Part 2 of the TED Radio Hour episode Navigating uncertainty.
During uncertain times, many of us are drawn to cynicism, seeing humanity as inherently selfish, greedy and untrustworthy. In his latest book, Hope for Cynics, Stanford psychologist Jamil Zaki draws on a decade of research to explain why cynicism is particularly tempting now and how to counter it with a different approach that he calls “hopeful skepticism.”
“Uncertainty is a perennial human experience. It’s one that we’re terrified of, but that we experience constantly,” Zaki told NPR’s Manoush Zomorodi on the TED Radio Hour. “Right now is a moment of extreme uncertainty, and I think that cynicism is a sort of dark safety net.”
Why cynicism can be appealing now
Zaki argues that cynicism offers control in the face of a chaotic external world.
“So a cynic, by deciding that they can’t trust anybody, by deciding that people are generally rotten, they might not live in a very bright and happy world, but they live in one that they understand,” Zaki said.
Zaki said one big factor that contributes to falling levels of trust is economic inequality.
“When people feel as though resources are all grabbed up by a small percentage of people, they might feel like they really need to compete in order to be those people,” Zaki said.
Another factor is the increasing tendency to quantify every aspect of life.
“How many steps we take, how well we sleep, how much approval our opinions get on social media … all of those become vectors for competition, comparison and for cynicism too,” Zaki said.
Social and cultural norms reinforce a perception that cynics are smarter, but Zaki says the research tells a different story.
Zaki references one study, where people were asked who they thought would perform better on a set of tasks: a cynic or a non-cynic. Of the people surveyed, 70% said they thought cynics would do better at cognitive tasks. But the results showed that cynics actually performed worse.
He cites a separate study that found cynics also do worse than non-cynics at spotting liars.
“[Cynics are] worse at knowing who’s lying and who’s telling the truth because they assume that everybody’s on the take and so stop paying attention to the evidence,” said Zaki.
The cynicism trap
Zaki says that people can generally tell when someone doesn’t trust them or has low expectations of them. So when faced with cynics, people tend to respond in guarded, untrustworthy ways. So Zaki argues that cynicism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
“In other words, by mistreating others, cynics create the exact conditions they fear. They tell a story full of villains and end up living in it,” Zaki said on the TED stage in 2021.
On the other hand, Zaki says that a range of studies have shown that people are more likely to be more trustworthy when faced with people who trust them.
“That’s something that I don’t think people realize. We act as though trusting others is a sort of weakness. Like we’ve shown our belly, we’ve made ourselves vulnerable. In fact, it’s a gift that we give to other people that can change them for the better and a gift that they often repay,” Zaki said.
Instead of a cynic, try to be a “hopeful skeptic”
Zaki’s antidote to cynicism is what he calls “hopeful skepticism.” Though people sometimes confuse skepticism with cynicism, Zaki says they are different.
“Skeptics think like scientists and they don’t imagine or assume that people are great or that people are terrible. They wait for evidence to figure out who they can trust and who they can believe in,” Zaki said. “Because of that, they learn more quickly and are able to adapt to new situations.”
Zaki ultimately argues that combining skepticism with hope creates a worldview that is realistic about the challenges and uncertainty we face, but that can imagine a better future and take action toward it.
“A hopeful skeptic to me is not somebody who is naive, not somebody who thinks that things are great or will be great,” he said. “But rather someone who’s open to learning about what people are really like and using that common ground to try to craft a future that more of us want.”
This segment of the TED Radio Hour was produced by James Delahoussaye and edited by Sanaz Meshkinpour. The digital story was written by Harsha Nahata and edited by James Delahoussaye and Sanaz Meshkinpour. You can follow us on Facebook and email us at [email protected].
Web resources
Related TED Talk: How gratitude rewires your brain
Related TED Talk: The courage to live with radical uncertainty
Related NPR links
Goats and Soda: We asked, you answered: What’s your secret to staying optimistic in gloomy times?
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