):
if you anonymously privately ask people about whether they would
like to take money away from a research project funded
through the National Institutes of Health. Most people did not
want to take the money away from medical research when
asked in private. However, when it was made clear that
(25:23):
the research in question could not directly benefit certain participants personally.
For example, it's like to cure a disease that only
affects a group you do not belong to, people became
hesitant to speak up publicly in the group about their
opposition to cutting the grant, even though they privately still
supported the grant. So to paraphrase. Lots of people wanted
(25:47):
to protect medical research that could not benefit them personally,
but they were hesitant to publicly speak up about protecting
the research unless it could benefit them personally. This hurts me,
gives me confidence to speak in public, but want to
I just want to help other people. That might be
(26:08):
a genuine private motivation, but people were afraid to say
that in public. And there could be a number of
explanations for this, but based on a few characteristics of
the findings, it was interpreted by the researchers as the
participants assuming a group norm of cynicism and fearing being
(26:30):
judged by cynical third parties. So if you fear that
the people watching you are cynical, you become sheepish about
publicly supporting something that doesn't benefit you personally, even if
you secretly believe it is good. And I thought this
was so interesting because it's sort of counterintuitive. You know,
we often think in public we want to come off
(26:51):
as good people, and so you know, you would want
to be seen doing something that would help other people.
But I absolutely think this phenomenon it checks out for me.
I've observed this kind of dynamic before and assuming it
is real. It's obviously not the only psychological pressure on
us in this kind of domain, like there will be
(27:11):
counter pressures pushing in the opposite direction as well, because
obviously sometimes people do speak up publicly in supportive causes
they have no personal stake in. Whether that's simply because
of the strength of their desire to support that cause.
Maybe it's just strong enough to overcome this fear, the
fear of social pressure, of pluralistic ignorance, or maybe there's
just some other social psychological pressure sometimes pushing in the
(27:34):
opposite direction, maybe again like the desire to appear selfless
and moral. But I can absolutely identify the feeling of
the fear of social disapproval based on the assumption of
cynical group norms. Sometimes something is happening that feels really wrong,
and I have an urge to point that out, to
(27:56):
say something about it, but nobody else around me is
saying anything, and I have the feeling like, well, this
is none of my business, and maybe I just don't
understand it well enough, and I'll look naive if I
say something. But actually, maybe lots of people are secretly
feeling this way because they falsely believe everybody else endorses
(28:16):
a cynical mind your own business mentality.
Speaker 1 (28:19):
I mean, it's very akin to the bystander phenomena in
some respects, the idea that, oh, well, I'm not the
one to jump in and help. There's someone else who's
either more closely aligned with the situation or has the
expertise that I don't, and then therefore nobody does.
Speaker 3 (28:36):
Anything exactly right. But in the case of cynicism, pluralistic ignorance,
creating a false belief in group cynicism has the pernicious
effect of actually creating real, genuine cynicism over time. The
author's write quote, as cynicism rises in a group, it
can make noncinics act in more self interested ways, which
(28:58):
further reinforces group members level of cynicism. It's a feedback loop.
Speaker 1 (29:02):
Wow. Yeah, as folks just essentially become more and more
cynical just to fit in with the group, and this
has a potentially transformative effect over time.
Speaker 3 (29:13):
Yeah, but trying to fit in with the group, even
if they are mistaken about how cynical the group is,
we're like overestimating the cynicism of the group and trying
to fit in with that false perception.
Speaker 1 (29:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (29:24):
And then finally, the authors look at the inter group
level cynicism between different groups, and this section involves meta perceptions,
essentially what you believe about how other people perceive you.
Some research has found that across many different cultures, groups
within each culture that maybe have antagonistic orientations like opposite
(29:48):
political parties or you know, just different groups that have
some antagonism, tend to have false overly negative intergroup meta perceptions.
People believe that the out group is more hostile to
their in group than the outgroup actually is, and this
perception gap can lead to actual intergroup cynicism and hostility
(30:10):
via the familiar mechanisms. If you think people hate you,
you treat them with distrust, and treating people with distrust
actually makes them like you less and trust you less. Quote,
false metaperceptions illustrate how people can become more cynical in
part because they overestimate how polarized their fellow citizens are.
(30:30):
All right, So those are the mechanisms the authors identify
for how cynicism grows and spreads. But they say, from
these observations, we can actually offer some tentative suggestions for
how cynicism can be beaten back. I don't think they're
presenting this as like the ultimate remedy, like we know
everything about how to defeat cynicism, but there's some good
(30:51):
starting places here. So at the interpersonal level, they say,
studies show that people appreciate being trusted and seem to
actually become less self interested and less cynical on average
when simply granted trust. So we have an interaction in
which you trust me with something. If you do that,
(31:11):
ion average will actually become a little bit less cynical
and a little bit less selfish. And the cool thing
about this is that it's transferable. So somebody trusts me,
I actually tend to become not only more likely to
trust that person back, but to trust an unrelated third person. Therefore,
the same way that acts and displays of cynicism can
(31:33):
create this toxic negative feedback loop that increases cynicism for
all parties involved, acts and displays of trust can probably
create a positive feedback loop that contagiously undermines cynicism within
the culture at large.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
So this is the real purpose of the leave a penny,
Take a penny tray, right, I mean, it's it's building
a better world.
Speaker 4 (31:58):
You joke.
Speaker 3 (31:58):
But I think little things like that may indeed make
a difference. You know, I don't have evidence of that
in particular, but I think the little moments of trust
probably do not have to be huge, Like you don't
have to go out so far on a limb. Just
going out a little bit to grant people trust I
think actually surprises them often and has this effect of
(32:20):
undermining cynicism.
Speaker 1 (32:22):
Yeah, I think that might be the case.
Speaker 3 (32:25):
So if you can undermine cynicism by creating these little
moments of you know, just lots of pervasive, little moments
of granting trust, you know, that's a good thing to know.
But I guess the question is like, how do you
actually implement this? Because you want to affect you want
to primarily affect people who are high in cynicism, or
at least moderate in cynicism. If you are a person
(32:46):
who realizes that you are more cynical than you would
like to be, and you have like the level of
self consciousness and willpower to go out on a limb
and engage in little exercises of trading trust to seed
the ground for a life, obviously, that's great if you
have that self awareness, go for it. But a lot
of highly cynical people are probably not going to do
this on their own, so it probably helps for less
(33:10):
cynical people to kind of deliberately contrive situations of friendly
cooperation to infect people suffering from cynicism with opportunities to
be trusted and to see examples of trust rewarded. I
don't know exactly the best way to do this, obviously,
you can't, like you, force cynical strangers to do trust
falls with you in the grocery store parking a lot.
(33:31):
But surely there are ways to stage parts of your
life so as to create little points of trading off
of trust and positive social contagion.
Speaker 1 (33:43):
Yeah. We're going to get into some possible examples of
this in a bit, but I'll go ahead and mention
some of it here. These are from some of the
ideas of an author we've already mentioned, Jamil Zaki, who
wrote a book about overcoming cynicism, Hope for Cynics, The
Surprising Eyes of Human Goodness that came out in twenty
twenty four. But one of the things that he discusses
(34:05):
is essentially the idea of conducting your own behavioral experiments
to produce on the whole positive evidence of human goodness.
So sort of in a way like leaving the door
open for little examples of trust and allowing that trust
to wander in again, not leaving the whole door open,
you know, not you know not like you know, writing
(34:26):
your social Security number on your arm and just seeing
if anything anybody does anything bad with it. But little
smaller acts, things just sprinkle throughout your daily life, like, oh,
here's a possibility to sprinkle a little trust out there
and see that trust returned and in doing so, giving
us more real life evidence of human goodness to counteract
(34:49):
this welling up of cynicism inside us.
Speaker 3 (34:52):
Yeah, and to place emphasis again on what you just
said and what we were just talking about it. It
doesn't have to be huge risks when you make little
bids for trust. It can be little things. Now, coming
back to the next level of analysis, it was the
intra group level. Remember this was the idea that pluralistic
ignorance can create within a group a false impression that
(35:14):
there is a norm of cynical self interest, that people
are and should be selfish, when really most people in
the group don't actually feel that way. They're just afraid
to speak up because they think maybe they're the only one.
We might be able to overcome this and other situations
of pluralistic ignorance if we create a culture, we try
(35:35):
to personally demonstrate, act out a culture in which people
have more courage to disagree with what they assume to
be the opinions of the larger group. It might turn
out that it actually is pluralistic ignorance. Maybe a lot
of people already agree with you, and they just didn't
want to be the only one to say something. And
this is especially important if the assumed group norm is
(35:57):
something poisonous, something that maybe is coming top down, like
it's a dog eat dog world. There's like a really
influential person over the group shouting this message. It's important
that somebody else is saying the opposite. Otherwise the message
shouted from the top can easily become assumed to be
the group norm even if it's not. But also the
(36:17):
authors point out that normative group pressure can work in
the opposite direction. This maybe sounds a little bit grubbier
than some of the other ideas because this involves the
idea of, well, maybe you should employ peer pressure to
positive ends. But the author's write quote just as non
Cynics can behave cynically under a norm of self interest.
So can sinics become more trusting when they feel normative
(36:41):
pressure to do so? There are experiments showing this. Somebody
might have a kind of cynical baseline, but when there's
peer pressure around them to be more trusting, it kind
of works. It makes them a little bit more trusting.
Speaker 1 (36:52):
I mean, this is what the trust falls are all about.
Speaker 3 (36:54):
Yeah, yeah, exactly the trust fall. I don't know, as
a particular act might be overly tainted with the aroma
of corporate seminars, but things like that, I mean, there
is a kind of kernel of wisdom at the inception
of the trust fall. So I don't know, do we
feel good about trying to intentionally use group peer pressure
(37:16):
to influence people? I don't know, Like, using it to
reduce cynicism seems like one of the better uses of
peer pressure than I can imagine.
Speaker 1 (37:24):
Yeah, Plus, just given how nefarious and how just infectious
cynicism is in our lives, Like, yes, we should pull
every level we have against it.
Speaker 3 (37:35):
And then finally at the inter group level. Remember this
was the example where groups in society become increasingly distrustful
of one another, in part because you imagine that the
other group is more hostile to your group than they
actually are. And the solution here, the authors propose, is
just give people accurate information, because studies in these situations
(37:58):
have shown that interventions of just like showing people real
examples of members of the out group, as opposed to
leaving it up to their imagination or you know, using
cherry picked examples from hostile in group media.
Speaker 1 (38:13):
Or outright conspiracy theories exactly oftentimes, like that's the mode
of thinking that is involved in characterizing the opposing viewpoint.
Speaker 3 (38:23):
Yeah, just seeing like real accurate representations of who the
out group is, like interacting with each other and seeing
what they're actually like. These types of interventions have been
found to reduce this kind of between group hostility and
perceptions of metaperceptions of hostility within the out group. Oh
(38:44):
are they actually as selfish and hostile as I imagined?
Now that I see them, it seems maybe not.
Speaker 1 (38:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (38:49):
So that's all I've got on this paper by Norman
and Zaki. But I think that is a very interesting
place to start. It's got there's a lot to work
with there.
Speaker 1 (38:57):
Yeah. Yeah, And I would say in general, for folks
who want more information about ways to become less cynical
and combat cynical, cynical thought and cynicism in your lives.
Zaki's work is definitely worth following, and he's out there
in a lot of places talking about this stuff writing
about it. Back in twenty twenty two, he did a
(39:18):
TED talk on the topic, and you can look that
up wherever you get your TED talks. There's a great
quote in that talk where he says, you might think
that cynicism is a system upgrade that allows you to
see who we really are. It's not. It traps us
in a version of the world we don't want to
live in and one we don't have to.
Speaker 3 (39:37):
That's put very well, and I think that's an important
thing to emphasize. It's like a lot of the literature
that we talked about, I think in part two of
this series, you know, with the cynical genius illusion that
like it's just framed as wisdom, that seeing the world
cynically as being realistic. I mean, maybe in certain scenarios
(39:59):
there are like very corrupt situations where cynicism is a
more accurate diagnosis of them. Most of the time, the
world isn't like that cynicism actually makes you worse at
predicting other people's behavior. It's just like, it's not a
good model of the world. It's not being real. It's
actually living an illusion, living within an illusion that hurts
you exactly.
Speaker 1 (40:18):
Yeah, Now, this talk was interesting because I believe it
was recorded in twenty twenty one, and so you know,
he definitely ties some of it into the global pandemic
and talking about the connection between cynicism and disasters, where
something disastrous can occur some sort of widespread scenario like
global pandemic, and it can lead to increased cynicism. And
(40:40):
he also talks a little bit about the danger of
slipping into what he calls a cynicism perma frost. I
suppose on the individual level, we're even on like a
larger societal level where if, like baseline, cynicism grows to
a certain level, it's just harder and harder for us
to shake it.
Speaker 3 (40:59):
Yes, cynicism is self reinforcing and self perpetuating. To come
back to something from that paper, it is a self
fulfilling prophecy. It makes the world in its image.
Speaker 1 (41:20):
Now, Zaki's twenty twenty four book again his hope for
cynics the Surprising Science of Human Goodness, and he, of course,
in this book covers the topic at length, goes through
a lot of what we've been discussing here, but then
there's added information and insight as well. I recommend picking
it up if you want to learn more about how
to combat cynicism, but I want to go through some
(41:41):
of the ideas that he brings forth that essentially gives
you sort of a plan of attack. One of the
first things that he points out is that you have
to recognize the harm of cynicism. And we've been talking
about this, after all, if you don't understand all the
mental and physical health as well as social ramifications of
a cynical mindset, you might and I continue to think
(42:01):
of it as a path of cool and safe detachment,
like this is what we are, this is the world
we live in. Realizing first of all that it's harming
you to think this way, that's a good first step.
Speaker 4 (42:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (42:14):
Yeah, Cynicism is not the safe bet. It's not i
don't know, putting your money in CDs or something. It's like,
it's more kind of like letting it get oily and
leaving it. Next to the fire.
Speaker 1 (42:25):
Yes. The next thing he brings up is embracing hopeful
skepticism and questioning your assumptions. I really like this one
because cynicism can I think, come to feel like it's
a comfortable sweater that you wear, and then if someone
comes around and says, get rid of that sweater, you're
gonna be like, well, this is this is what I wear.
This is basically my skin at this point. And so
(42:46):
the idea here is that hopeful skepticism is kind of
something that's going to fit you the same as that sweater,
but it's not going to constrain your soul, you know,
So you know, assume better of people in general, but
also self analyze your cynical ideas, engage in rational skepticism,
which is to say, seek actual real world evidence for
(43:08):
your negative opinions and beliefs and pay closer attention to
what you actually observe in the world.
Speaker 3 (43:14):
Oh yeah, So this is coming back to the distinction
we made in the last episode between cynicism and skepticism.
Whereas cynicism is just a bias toward negativity and distrust,
skepticism is trying to award your trust to things on
the basis of whether there's good reason to trust them
or not paying attention to evidence and trying as best
you can to ignore your biases, whereas cynicism is itself
(43:36):
a bias, and.
Speaker 1 (43:37):
If you want to think about this as trust but
confirm fair enough, however you want to think about it.
It also reminds me a lot of some of the
anti anxiety techniques I've learned about in recent years, such
as putting your thoughts on trial and asking yourself questions
like A what am I afraid will happen? And b
what is likely to happen? Because we can often allow
(44:00):
our negative thought patterns to just run around unchecked in
our minds, like it's not at the forefront of our
thought We're trying to do other things and it's just
in the background like a yapping dog. But if we stop,
if we identify our thoughts and then we apply reasoning
to those thoughts, we put those thoughts on trial and
say like, hey, you stop barking. Now, let's talk about
why you're barking and what you're barking about. Then you
(44:22):
can actually begin to make serious headway towards dismissing these
thoughts or at least diminishing their power. Zaki also recommends
we conduct again our own behavioral experiments to open the
door for examples of trust to wander into our lives,
to practice trust. And this is this is a this
is one that's so big that it's going to sound
(44:44):
like overly naive just to say it, but focusing on
the positive. I mean, how many times have you heard that?
It can it can almost sound like you should smile more.
He recommends engaging in positive gossip as opposed to just
negative gossip, to making an effort to finding exams semples
in your life and in the world of people doing
good to counteract the other stories. They're going to maybe
(45:07):
catch your attention more and certainly drift up towards the
top of the news feed more. In a way, this
reminds me of that famous mister Rogers quote about looking
for the helpers. You know, I believe he said quote.
When I was a boy and I would see scary
things in the news, my mother would say to me,
look for the helpers. You will always find people who
are helping.
Speaker 3 (45:28):
Now, to answer the cynical thought arising in some people's heads,
you might think, in reaction to that, like, Oh, but
isn't that just sort of like turning away from reality, Like,
isn't that not being realistic and wanting to live in
a happy, happy fantasy land.
Speaker 1 (45:43):
No.
Speaker 3 (45:43):
I think a lot of the research we've looked at
is like this is a strategy for having a more
realistic view of the world. What we have a tendency
toward is an unrealistic view of the world based on
the high salience of negative events. So like you know,
nineteen positive events and one negative event event, the one
negative event defines our memory of what happened. And so
(46:08):
this is like trying to have a more realistic view
based on the actual real world prevalence of trust and positivity.
Speaker 1 (46:16):
Yeah. Yeah, And I mean it really comes down to,
like make sure that you have a balanced diet of
information about people in the world, and that can include
a media diet, it can also certainly include a real
life diet and how you're interacting with people. Like one
example from my own family, over the past year, we've
started watching the YouTube videos of Sam Bentley, who you
(46:36):
can find on wherever you get your videos. But this
is a guy who highlights positive social and environmental news
from around the world and these are the kind of
stories that are generally never the headline. And it's not
to say that they should be, and it's not to
say that you should be only watching this sort of
new stream and not the other news streams, but you
(46:58):
know their general positivity and hope fullness can provide a
very necessary counterbalance to the more cynical darkness that is
just going to well out of you in response to
the coverage the rest of the coverage out there. And again,
even if the coverage is fair and you know, on
the level, I mean, still it's going to feed that
cynicism that is in all of us, that is going
(47:21):
to potentially rise up if we don't keep it in check.
Speaker 3 (47:24):
Yes, it is very important to be aware of and
informed about and have a realistic view of threats and
bad things happening, But if you want to be able
to respond to those in the best way possible, it's
actually important not to let a cynical mindset set in
which it just disempowers you. So it is important to
be aware of threats and dangers and not like ignore them,
(47:48):
to like have them front of mind in a way,
but be able to respond to them realistically and productively.
Rather than just submitting to cynical surrender.
Speaker 1 (47:57):
Absolutely, Now, we should be clear that none of this
is like a one and done solution. There's not like
a checksheet you can go through and at the end
of it be like, ah, well, there we go, cynicism defeated.
In fact, Zaki here of the author in his TED talk,
drives home that he still struggles with cynicism himself all
the time. And it is a struggle. You can't completely
(48:19):
squash the infection of modern cynicism. And that's one of
the cruel realities of the whole scenario. Cynicism is just
going to well up again and again, potentially gaining foothold
each time subconsciously, like it's just in the background growing,
and it requires deliberate effort generally to counter its growth. So,
you know, like any kind of maintenance, except its maintenance
(48:42):
on your outlook on the world, on your psyche and
your soul. And once again, none of this is a
proposed transition from cynicism into naivety, or from cynicism into
some sort of unhealthy optimism. It's a transition from an
unhealthy and ultimately unrealistically bleak outlook on people in the
world into something that is more balanced, more reasonably optimistic,
(49:03):
and healthier for you in multiple regards.
Speaker 3 (49:06):
Yeah, see the world as it really is. Trust when
you can and use those relationships of mutual trust to
make life better.
Speaker 1 (49:14):
All right, Well, we're going to go ahead and wrap
up these episodes on cynicism right here on an upnote,
on a hopeful note, on optimistic note, and then maybe
give you a little homework for ways that you can
bring less cynicism into your manifested life. We want to
remind everyone out there that Stuff to Blow Your Mind
is primarily a science and culture podcast, with core episodes
(49:36):
on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short form episodes on Wednesdays and
on Fridays. We set aside most serious concerns just talk
about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3 (49:44):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact Stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com.
Speaker 2 (50:05):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.
Stuff To Blow Your Mind News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Lamb
Joe McCormick
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Kingdom of Fraud
It’s the unlikeliest of criminal partnerships: a devout polygamist from an insular Utah sect joining forces with a shadowy Armenian tycoon from LA. The result - a billion dollar fraud conspiracy. In Kingdom of Fraud, investigative reporter Michele McPhee traces the origins of the extraordinary alliance between Jacob Kingston and Levon Termendzhyan. Together, the two men trigger the largest tax investigation in American history and weave around themselves a web of dirty cops, influential political relationships and transnational money laundering. All this is set against the backdrop of Jacob Kingston’s clan – The Order. A powerful and secretive polygamist organization in Salt Lake City. To whom Jacob is desperate to prove his worth. Kingdom of Fraud is produced by Novel for iHeart Podcasts. For more from Novel, visit https://novel.audio/. You can listen to new episodes of Kingdom of Fraud completely ad-free and 1 week early with an iHeart True Crime+ subscription, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. Open your Apple Podcasts app, search for “iHeart True Crime+, and subscribe today!