According to Thomas Hobbes, one of history’s most famous cynics, life is “nasty, brutish, and short”. But according to , director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Laboratory in California, this is, ironically, more likely to be true if you have a cynical, Hobbesian outlook on life, seeing the worst in humanity and failing to trust anyone.
Zaki didn’t always think this way. He has studied and lectured on the brain circuitry behind empathy and kindness for two decades, all the while harbouring a dirty secret: he was a cynic. It was after the death of his friend Emile Bruneau, who studied the neuroscience of peace and conflict and was “one of the most hopeful people I ever met”, says Zaki, that he began to examine his cynical perspective. He discovered that cynicism is not only harmful to our lives, but also makes us believe things that aren’t true. Luckily, there are tools we can use to combat our cynicism, as he explores in his upcoming book Hope for Cynics: The surprising science of human goodness.
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Alison Flood: What is cynicism?
Jamil Zaki: Cynicism is a theory that, in general, humanity is selfish, greedy and dishonest. Theories power our behaviour, what we do and what we don’t do. So cynics use their theory about people to guide their behaviour in the social world. It changes what they see, it changes how they interpret other people and it changes what they do, such as not trusting others.
How does cynicism differ from scepticism?
That’s really important. Cynicism and scepticism are often confused with one another, but they’re really quite different. I think of cynics as like lawyers in the prosecution against humanity. They have negative assumptions about people, and they seek out evidence about all the harm and terrible things that people do, ignoring evidence about their positivity. Scepticism [involves] openness to information about the world and about people in general. Sceptics think more like scientists.
What makes a person a cynic?
Cynicism is heritable, meaning that if your parents are cynical, there’s a higher chance that you will be as well. But a lot of cynicism has to do with our experiences of life, in particular our early experiences. Cynics act as though they’re very confident, in a sneering way, about the world. But actually, research suggests a lot of them have been hurt in the past. So I think that betrayals and other forms of trauma can lead to cynicism. I completely understand why and I don’t want to seem like I’m attacking cynics. I have been a cynic myself and I know that it’s really hard when you’ve been hurt to trust others again. And yet the case I’d like to make is that even for those of us who have been hurt, cynicism hurts us again by closing us off to opportunities for new relationships, new experiences. Cynicism makes it harder for us to learn, and thus causes us to miss all sorts of opportunities.
Are we becoming more like this?
People have become more cynical, and younger people are less trusting than older adults. A found that only 18 per cent of 12th graders [17 to 18-year-olds] in the US believed that most people can be trusted. That was lower than the general level for adults at the time, which was around 30 per cent. But that’s all worse than it was about 50 years ago, when about half of adults in the US . These percentages are from the General Social Survey, which has surveyed tens of thousands of Americans over the years.
Why has this happened?
There are so many reasons that cynicism is on the rise. Some of them are structural – increased inequality, the way that we use media, such as news outlets focusing on negative stories to grab our attention. All of these things can increase our cynicism. But we have also come to glamorise cynicism in our culture. We act as though cynics are smart. If you ask people to choose either a cynic or a non-cynic for difficult intellectual tasks, most people will think that . And about 85 per cent of people . We think they’re not just smart, but socially smart.
But over the course of several years now, researchers have looked at cognitive performance in hundreds of thousands of people and found that cynics perform less well on analytical tasks, on mathematical tasks and on social tasks, like figuring out who is telling the truth and who is lying.
So we have an absolutely backwards idea about cynicism that might be encouraging us to act cynically in order to impress the people around us, even though we’re actually acting in a way that’s less accurate and less helpful.
Can being too cynical hurt us in other ways?
Cynicism hurts us in basically every way a scientist can measure. Cynics suffer in terms of their mental health. They are . They tend to like alcohol more; their relationships are shorter-lived and less satisfying. Their – everything from cellular inflammation to coronary disease to diabetes, all these are predicted by cynicism. They do worse financially. If cynicism was a pill, it would be a poison.
Tell us about the evidence behind this.
Ever since the 1950s, psychologists have measured people’s cynicism using something known as Cook and Medley’s cynical hostilities scale. You tell researchers whether you agree with a set of statements. For instance, “most people are only nice in order to get something from you”, or “people only act honestly because they are scared of being caught”. If you believe these things about human nature, that clocks you in the eyes of researchers as a cynic, and for decades, researchers have gathered information about people’s cynicism and correlated it with their life outcomes.
But doesn’t cynicism also correlate with hardship in life? Can the relationship between cynicism and poor outcomes be explained by this?
None of the studies I’ve mentioned make people into cynics and then measure how their lives unfold. Cynicism correlates with hardship and we can’t completely rule out the impact of that on the outcomes. But the relationship between cynicism and poor outcomes also can’t be explained away by people’s race, gender or income. Cynicism alone might not ruin our lives, but it doesn’t sweeten them, either.
Why are cynics so much worse off?
We are fundamentally social creatures. We flourish through our connections with other people. Cynicism is like a tourniquet that cuts you off from those connections and makes it impossible to receive the psychological nourishment that we all need. That connection decreases our stress, decreases our cellular inflammation, improves our immune function, improves our sleep, improves our mental health.
Presumably this has wider implications too?
People require relationships to be healthy, and communities require a network of relationships to flourish. So versus less cynical tend to do a lot worse. Their , and they’re less likely to bounce back from difficult times, and they’re also less likely to grow financially. Researchers at one point looked at the relative , and then for years afterwards, looked at the growth in their GDP. They found that trusting nations, controlling for all sorts of other factors, grew economically, whereas more cynical nations flatlined or cratered economically.
Would you describe yourself as a reformed cynic?
I’m not reformed. I’m in recovery. I still struggle with cynicism, as I think most people on the planet do.
How can we fight our internal cynic?
To live an anti-cynical life requires three steps, none of which always come naturally. It’s like cynicism is a treadmill pulling us in one direction towards a bleak view of each other, so we have to be active in combating it. That means thinking differently, acting differently and sharing differently.
Thinking differently requires adopting a mindset I call hopeful scepticism. So be sceptical – open to information about people instead of relying on our assumptions – and also understand our bias towards the negative and actively counteract it. So when you start thinking about somebody, when you start telling a story about somebody, think about something positive that you can use to describe that person. Start the conversation there. It’s not putting on a pair of rose-coloured glasses. It’s taking off the mud-coloured glasses that most of us are usually wearing.
The second is to act differently. This means doing things that show people that we’re not being cynical towards them, taking calculated leaps of faith on them.
The third is to share differently, and this is, in essence, being able to understand our impact on others, not just fighting our own cynicism, but fighting it in the people around us. We’re prone to not just being negative in what we think, but in what we say, talking about people who do harmful things, for instance, much more than we talk about people who do helpful things. So reorienting what we share with other people.
There is a fascinating study mentioned in your book about tribal cynicism, a belief that people on the “other side” are stupid or evil. Tell me more.
We are cynical about humanity in general, but we’re even more cynical about people we disagree with. And disagreements get worse because we’re completely wrong about who’s on the other side. We think that people we disagree with are much more extreme, much more hateful and much more violent than they really are. In one study, researchers asked Republicans and Democrats in the US , and they also asked them “what do you think the other side believes?”. The data showed that Republicans want more of a closed border; Democrats more of an open border. But there was a lot of overlap. Really, both groups were pretty close to the middle. But if you ask them what the other group thinks, they believe that the other side was totally extreme. In other words, there’s a whole bunch of common ground that we obscure through our cynical beliefs about the people we disagree with.
Do you think that hopeful scepticism is enough to deal with the major problems of our time?
Absolutely not. But I can tell you this: cynicism is not a radical feeling, it’s a tool of the status quo. When we feel cynical about major problems like climate change, we’re less likely to do anything about it because we feel that our actions have no meaning. Hope is not the same as optimism. It’s not the belief that things will automatically get better. It’s the belief that they can get better and a sense of empowerment, a sense that we can have something to do with that improvement. So hopeful scepticism is part of a solution. I think it’s the beginning because it inspires action.
Alison Flood is Â鶹´«Ă˝â€™s comment and culture editor
