The cost of cynicism

We all know someone — maybe it’s a friend, a co-worker, a family member — who always manages to be the voice of doom. The person who always knows that something is pointless or won’t succeed.

If no one immediately springs to mind, I regret to inform you that it’s possible that you’re this person in someone else’s life. If that’s the case, I’d like to tell you to stop being so damned cynical, but the reality is that it’s not that easy. Cynicism is everywhere. In fact, you could make the case that cynicism is becoming a default setting for people in our society.

But why is that the case? And does it make any sense to be so cynical?

Jamil Zaki is a psychologist at Stanford and the author of a new book called Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness. Zaki explores the consequences of cynicism, both for cynical individuals and cynical societies, and he also punctures the conventional wisdom that says cynicism is a reasonable response to the world.

I invited Zaki on The Gray Area to make the case against cynicism. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Sean Illing

Everyone has a vague idea of what it means to be cynical, but what’s a more precise way of thinking about cynicism? 

Jamil Zaki

I think it’s important to separate ancient cynicism from modern cynicism. So when I talk about cynicism, I’m not talking about the philosophical school led by Antisthenes and Diogenes but rather about a general theory that people have about humanity. The idea that overall and at our core people are selfish, greedy, and dishonest.

Now, that’s not to say that a cynical person would be shocked if they witnessed somebody donating to charity or helping a stranger, but they might question the person’s motives. They might say, “Ah, they’re probably in it for a tax break or maybe they’re trying to look good.” Cynicism is not a theory about human action, it’s a theory about human motives, that ultimately we are self-interested beings, and because of that we can’t be trusted to truly have each other’s best interests in mind.

Sean Illing

So how do you know you’re a cynic and not what we might call an old-fashioned realist?

Jamil Zaki

A lot of people will write to me, “You are calling us cynics, but we’re realists. Cynicism is really just understanding what people are really like.” I think it was George Bernard Shaw who said, “The characteristic of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who haven’t got it.”

There’s this stereotype that cynicism is the same as realism. Even non-cynics believe this. If you survey people and describe a cynic and a non-cynic to them and say, “Who’s smarter?” 70 percent of people think that cynics are smarter, and 85 percent of them think that cynics are socially smarter, that they’ll pick up on who’s lying versus telling the truth, for instance. 

The fact is that we’re wrong on both counts. Cynics actually turn out to do less well on cognitive tests than non-cynics and have a harder time picking out liars from truth-tellers. That, I think, points to a disjunction between what we think realism is and what it actually is.

Sean Illing

If you asked me to tell you the difference between skepticism and cynicism, I’m not sure I could do it. What’s the difference?

Jamil Zaki

It’s super important. They are not just different from one another, but one can be used to fight the other.

If cynicism is a theory, what theories do is they structure our perception of the world and often bias our perception of the world. If you think that things are a certain way, you will pay lots of attention to any information that accords with that perspective and ignore or discount evidence that doesn’t, so you end up through your worldview finding confirmation for it and doubling, tripling, quadrupling down. 

Skepticism really doesn’t allow for that. A true skeptic is open to evidence, whether or not that evidence matches their preconceived ideas, and they’re willing to update even relatively basic assumptions that they have if the evidence comes in on the other side.

Sean Illing

Do we know what makes people cynical? Is it a personality thing? Is it a genetic thing? Is it a neurochemical thing? Do any of us choose to be cynical in any meaningful sense?

Jamil Zaki

Well, cynicism is relatively stable across people’s lives in the absence of any intervention. So if you’re cynical now, it’s likely that you’ll stay that way if you don’t do anything about it. There are some heritable components to cynicism. Identical twins are slightly closer in their cynicism than fraternal twins, for instance, but the genetic and heritable component seems pretty small.

Then there’s the other fascinating thing you ask: Do we choose cynicism? I don’t know if we choose it or if it chooses us based on our experiences. I guess I would describe those experiences at a couple of different levels. The first is our personal experiences, especially our negative personal experiences. But there’s a second level here as well, which is the structures around us. Environments that are really competitive, for instance, are more likely to increase people’s cynicism, and environments that are cooperative tend to decrease cynicism. That’s a level of flexibility that I think is faster. 

Our childhoods affect us for many years, but your situational cynicism can change very quickly. If you are at a high-stakes poker table, there’s absolutely no reason for you to trust the people around you. But if you’re among a set of neighbors that you have longstanding warm relationships with, there are lots of reasons to trust.

Sean Illing

Do you think our culture engineers cynicism?

Jamil Zaki

I do. And I think it’s doing so more now than it used to. Cynicism is on the rise. In 1972, about half of Americans believed most people can be trusted, and by 2018 that had fallen to a third of Americans. We’re experiencing a massive drop in faith in one another and in our institutions, and with that comes a rise in cynicism. I think not only are we engineering cynics, but we’re doing so more efficiently now than we were in the past.

Sean Illing

Disease is a strong word, but is it helpful to think of cynicism as a psychological disease?

Jamil Zaki

It certainly has some qualities that we would associate with disease. It harms our physical health. Cynics suffer more from heart disease. They’re more likely to die earlier than non-cynics. To the extent that disease is life-negative, that fits the bill. And it also comes to us unbidden, just like a virus might. We catch it from our environment, and we often experience it unwillingly. We yearn to get rid of it, which is another thing that many people who are sick want. 

I don’t want to stretch the metaphor too far, but I think that those aspects of illness are notable and shared with a cynical worldview.

Sean Illing

Why do cynical people live shorter lives? Why do they have more heart problems? Is it as simple as happy, hopeful people are healthier, less stressed-out people and therefore they live longer?

Jamil Zaki

There’s decades of science now that demonstrate that one of the most nourishing things for us psychologically is connection to other people. Folks who feel connected, who feel like they have community, like they can depend on others, experience much less stress physiologically. They sleep better. Their cellular aging is slower than people who feel lonely. 

Cynical people who can’t trust others or feel that they can’t, who are unwilling to be vulnerable and open up, it’s almost like they can’t metabolize the calories of social life, and so they end up psychologically malnourished, which is toxic at many different levels.

So again, if social contact is salutary, if it helps us retain our health in all these ways, then we need to allow ourselves to be accessible in order for that to work, and cynics just don’t. And it’s a really tragic thing. Because I think, like you and I, a lot of cynics don’t want to feel this way, but we experience life as more dangerous if you think that people are untrustworthy and think, “Wow, I need to stay safe. I need to not take a chance on people.” By not taking chances on people, we are taking larger long-term risks with our well-being and missing out on lots of opportunities. 

The problem is that those missed opportunities are invisible, whereas the betrayals that we’ve suffered in the past are highly visible and palpable. So we might learn too well from disappointment and not well enough from missed opportunities.

Sean Illing

What’s your practical advice for people who have cynical instincts and want to overcome them? 

Jamil Zaki

It’s a shift in our mindset, to be skeptical of our cynicism, to fact-check our cynical conclusions. Also, I would add to that, to be more aware of our power. 

In our lab, we taught people something called a reciprocity mindset. The same way that cynical self-fulfilling prophecies bring out the worst in people, when you put faith in people, they know and they step up. This is actually true. This is something that economists call earned trust. But we found that when we taught people about earned trust, they were more willing to trust others. And when they trusted, other people became more trustworthy. 

But another thing that I would recommend is just trying to take more leaps of faith in people. I think we’re too risk-averse in our social lives. We focus too much on what could go wrong and not enough on the relationships we could build. I think that taking small and calculated chances on other people is a really powerful way of rebalancing our risk portfolio, opening ourselves up to other people, and also giving them the gift of the chance to show us who they really are.

Listen to the rest of the conversation and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts.