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Episode: You 2.0: Fighting Despair

Author: Hidden Brain, Shankar Vedantam
Duration: 00:49:08

Episode Shownotes

Every morning, you wake up and face the world. What does it look like to you? Do you see a paradise of endless opportunities, where people are friendly and helpful? Or a world filled with injustice, where people cannot be trusted? In the final installment of this year's You 2.0

series, we talk with psychologist Jamil Zaki about how we become disillusioned and distrustful of the world, and how to balance realism with hope.Did you miss any of the other episodes in the You 2.0 series? Make sure to give them a listen here or on our website: You 2.0: The Gift of Other PeopleYou 2.0: Taking Control of Your Time You 2.0: How To Say NoYou 2.0: Remember More, Forget LessAnd if you like today's conversation with Jamil Zaki, be sure to check out our earlier conversation with him, "The Empathy Gym."

Full Transcript

00:00:01 Speaker_02
This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. A few short years ago, if you needed to buy something, you would take a walk down to a corner shop or go to a mall. If you wanted to watch a movie, you went to a theater.

00:00:15 Speaker_02
On nights you didn't want to cook, you stepped out to a restaurant. Shopping, entertainment, and dining brought us into contact with other people. Waiting in line at checkout or standing in a crowded bar, we encountered a wide spectrum of humanity.

00:00:30 Speaker_02
Nice people, mean people, boring people. Today, many of us choose convenience and comfort over connection. Need something from the grocery store? Plug your order into your phone. Want to see a movie? Fire up Netflix on your computer.

00:00:49 Speaker_02
Need to check in on friends? Hop on Instagram. You can pay someone to walk your dog or stand in line for you at a concert. Dating apps allow you to check out potential mates from the safety of your couch. Why go out when you can order in?

00:01:08 Speaker_02
Some time ago, the food delivery app Seamless launched an ad campaign, plastering signs all over the New York City subway. In bright colors with big yellow font, the ads read, over 8 million people in New York City, and we help you avoid them all.

00:01:27 Speaker_02
How did we get here? When did the world become a place where friendship meant liking a photo? This week on Hidden Brain, the source of the powerful vortex that warps the way we feel about the world, and how to fight its gravitational pull.

00:01:58 Speaker_01
We are all born with eyes filled with wonder.

00:02:02 Speaker_02
We play, we laugh, we seek out friends. But at some point, this changes. We erect defenses against the world. We pull back from strangers. We retreat into ourselves. What was that moment for you? Was it when you got bullied in middle school?

00:02:18 Speaker_02
When a friend betrayed your trust? When the grind of living paycheck to paycheck became too much?

00:02:25 Speaker_02
At Stanford University, psychologist Jamil Zaki is interested in how our experiences shape our view of the world and how our view of the world shapes what we experience. Jamil Zaki, welcome to Hidden Brain.

00:02:38 Speaker_00
It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you.

00:02:41 Speaker_02
Jamil, some time ago you came across a story about a young Japanese artist. He said he had discovered something about himself on a New Year's Eve. Who was this young man, and what was his story?

00:02:53 Speaker_00
His name is Atsushi Watanabe. He's an artist living in Japan, and he, through a long series of events, had become quite isolated, and in fact was isolated entirely in his room for many months.

00:03:09 Speaker_00
he had begun his period of isolation during a day in July, which in Japan is known as Sea Day or Umi no Hi.

00:03:18 Speaker_00
And on New Year's Eve, he was on a streaming site and he saw somebody else on that site comment, the last time I saw the sky was Sea Day, meaning that this person had been isolated and inside for nearly six months.

00:03:31 Speaker_00
And Watanabe realized with horror that that was true of him as well.

00:03:39 Speaker_02
Atsushi Wadanabe grew up about 25 miles outside of Tokyo, in a city called Yokohama. His life was chaotic.

00:03:47 Speaker_02
He fought with his sister, and according to Atsushi, his father did not get along with the people around him, and his mother didn't do much to alleviate the situation.

00:03:56 Speaker_00
So he felt very embittered and disappointed towards them. He was very talented from a young age at art and crafts and sort of escaped into art and found that that became a career for him.

00:04:10 Speaker_00
He went to a specialized high school and then to Tokyo University of the Arts and really created beautiful works throughout his childhood and early adulthood.

00:04:20 Speaker_02
I mean that sounds wonderful. I mean he was pursuing a career as an artist.

00:04:25 Speaker_00
It sounds wonderful, I agree. For him, it was more complicated than that. Watanabe really wanted his art to help people.

00:04:33 Speaker_00
He wanted to use it as social commentary, and he thought that others in the art world would likewise be driven by these values of connection and and altruism.

00:04:43 Speaker_00
Instead, he found that art, like any other career, is full of careerists, people who are often quite competitive and compare themselves to each other.

00:04:55 Speaker_00
Watanabe, like so many of us, suffered from depression and anxiety, and being put in this pressure cooker of an industry just made it worse and worse, and eventually it became unbearable for him.

00:05:11 Speaker_00
At one point, after seeing so many of his peers posting about their awards, he ended up breaking his phone and retreating to his parents' home, a place that he wanted to use as an escape, but which really wasn't that comforting for him because his relationship with his parents was still so strained.

00:05:33 Speaker_02
So at what point did he withdraw to his room and become essentially a recluse?

00:05:39 Speaker_00
I believe it was in 2010, and he, again, started feeling more and more alienated, first from the art world and then more and more from even his family.

00:05:51 Speaker_00
I think of his life, and this is from an outsider's perspective, as shrinking, like the circumference of a circle becoming smaller and smaller until the only place that he felt safe and comfortable was in this tiny few square feet of his room.

00:06:07 Speaker_00
He had joined what could be thought of as a community, really having an experience known as hikikomori, a Japanese term for total social isolation.

00:06:17 Speaker_00
It's almost like being in a jail cell, except it's a cell of your own creation as opposed to something imposed on you by the state.

00:06:32 Speaker_02
How does the story unfold, Jamil? What happens next?

00:06:36 Speaker_00
Well, he stayed in isolation for months after that. And again, from an outsider's perspective, it seems like this circumference of your mind shrinks as well.

00:06:46 Speaker_00
Watanabe began to fear that maybe he and the world would never reconnect again, that maybe he would live the rest of his life in that one room.

00:06:54 Speaker_02
At some point, his family decided to launch something of an intervention. Tell me what happened.

00:06:59 Speaker_00
Yeah, his father, who he had never gotten along with, decided he had had enough. And he contracted with a service in Japan that specializes in involuntarily pulling recluses out of their homes.

00:07:15 Speaker_00
And Watanabe, upon learning about this from his mother, was infuriated. He broke down his door and set out to confront his family, but there was no one there. They were out for the day. What he did find surprised him.

00:07:30 Speaker_00
He found in the living room a lot of books that he had never seen and paging through them, he realized that his mother had bought all these books about social isolation in an attempt to understand and support her son.

00:07:45 Speaker_00
And that moment of realizing that in her own way, she was trying her best to be there for him really broke down his defenses.

00:07:57 Speaker_00
She came home and they sat and talked for hours, opening up about the pain that they had been through and how they might move forward.

00:08:09 Speaker_00
He had not spoken in so long that his throat dried up in trying to speak and he had to drink lots of water even to be able to have this conversation. But he said that at that moment, the captivity of his heart went away for good.

00:08:29 Speaker_02
What happened to Atsushi over the ensuing months? How has he turned out since then, Jamil?

00:08:36 Speaker_00
Atsushi is, to me, an absolute inspiration and a redemption story. He went to a clinic to rehabilitate his body and mind for several months, and then he turned his period of isolation into art.

00:08:53 Speaker_00
In one of his first pieces, he built a concrete structure and isolated himself in it for seven days. And then at the end of the seven days, with a hammer, broke himself out of his captivity.

00:09:06 Speaker_00
And what I find so beautiful about this is that he was mimicking the experience of isolation, but owning it, transmuting it into something that other people could understand.

00:09:16 Speaker_00
And this time, instead of opening the door into his living room, when he escaped his captivity, there were photographers and an audience. and his art has inspired so many.

00:09:26 Speaker_00
He's made lots of pieces like this, bringing awareness to the pain of isolation and has become an extremely successful and in-demand artist in Japan.

00:09:46 Speaker_02
So about 300 miles from where Atsushi lived in Tokyo is the city of Kobe. You talk about two Japanese neighborhoods in Kobe. They were only a few miles apart, but they were also very different. How so, Jamil?

00:09:59 Speaker_00
Yeah, so these are two neighborhoods known as Mano and Mikura. On paper, pretty similar, both working class neighborhoods with lots of factories, for instance. But they had different histories.

00:10:13 Speaker_00
Mano had a lot of family businesses and a lot of local trade between people who were also neighbors. It also had a history of activism. People in Mano had fought for environmental protection, for instance, together.

00:10:27 Speaker_00
And that had bonded them in common cause over the decades. So you can think of Mano as a very tight-knit, trusting, and interdependent community.

00:10:37 Speaker_00
Mikura had less of that history, and people were less connected, less interdependent, and potentially less trusting of one another as well.

00:10:49 Speaker_02
So, in 1995, a massive earthquake hit Kobe and its surrounding neighborhoods. The tremors sparked fires that lasted for days and destroyed over 100,000 buildings. More than 6,000 people died. What happened to these two neighborhoods, Jamil?

00:11:06 Speaker_00
Yeah, this is a horrible tragedy, but really, if you think about it and look at the historical record, it was more than one tragedy because it was experienced so differently by these different neighborhoods.

00:11:18 Speaker_00
In Mikura, people watched often in their nightclothes, in their pajamas, while buildings were reduced to ash. In Mano, people did not wait for the authorities. They banded together and fought the fires themselves.

00:11:35 Speaker_00
For instance, running hoses from factories or creating pop-up bucket brigades to bring water from rivers to fight the fire again on their own. And because of that, the damage was far less in Mano than in Makura.

00:11:50 Speaker_00
Again, here you see this trusting neighborhood banding together in a way that protected them and likely saved many lives.

00:12:02 Speaker_02
You know, Jamil, when we think about cities and neighborhoods, we often think about physical infrastructure. We think about, you know, fire brigades and roads and access to water and electricity. And obviously those things are important.

00:12:16 Speaker_02
You're pointing to something far subtler here at the level of human psychology.

00:12:20 Speaker_00
Absolutely, Shankar. I think that's beautifully put. We have the physical infrastructure that connects us, but for that to work as well as it can, we also need a psychological infrastructure. We need a sense of interconnection.

00:12:36 Speaker_00
You know, the same way that we are all wired together through satellites and telephone wires, we must be psychologically wired together. And the networks that do that are networks of faith in one another, a sense of common purpose and shared values.

00:12:53 Speaker_00
That social infrastructure, that sense of common purpose and interdependence is crucial to continuing and flourishing together.

00:13:12 Speaker_02
When we come back, how we become disillusioned and distrustful of the world and the surprising effects this has on us. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

00:13:41 Speaker_01
This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedant.

00:13:45 Speaker_02
Every morning, you wake up and face the world. What does it look like to you? Do you see a paradise with endless opportunities where people are friendly and helpful? Or a world filled with injustice where people cannot be trusted?

00:14:01 Speaker_02
At Stanford University, psychologist Jamil Zaki is interested in how the way we view the world shapes our experience of it.

00:14:10 Speaker_02
Jamil, in the examples we've discussed, the way that individuals and groups feel about one another seems to shape how they behave toward one another.

00:14:18 Speaker_02
You say that across the world, many of us have been stricken by a worldview that sees the world in a harsh and negative light. What is this worldview?

00:14:28 Speaker_00
This worldview, Shankar, is cynicism. That is the belief that people in general are greedy, dishonest, and untrustworthy. And it is on the rise.

00:14:40 Speaker_00
A survey that came out several years ago found that 12th graders, people who are just entering adulthood, were even less trusting than older generations. I think only 18% of them believed that most people can be trusted.

00:14:56 Speaker_02
So some time ago, we had the psychologist Jared Clifton on Hidden Brain, and he talked about some of his research on parents' desire to keep their kids safe by teaching them that the world is a dangerous place.

00:15:08 Speaker_02
In some ways, do you think parents and other caregivers could be partly to blame for their kids becoming mistrustful?

00:15:15 Speaker_00
I think that parents are probably to blame for a lot about their children, both the good and the bad. But certainly, I think that is a big factor. So I love Jer's work.

00:15:27 Speaker_00
And as you describe, he interviewed hundreds of parents and asked them, what do you think will help your child? What beliefs do you think will help them?

00:15:37 Speaker_00
And more than half believed that in order to help their child, they should make them feel like the world is dangerous instead of safe. And I want to say, I can really understand why a parent would feel that. As a parent, I felt that way too.

00:15:51 Speaker_00
We think it's our job to protect our children from the slings and arrows of the world.

00:15:56 Speaker_00
But it turns out that if you teach your children that the world is full of slings and arrows, they'll walk around with a shield all the time, and that might not actually help them.

00:16:05 Speaker_00
So by teaching our kids that the world is dangerous, we might be keeping them safer from certain risks but we also are exposing them to a huge risk of living a diminished and less fulfilled life.

00:16:22 Speaker_02
So as you just said, a number of studies show that people with lower trust tend to be less happy, less healthy, less engaged in their communities compared with people who have higher levels of trust.

00:16:33 Speaker_02
Economists have measured the effect of trust on a nationwide level, and they've compared countries with one another. What do they find, Jamil?

00:16:43 Speaker_00
Yeah, trust at a social level is incredibly important. Of course, if you as a person can trust, that's good for you. If we as people can trust, that's excellent for all of us.

00:16:55 Speaker_00
As we saw in the story of Kobe, this neighborhood of mano that was very trusting was agile and able to pivot that community in times of crisis. But trust helps us in good times as well.

00:17:07 Speaker_00
Trusting nations tend to have people in them who are more willing to volunteer and donate to charity, who participate in civic life more, for instance, voting more.

00:17:18 Speaker_00
They tend to have greater levels of happiness nationally, and they tend to do better economically. Economists once measured the trust of dozens of nations and then the growth in their GDP. over the following years.

00:17:32 Speaker_00
And they found that high-trust nations increased in their economic health over the years, while lower-trust nations stagnated or even shrunk economically.

00:17:45 Speaker_02
One of the statistics that I found really jaw-dropping was that in terms of well-being, living in a high-trust group is worth as much as a 40% pay raise. That's incredible, Jamil.

00:17:57 Speaker_00
That's right. And again, I think it comes back to this beautiful metaphor you raised earlier of social infrastructure.

00:18:05 Speaker_00
If you feel as though you are part of a community, evidence shows from so many angles that that is salutary, positive for both your physical and mental health.

00:18:20 Speaker_02
So cynics turn out to be highly critical of others and themselves. And you say that even though you were running a lab studying empathy, you fell into this trap yourself the first year that you were teaching at Stanford. Can you tell me what happened?

00:18:35 Speaker_00
Yeah, this is a story that I'm not very proud of, but I think is important to tell. So I started at Stanford in 2012 and was extremely anxious. You know, this is the job that I dreamed of my entire adult life. And finally,

00:18:50 Speaker_00
it was handed to me and the pressure that I felt from that was indescribable. I felt completely sure that maybe Stanford had made an error in hiring me and certainly I wasn't going to make it to tenure.

00:19:03 Speaker_00
The other thing that happens when you start a lab is that you no longer are dependent only on yourself. You're dependent on the people you hire. in my case postdocs and graduate students and staff.

00:19:16 Speaker_00
I figured that my job was to absolutely in an anxiety-ridden way make sure that everyone was as productive as I needed them to be and as they needed to be to succeed in the exact same way that I had.

00:19:30 Speaker_00
I think that I was probably a very stressful person to have as a leader and actually I don't just think that, I know it. About a year into the life of my lab, one of the people that I was trying to train urgently requested a meeting.

00:19:45 Speaker_00
And so we met and she was in tears and said, you know, this work is really stressing me out and it's just unsustainable for me. I feel as though my mental health is taking a hit in this lab. And if things don't change, I'm going to leave.

00:20:03 Speaker_00
Frankly, Shankar, I feel some shame, almost a visceral response even talking about it now.

00:20:10 Speaker_02
Yeah. Yeah. But it is, I mean, it is sort of striking, right? Because you're an empathy researcher and you've created something of a toxic environment in your own lab. That is, I mean, the mismatch between that must have been very jarring.

00:20:23 Speaker_00
It was a rich and very painful irony that I felt immediately. And I have to say, I'm extremely grateful to that person for having the bravery to step up and challenge a new boss at that time. And I learned a lot from that moment and changed.

00:20:43 Speaker_00
But at that time, I realized that my cynicism was really not just getting the better of me, not just stopping me from living the life I wanted, but it was creating harm to others. And that really was a very hard realization.

00:21:06 Speaker_02
I should say, Jamil, that I've known you now for a few years, and I think you are one of the kindest and most generous people that I know. So I have no doubt that in some ways you've learned from these experiences and changed.

00:21:19 Speaker_02
But it is striking that many of the qualities that you describe that cynics have, a tendency to withdraw into themselves or to be distrustful or to be highly critical, these are things that you found in yourself?

00:21:32 Speaker_00
Absolutely. And I think that there's a lot of reasons for that. Cynics tend to be people who have been harmed in the past. And I had a relatively hard family life. And I think that that created that sense of

00:21:49 Speaker_00
defensiveness, that idea that I needed to protect myself in order to survive. And I think that those lessons die hard. And for me, they've lingered.

00:22:03 Speaker_00
And I consider myself these days a recovering cynic in that I'm working on these qualities in myself, even as I try to teach others about them.

00:22:21 Speaker_02
So there have been a number of different studies looking at the effects of cynicism in different domains. One of the most striking is in education.

00:22:29 Speaker_02
In the 1950s, the psychologists Walter Cook and Donald Medley asked teachers whether or not they agreed with three statements. One, no one cares much about what happens to you. Two, most people dislike helping others.

00:22:42 Speaker_02
And three, most people are honest, chiefly through fear of getting caught. And the teachers were asked, do you agree with these statements? Do you disagree with the statements?

00:22:52 Speaker_02
What did the study find about the effectiveness of these teachers in working with students?

00:22:57 Speaker_00
Yeah, so Cook and Medley actually gave teachers 50 statements like the three that you just read, but those are great examples.

00:23:04 Speaker_00
And they were, in essence, trying to locate individual differences, things that people would say, things that they believed that might predict their rapport with students.

00:23:14 Speaker_00
And indeed, maybe unsurprisingly, they found that teachers who thought that people will just get away with whatever they can and you can't be too careful around them,

00:23:24 Speaker_00
weren't great teachers, at least in terms of their relationships to their students, but what Cook and Medley found was that this did not stop in the classroom.

00:23:33 Speaker_00
That people who answered these questions positively, who believed these bleak things about human nature, turned out to be hostile in general. They called this cynical hostility.

00:23:46 Speaker_00
And if I might, I'd like to use their words from a paper that they wrote in 1954, where they describe what a hostile cynic is like. They said, the hostile person is one who sees little confidence in his fellow man.

00:24:01 Speaker_00
He sees people as dishonest, unsocial, immoral, ugly, and mean, and believes they should be made to suffer for their sins. Not a hit at parties, these people, potentially.

00:24:16 Speaker_00
So since then, this cynical hostility scale has been used in hundreds of studies and the outcomes are striking in their consistency.

00:24:27 Speaker_00
People who answer these questions positively, who think of human nature in these bleak and cynical terms, just suffer and create suffering all throughout their path in life.

00:24:38 Speaker_00
It's really, it's a tragic way of viewing the world when you look at the data.

00:24:50 Speaker_02
Can you talk a moment about the vicious cycle between cynicism and mental health problems like depression?

00:24:56 Speaker_00
Yeah, absolutely. So cynics tend to suffer many more mental health issues than non-cynics and also have a hard time connecting with people. Connecting with people is one of the fastest ways to improve our mental health.

00:25:12 Speaker_00
Social connections are like nourishment that can help us bounce back from difficult times. For cynics, though, that's not really the case as much. So it's almost as though if social connection is medicine, It doesn't work for cynics.

00:25:27 Speaker_00
It's almost as though they have, you know, they're resistant to this medication that helps the rest of us.

00:25:39 Speaker_02
I'm wondering if some people might be thinking at this point, you know, so there are a lot of negative consequences to cynicism, but surely there are benefits to being suspicious and distrustful as well. Maybe it can keep you safe.

00:25:51 Speaker_02
There are obviously, you know, lots of violent and dangerous and dishonest people in the world. Are cynics more accurate than non-cynics when it comes to spotting the bad guys?

00:26:01 Speaker_00
This is a common stereotype, so common that psychologists have a name for it, the cynical genius illusion. And it has two parts to it. One, as you're saying, people think that cynicism is a sign of intelligence.

00:26:15 Speaker_00
So in research, if you describe a very cynical and very non-cynical person to participants and ask them, which one of these people would be better at an analytical task? They will say the cynic would outperform a non-cynic.

00:26:29 Speaker_00
They also think cynics are socially smart. So if you say, hey, I want to bring somebody in to detect who's lying in a company when they give their resume. 85% of people think that a cynic will be a better lie detector than a non-cynic.

00:26:48 Speaker_00
So most people have faith in people who don't have faith in people. It's a little bit of a tongue twister, but it's true. And most people are wrong.

00:27:00 Speaker_00
The data are pretty clear here that cynics perform less well on analytic and cognitive tests, and they're worse lie detectors.

00:27:09 Speaker_00
So if you actually have cynics and non-cynics look at people sort of giving job interviews, half of the people told to lie, half told to tell the truth, more trusting people are better at spotting liars than cynics.

00:27:24 Speaker_00
And I think that's partially because cynics have this general blanket theory that nobody can be trusted.

00:27:31 Speaker_00
And so they actually, in trying to argue, thinking like lawyers in the prosecution against humanity, stop actually listening, stop actually paying attention to the evidence.

00:27:43 Speaker_02
So, Jamil, I want to talk about some of the drivers of cynicism. The journalist David Bornstein compares the news media to an ambulance siren that sounds every few minutes.

00:27:54 Speaker_02
I feel you're going to tell me that my profession is part of the problem when it comes to breeding cynicism.

00:27:59 Speaker_00
Well, certainly not your show, Shankar. But I want to say that I really think that the profession of journalism is extremely noble.

00:28:12 Speaker_00
What Bornstein told me that resonated so much is that journalists believe, and I think sincerely believe, that one of the best things they can do to help society is to point out where we're falling short.

00:28:24 Speaker_00
exposés and shedding light on injustice and corruption are really moral and powerful endeavors. The problem is when journalists and the news media end up producing so much bad news that they skew people's perception of what society is like.

00:28:42 Speaker_00
This even has a name called Mean World Syndrome.

00:28:46 Speaker_00
It turns out that communications scientists have found that the more news a person watches, the more they think that others are dangerous, the more they think that crime is rising, the more they think that they're unsafe, even when those things are demonstrably untrue.

00:29:03 Speaker_02
I mean, I think many of us have the experience now of opening a news website and almost, you know, bracing each morning saying, you know, what fresh horror are we going to be told about today?

00:29:15 Speaker_00
I feel like opening my phone in the morning is like preparing for an electric shock. And I've been shocked so many times that I'm almost desensitized to it and can often feel helpless.

00:29:29 Speaker_00
And I think I'm not alone in that experience, but it certainly drives up my cynicism and I think is driving up our collective cynicism as well.

00:29:42 Speaker_02
You say that another driver of cynicism is that we live in an increasingly transactional world. What do you mean by this, Jamil?

00:29:49 Speaker_00
Well, in many ways, relationships come in different types. So there are relationships where we're supposed to transact.

00:29:56 Speaker_00
We're supposed to count and keep score and make sure that if I go to a restaurant, I'm not just going to tell the owner, hey, that was a delicious meal. Thanks so much. Next week, I'll have you over at my house. We're supposed to transact.

00:30:13 Speaker_00
We're supposed to work in a way that's defined by markets and market mentality. That's appropriate. There are other cases in which we're not supposed to act that way.

00:30:23 Speaker_00
If my kids make me breakfast for Father's Day and I say, thanks so much, and I tip them $5, that would also be inappropriate because we have a communal relationship where we're supposed to trust one another and not keep score.

00:30:39 Speaker_00
I think that one thing that worries me is the extent to which features of market living are entering into communal spaces. And I think that one reason for this is because we are counting more things like we used to count money. right?

00:30:55 Speaker_00
We count how much social approval we receive on, uh, on different platforms like Facebook or Twitter or Instagram. We count how much we exercise and meditate. There are apps where you can compete with your friends for who's taking more steps.

00:31:11 Speaker_00
And I think that that quantification can make us feel like we're in a transactional space, even when we might not want to be.

00:31:22 Speaker_02
So, Jamil, you say that there is a relationship between cynicism and loneliness, and in some ways this might be a chicken and egg problem because cynicism prompts people to withdraw from the world, but you're saying that also the reverse is true?

00:31:36 Speaker_00
That's right, yes. When you feel withdrawn, oftentimes in that space, in the pain and isolation and sadness that you feel, beliefs and ideas pop up. Like, actually, I need to focus only on myself.

00:31:53 Speaker_00
You see this a lot in loneliness and also in depression, where people who are depressed will withdraw socially, then they'll start to judge themselves or others and think, wow, I feel really lonely. People just aren't trustworthy.

00:32:08 Speaker_00
Maybe I'm not good enough. Maybe they're not good enough. I don't know. But for whatever reason, I'm going to be alone forever. And when people start to have those beliefs, they then start to act on them, withdrawing further.

00:32:20 Speaker_00
Cynicism can be thought of as a toxic set of self-fulfilling prophecies. When we don't believe in people, we act in ways that show a lack of faith, and they react to that in a way that maybe confirms our initial beliefs.

00:32:40 Speaker_02
The comedian George Carlin once said, scratch a cynic and you'll find a disappointed idealist. People are not born cynical. It happens after experience causes them to change their expectations about the world.

00:32:53 Speaker_02
Many of us have come to see the world as a hopeless place where people cannot be trusted. We think these views will protect us from harm, but they often end up doing the opposite. When we come back, how to balance realism with hope.

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You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. We live in a world where it's easy to be cynical. Look around you and you will find endless reasons to believe the world is a dangerous, violent place.

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That people are unreliable, undependable, and greedy. At Stanford University, psychologist Jamil Zaki studies the effects of these beliefs on our well-being.

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In his book, Hope for Cynics, The Surprising Science of Human Goodness, Jamil explores the psychology of cynicism and the ways it affects our lives.

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He says that cynicism doesn't just erode our mental health, it also undermines our ability to fix our toughest problems. Jamil, in 1978, the Czech writer Vaclav Havel wrote a parable about a grocer living under an authoritarian regime.

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What was this story?

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Yeah, this was in Havel's essay, The Power of the Powerless. And he wrote about how totalitarian states erode people's trust in one another.

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So in his example, this grocer is compelled by his government to hang a slogan in support of a communist regime. And he does so. He doesn't believe the slogan, and his neighbors know he doesn't believe it.

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So in hanging it up, what he's really doing is hanging a white flag of defeat. other people, his neighbors, hang up their slogans as well.

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And what this does is it sends a sort of message around the entire neighborhood that everyone has capitulated to the regime. And if anybody decides to try to stand up or create social change, the people around them will not have their back.

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It's a visual cue that people can't trust one another.

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And of course, what the story suggests is that as we become cynical and mistrustful, it breeds cynicism and mistrust in those around us.

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That's right. Again, this is a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy in which cynical people tell a story full of villains. and then end up living in it. And this is really useful actually for things like totalitarian regimes.

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One view of cynicism is often, well, it might not feel good, but it's moral. It's good for us or right for us to pay attention to injustice.

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And I certainly wouldn't disagree with that, but it's also true that cynics foreclose on the possibility of anything better. And when you lose faith or hope that things could get better, you stop trying.

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I would say that cynicism is far from a radical worldview. I'd say it's often a tool of the status quo.

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So you talk about a concept called hopeful skepticism. What is hopeful skepticism, Jamil?

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Well, I think it's important to first separate cynicism from skepticism because these two are often confused with one another. As we've been discussing, cynicism is the theory that others are greedy, selfish, and dishonest.

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Skepticism is really quite different. It's a desire to have evidence to support our beliefs and to not simply accept our assumptions about the world. The idea of hopeful skepticism is twofold.

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One, it's being open to evidence the way that scientists are. But two, it's understanding that our default is relatively negative and often too negative. We often miss the goodness in others, even when it's there.

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So hopeful skepticism is an openness to the world that is complemented by the idea that, hey, people are probably better than I think. And if I pay attention, pleasant surprises might be everywhere.

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You say that one of the first steps to becoming a hopeful skeptic is to challenge your own assumptions. You conduct an exercise on yourself that you call Reasons to be Cheerful. What is this exercise?

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Yeah, this is one in which I try to notice positive things in my everyday life, and in particular, positive things that other people do.

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I actually started this as a practice with my kids because I realized I was griping to them about all sorts of people and maybe giving them a negative view of the world.

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So I started trying to notice for them and tell them about everyday positive acts that I had seen. And I noticed that this habit of action, of speech, turned into a habit of mind.

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It was like knowing that I wanted to share positive stories with them popped an antenna out of my head and made me curious and hungry for evidence of positive and kind acts. And once that antenna popped up, it was not hard to find those acts.

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They are everywhere. It was like changing the lens through which I saw the social world and suddenly alerted me to a world full of generous and open-minded and warm people.

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You've also studied the impact of small acts of kindness. Tell me about some of this research you've done in your lab.

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Yeah, so in my lab, we study kindness and generosity and empathy. And one of the things that we find is that you often imagine that kindness is a sort of transfer. I do something for you, you feel better, and maybe I pay a cost.

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Maybe I'm more tired or sadder after listening to your hardships. Or maybe I give you money and I'm a broker. It turns out though that everyday acts of kindness are one of the best ways to improve our own well-being But it matters why you do it.

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I think that many of us can act kindly in a cynical way, right? You help a friend move because you owe them or because you feel you feel like you have to And it turns out that when you act kindly from a place of cynicism that doesn't help you at all.

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Acting kindly only helps our well-being when we do so from a place of compassion and genuine connection.

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I mean, this goes back in some ways to what you were saying earlier about the tendency we increasingly have to keep score. What you're really saying is that keeping score doesn't help us gain the benefits of generosity and compassion.

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That's right. That's absolutely right. If you treat life as an exchange, then you can benefit in that setting. But so much of what matters most in life is what can't be counted. It's the relationships and community that we have just for the sake of it.

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And when you act even kindly, but from a calculating place, you deprive yourself of that feeling, that feeling of community that I think is so fundamental to who we are as a species and to what allows us to flourish.

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So I can hear some people saying, you know, Jamil Zaki is telling me to put on rose-tinted glasses. Surely in the face of major problems like war and climate change, it's ridiculous. It's naive to be hopeful.

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Well, you know, I can hear those people as well because oftentimes they say that to me directly. I don't have to imagine them. And I understand that instinct.

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Look, in talking about the downsides of cynicism and the upsides of hope, I am in no way wanting to paper over the real harm and destruction and corruption and pain that saturate our world. Hope is not the same as optimism.

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Optimism is the belief that things will be better. I think of that as rose colored glasses and something that can make us even complacent. Hope is the notion that things could get better.

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And it often coincides with a lot of dissatisfaction with how things are now. I think that hope can be a feeling that actually inspires us to challenge these structures, to challenge the forces in our culture that are doing harm.

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I think of hope as a fiery and often radical emotion, something that is not saying, this is fine in a room that's on fire, but rather saying, this room is on fire, we can put it out.

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Jamil says one of his role models when it comes to cultivating a hopeful outlook in life was the late neuroscientist Emil Bruno. They worked on several research projects together. Then, in 2018, Emil noticed something odd.

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In 2018, Emil noticed that each night his laptop screen looked dimmer and dimmer. And then he started getting headaches. He's a neuroscientist, so he knew this was a bad sign and he asked for a CT scan.

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And what the doctors discovered was a glioblastoma, which is a very aggressive form of brain cancer. And it's one that would take his life two years later on September 30th, 2020.

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Once Emil found out that he had brain cancer, he knew that he didn't have long to live. And the two of you talked on the phone and he told you the news. Can you tell me what happened that day, what that conversation was like?

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I was beside myself with grief and sadness. He had two young children, a loving spouse. He was in his early to mid 40s. It was just this tragedy that his life would be cut short. And in an astonishing turn of events, he started to try to comfort me.

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Maybe I could have done better there, but he said that Although he was of course extremely sad and his family was so sad, he also had discovered inside himself this sense of all that is beautiful in the world.

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He said it lived inside him like a ball of plasma. He told me that none of us get to live forever, but most of us don't know how long we have. And he knew that he had months, maybe a year or two to live.

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And it just equipped him with this sense of deep determination to live his values, to be with his community, And to continue his work to find the good in people and to promote hope and peace, it was really incredible.

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And it made me think, and I still think to this day, that there's a difference between a long life and a good life. He knew at that moment that he was going to be deprived of the first.

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None of us can choose how long our lives are, but he made a choice to have the second, to have a good life. It was one of the most inspirational conversations I've ever had.

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So a lot of us, Jamil, feel like the world hands us things, and when those things are good, we feel hopeful about the world, and when the world hands us bad things, we don't feel hopeful about the world.

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I think what Emil was saying is that we actually have the agency to choose hope, that hope, in fact, is an active choice.

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Oh, thank you, Shankar. That's so well put. That is exactly what I see Emil to have done. His life was by no means easy, and he could have chosen to turn his back on the world, to feel as though life had treated him unfairly, and he just refused.

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His hope was fierce and defiant and to me gives exactly the lesson that you're describing, that hope is a choice. It's something that we work on and it's a skill that we can build. I told Emil during that phone call that I was jealous of him.

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I know that's a strange thing to say to somebody who's just been diagnosed with cancer, but his positivity was just so mind-blowing. And I said, I just don't know anybody who sees the world the way that you do. And he knew that. He said, I know.

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I know that I have this idiosyncratic view. I know that I have this intense positivity.

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And he said, one of the things that I wish is that if I could squeeze that positivity out, like the toothpaste out of a tube, that I could leave it behind, that I could spread it even after I'm gone.

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And, you know, in the book I try to tell his story and it's my very small way of trying to help him even just a little bit with that mission.

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Jamil Zaki is a psychologist at Stanford University. He is the author of Hope for Cynics, The Surprising Science of Human Goodness. Jamil, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

00:47:19 Speaker_00
Thank you, Shankar. This has been delightful.

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Do you have follow-up questions for Jamil Zaki about cynicism and how to resist it? If you'd be willing to share your question with the Hidden Brain audience, please record a voice memo and email it to us at ideas at hiddenbrain.org.

00:47:40 Speaker_02
That email address again is ideas at hiddenbrain.org. 60 seconds is plenty, and please use the subject line, cynical. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media.

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Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Querell, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor.

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If you have another device, you can access the subscription via support.hiddenbrain.org. I'm Shankar Vedantham. See you soon.