How to Overcome Cynicism and Embrace Hope with Jamil Zaki

Episode Transcript:

00:00:00 – Jamil Zaki
I was talking with the columnist David Brooks recently and he said that he asks his students each year, do you think people are generally good or bad? And he said that over the last ten to 15 years, the proportion of students who say, yeah, I think people are generally bad has skyrocketed.

00:00:23 – Chris Forbes
Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts. We have quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts dont strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we dont have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But its not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Doctor Jamil Zaki, a professor of psychology at Stanford University and the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab. Jamil trained at Columbia and Harvard studying empathy and kindness in the human brain, interested in how we can learn to connect better. Today, Jamil and Eric discuss his book, Hope for Cynics.

00:01:42 – Eric Zimmer
Hi Jamil, welcome to the show.

00:01:44 – Jamil Zaki
Thanks so much for having me.

00:01:45 – Eric Zimmer
I’m excited to have you on. We’re going to be discussing your latest book, which is called hope for the surprising science of human goodness. But before we get into that, we’ll start like we always do, with a parable. And in the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. They think about it for a second, they look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

00:02:29 – Jamil Zaki
I love that parable. I think about it all the time. And to me it speaks to something that is deeply true about people, based on not just my personal experience, but also my experience as a behavioral scientist and research psychologist, which is that our beliefs about the world are realities. Our inner realities are self fulfilling prophecies that change the lives we live and the relationships that we build. So if you have the belief that, in general, fear will win out, that in general, people are selfish and greedy and dishonest, well, then you’ll treat people that way, and they’ll treat you accordingly. That, I suppose, would be feeding the bad wolf. And if you instead choose to hope and to be more driven by the data, you will put faith in people, and they will bring their best out for you. I suppose that would be feeding the good wolf. I think that. Well, I love this idea in general, and I love that this is how you start your conversations, because I don’t think we focus on this enough. I don’t think that we understand as a culture how much power we have through our habits of mind to change the reality that we reside in. It really speaks to one of the most profound insights from all of psychology.

00:03:54 – Eric Zimmer
There’s something you talk about in the book. I’m jumping ahead a little bit here, but you say that Maya Angelou once advised, when you show people who they are, believe them. But what people show you depends on who you are. And then you go on to quote a psychologist, Vanessa Bones, maybe something called influence neglect. Say more about that.

00:04:17 – Jamil Zaki
Yeah, Vanessa. Vanessa Bonds is a great psychologist who studies, again, this idea of influence neglect, which I think people should really try to internalize if they can. She has a great book about this called you have more influence than you think. And in general, the idea is that we imagine that other people are just who they are and that when we observe them do something, we’re learning about their true colors. This is wrong in at least two ways. First, people are totally different in different circumstances. If you put somebody at a high stakes poker table and then put them with somebody they disagree with about a political issue and then put them with their child, you will see three completely different people. They might be in the same body, but the different situations draw out different versions of who they are. So that’s, number one, is that when you see somebody, you’re only seeing one version of them. Insight number two, which comes from Vanessa’s work, is that the version that you see has a lot to do with you. I think a lot about Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, right? That when you try to observe the physical world, the mere fact that you’re observing it at a quantum level causes it to change. And I often think Heisenberg applies to subatomic particles. But we also have Heisenberg’s friends and Heisenberg’s colleagues and family members. Right? When we observe somebody, the fact that we are part of their situation changes who they become in that moment. And so I think that we have a lot of responsibility and a lot of opportunity. I write and think a lot about trust, for instance. And we tend to imagine that trust is a risk that we are taking on. We worry about being betrayed, and that’s a fair worry. But what I don’t think we realize enough is that when you trust somebody, they often become more trustworthy because human beings reciprocate what others give to them. And when you distrust somebody, they often become less trustworthy because we retaliate the harms that other people do to us. So when we make decisions around other people, I think it’s critical to remember we’re choosing not just to learn about the person, but how we want to influence them, which version of them we want to bring out.

00:06:32 – Eric Zimmer
Right. It’s completely obvious on one level that how we treat other people has to do with how they treat us. If I had gotten on this call with you and been like, yeah, thanks for coming on. That book kind of sucks, but I can’t wait to talk about it.

00:06:45 – Jamil Zaki
Right?

00:06:45 – Eric Zimmer
Like, it’s obvious you and I would be having a different conversation right now. So it’s really obvious. And yet, like you said, most of us don’t actually think of it that way. It makes me think about one of my favorite things that, you know, listeners are probably like, he’s going to bring up the fundamental attribution error again, but I am because it’s such a great example. Right? And the fundamental attribution error, as I understand it, is that, like, if I saw you acting in an angry way, assume you’re an angry person. But when I act angrily, there’s a very good reason for it. Right? Circumstances apply in my case, but in your case, it’s who you are. As if circumstances aren’t playing an equally sized role in exactly how you are behaving.

00:07:33 – Jamil Zaki
You’re singing my song, Eric. I mean, I could talk about the fundamental attribution error all day.

00:07:37 – Eric Zimmer
Kindred spirit.

00:07:38 – Jamil Zaki
Finally, you know, the fae, as it’s called in my nerdy corner of the world, is most associated with one of my colleagues, the late, great psychologist Lee Ross. Lee was a brilliant and very kind person who thought a lot about how we think about each other. And I actually want to share with you that later in his career, Lee said that there’s the fundamental attribution error where we typecast people based on their behavior. We don’t realize how malleable other people are. But Lee said there’s also the truly fundamental attribution error, which is our sense that when we perceive something, we’re doing so objectively, this is what’s often known as naive realism. Right. That if I think a song is good, it’s because it’s good. If I think that that dress is black and blue and you think it’s white and gold, the question is not whether I’m wrong. The question is, why are you wrong? What’s wrong with your visual system? Right.

00:08:35 – Eric Zimmer
Right.

00:08:35 – Jamil Zaki
And this sense of the truly fundamental attribution error, the illusion of objectivity, is at least as damaging to our relationships and our ability to connect with others as the regular fundamental attribution error.

00:08:49 – Eric Zimmer
I love that because, indeed, that is the true fundamental attribution error, that we actually see the world in some kind of way, it actually is, versus very much a reflection of our conditioning.

00:09:03 – Jamil Zaki
That’s right. That’s part of why I love the two wolves parable, because it speaks to the idea that there is no single reality. And I think about this all the time. A lot of my work these days centers around the question of, are people fundamentally kind or cruel, compassionate or callous? Good or bad? And these are philosophical questions that will never be answered, I think, in a clear, scientific way. But the way you answer the question matters enormously. And the way that we answer these questions has been changing. I was talking with the columnist David Brooks recently, and he said that he asks his students each year, do you think people are generally good or bad? And he said that over the last ten to 15 years, the proportion of students who say, yeah, I think people are generally bad has skyrocketed.

00:09:55 – Eric Zimmer
Wow.

00:09:56 – Jamil Zaki
And data bear this out, right? So, as I write about in the book, in 1972, about half of AmEricans believed most people can be trusted. And by 2018, that had fallen to a third of AmEricans, a drop as big as the stock market took in the financial collapse of 2008. So we are living through a deficit in trust and in our faith in each other. And you might just say, well, that sounds like it feels bad, but, hey, maybe people are just right. But I think the point, again, to this idea of the truly fundamental attribution error is that when you perceive that, it changes how you act in the world. And if a lot of us lose faith in each other all at once, it literally changes the world that we create together.

00:10:41 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. Makes me think of some of the research we start to see about loneliness, which is that if you’re lonely, you begin to think more suspiciously of other people, which, of course, makes you more lonely. It’s this negative spiral that you get into that is a feedback loop that is not headed in the right direction. There’s something that you say in the book, though, about this idea that when you ask people, they will say that people are not good. To the extent that we used to believe maybe that people are good, but that if you then ask people are the people that you know in your life better or worse than they used to be, they’ll say they’re about the same. So it’s like on one level, we are saying out there, beyond what we actually can see with our own eyes, it’s all bad. But when I look with my own eyes at the people around me, well, actually, people seem pretty good.

00:11:41 – Jamil Zaki
Yeah, brilliantly put, and I appreciate you picking that out. I think that this speaks to both the nature of the problem and to some potential solutions, or at least treatments for the problem. Cynicism, this idea that people are generally self interested and untrustworthy and rotten is very prevalent on our screens, on tv, on our computers, on our doom scrolling, endless feed phones. There is a vast perception that people in general are pretty terrible. And that’s for a bunch of reasons. One is that these media companies that give us this information have learned that human beings have a natural instinct to pay lots of attention to negative information. So they feed us more and more negative information, and we feed the wolf that is based on fear and judgment from that information. And by contrast, when we go off of our screens and interact with actual human beings, things go much, much better. The way that I think about it is that there is a neighborhood size hole cut into our cynicism. And as you put it beautifully, when we think about abstractly what people are like, we’re terribly judgmental. We’re quite hopeless. But when we think about the people we know, or even just the people we see on a regular basis, we feel completely different. And that, to me, is really sad, because it suggests that there are really big misperceptions that are clouding our ability to see each other clearly and to connect with each other. But it also speaks to a gigantic opportunity, which is that if we can move past those misperceptions and actually pay more attention to the good data that we’re taking in, the accurate data that we’re taking in from our real lives, there are pleasant surprises everywhere.

00:13:38 – Eric Zimmer
I. Yeah, I love that idea. So let’s back up a second and maybe start from the beginning a little bit more. You say early in the book that, exploring decades of research, I discovered that cynicism is not just harmful, but often naive. I think we’ve talked a little bit about the harmfulness, right. The way that if we perceive others to be a certain way, we’re going to get that back in response to a certain way. So that’s one of the ways it’s harmful. Are there other ways that it’s harmful?

00:14:09 – Jamil Zaki
Oh, yeah. Unfortunately, cynicism seems harmful in basically every way scientists can measure. Cynics tend to be less healthy than non cynics, so they tend to suffer from more depression, loneliness, heart disease. They die younger than non cynics, so all cause mortality greater among cynics. Cynicism does not help us succeed. So if you follow cynics and non cynics overdose ten years of their careers, cynics earn less money and are less likely to rise to leadership positions in their work. Cynicism, not surprisingly, bad for our relationships. It’s also bad for our communities. Cynical communities tend to be less civically engaged. People vote less if their trust in each other is low, they donate to charity less, volunteer less, and even engage in activities like self harm more. So really, the most famous line about cynicism is probably from Thomas Hobbes, the philosopher, who in Leviathan said, we need a strict government because left to our own devices, human life is nasty, brutish and short. Unfortunately, that probably applies best to cynics themselves. Right. It seems that, again, through self fulfilling prophecies, if you write people off, it’s just enormously difficult to be vulnerable. And if you’re unwilling to be vulnerable, it’s enormously difficult to build the relationships that human beings depend upon for psychological nourishment. And that’s a really tragic. Again, another of these vicious cycles that we see in the psychology of cynicism.

00:15:42 – Eric Zimmer
Before we move on to cynicism being potentially naive, I suppose we should define it a little bit, or I would imagine many people listening to this are going, well, am I a cynic? I don’t know. Right. I mean, some people know, you can sort of tell. Some people know they’re cynics, we know some people, we can be like they’re cynics. But for a lot of us, we might be like, well, am I? I’m not entirely sure. What are we talking about here? When we say someone’s a cynic?

00:16:06 – Jamil Zaki
Yeah, it’s a really important question. I think of cynicism as, and I want to be clear, I’m talking about modern cynicism, not the school of cynicism, which was an ancient philosophical school, but modern cynicism. Is a theory, the theory that in general, people are selfish, greedy and dishonest. And there are ways to measure that in yourself. For those of your listeners who really want to go deep, you can find online the cook medley cynical hostility scale, which is a questionnaire developed in the 1950s. It includes questions like the do you agree or disagree that most people are honest, chiefly through fear of getting caught? Eric, I wonder whether you agree or disagree with that.

00:16:52 – Eric Zimmer
In classic fashion for me, I would actually ask about five follow on questions to that. I’d be like, well, honest about what? I think we can be honest and dishonest about different levels of things. Maybe it’s easy to be dishonest about small things, but about big things, or how much is the harm that would come from being dishonest? So, absolutely, I’m terrible at these sort of tests because I’m always like, well, I don’t have enough information to answer this question.

00:17:23 – Jamil Zaki
You sound just like a social scientist. This is what we always do. We love to say, you can’t answer that question. You need context. Yeah, but in general, right, there are 50 questions sort of like that. Do you think people are honest chiefly through fear of getting caught? Do you agree that people generally don’t like helping one another? Do you think that most people can be trusted? These yes or no questions, and they’re pretty negative statements, and the more of them you agree with, the higher you would score in cynicism. Another way to think about cynicism is through what that theory does in terms of our behavior. Right. So if you think that most people are on the take, they’re just out for themselves. Well, that’s going to change what you do.

00:18:04 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:18:04 – Jamil Zaki
Trusting people is a gamble. It’s a social gamble. We put faith in somebody and we stand to gain if they show up and we stand to lose if they don’t. And cynics think of that as a sucker’s bet. They think of it as a terrible gamble. And so they’re much less likely to trust people in economic games. They’re less likely to trust people in terms of opening up about their struggles or putting faith in people in any way. So that’s another way that you might look to yourself and your own behavior to assess your cynicism. How much are you willing to bet on other people?

00:18:40 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. In that regard, I’m not a cynic. I do think people are generally good and can generally be trusted. And yet I believe also in the parable of wolves. Right. We all have good and bad things in all of us. But in general, I’m not cynical about people where I might tend towards more cynicism. And I wonder if this is a different aspect of it. Is cynicism towards the size of the problems that we might face societally. So I may be hopeful about people in general, believe people are generally good, they want to do the right thing, they’re decent people, and not feel hopeful at all about, say, our ability to solve the climate crisis. And so is that cynicism? Is that something different? What is it when it’s not applied at an individual level or a personal level, but at a scope of the problems that we face? Level?

00:19:38 – Jamil Zaki
Yeah, that doesn’t sound very cynical to me at all. And I should share, by the way, I really appreciate you being transparent about where you fall on all of these dimensions. I want to also be open with your listeners because I feel like sometimes when somebody writes a book about something like cynicism, they’re saying, oh, it’s bad, it hurts us. It sounds like they’re calling other people out or judging people. I want to be really open, and you know this from reading the book, Eric, but yeah, I struggle immensely with cynicism. In fact, I would consider myself a cynic at the time that I started writing this book, and now I would consider myself a recovering, definitely not recovered, but recovering cynic. So for those folks out there who feel this way, I’m right there with you. I’m not standing apart. I think that to your point about, well, on the one hand my faith in people, and on the other hand, my faith in our ability to tackle a problem here, you’re really nicely getting at some of the dimensions of hope. So maybe we can talk about what hope is and we can try to put these pieces together.

00:20:39 – Eric Zimmer
Sure. Yeah.

00:20:40 – Jamil Zaki
So hope is different from optimism. Optimism is the idea that things will turn out well, and sometimes it can be a complacent feeling. Right. You think? Well, I think the climate crisis sounds bad, but I’m sure scientists will figure something out in the next 30 years. So there’s nothing really that I have to do here. I think optimism actually is really similar in some ways to cynical hopelessness, which is, hey, nothing’s going to happen. I’m a doomer. So again, I don’t have to do anything, right? Because my actions, if you are certain of the outcome, then your actions do not matter one way or the other. And I think sometimes that can be fair and totally uncynical. For instance, if there was a giant meteorite headed to Earth and all the nuclear weapons in the world aren’t enough to stop it and we will be obliterated in six months. It would in no way be cynical to say I think we’re going to be obliterated in six months. That would be realistic. I think with things like solving or even addressing the climate crisis, this is a little bit different because it’s a collective action problem. And so our belief in each other now relates to our hope for the future. Right? Hope is the idea that things could turn out better and that our actions mattered. It’s an empowered and action oriented emotion. And one thing that I write about with respect to climate is that people in the US at least greatly underestimate how much other voters in the US care about the climate crisis. So it could be that I don’t think we’re going to be able to do anything about it because I think I’m the only one who cares. If that’s where you’re coming from, Eric, then I would say, well, maybe let’s look a little bit more at the data about what other folks want. And maybe if you realize that other people want the same thing you do, maybe there’s a little bit more collective efficacy, a sense of possibility for what we could do together.

00:22:54 – Eric Zimmer
Lets go back for a second to the claim that cynicism is not just harmful, which we covered, but often naive. Talk about the naive piece.

00:23:04 – Jamil Zaki
This I think is so important because it counters to my mind what has become a cultural stereotype. When I write about hope and talk about hope, I get made fun of constantly. What is this, Obama 2007? Come on. It’s so try hard. It’s cringe, it’s naive, sometimes even worse. It’s privileged, it’s toxic to hope, it’s denying our problems. And by contrast, people say, yes, cynicism, it feels bad. But you know what? Cynics are right? And so if it feels bad to know the truth, well then I guess I’ll feel bad. To which I would say, not so fast. Let’s look a little bit more closely at the data. And it turns out that the data here are quite clear at a number of levels. One, people think that cynics are smarter than non cynics. So if you ask people, if you describe a cynic and a non cynic, you say who will do better at cognitive tests? Who will be wiser? 70% to 85% of people pick the cynic. But then if you actually give cynics and non cynics cognitive and social tests, cynics do worse than non cynics now, why is that? Well, cynicism, as we’ve been talking about, is a blanket theory. It’s an assumption about people. And if you move through the world with an assumption about people, you won’t engage in a lot of critical thinking. You will paste that assumption on to every situation in your life. It’s actually a very unthinking, or in other words, naive way of viewing the world. And it turns out that that makes cynics wrong in a bunch of different ways. In fact, even folks who would not consider themselves cynics tend to underestimate people. There’s decades of evidence that people don’t realize how trustworthy, generous, open minded, and warm others are. So cynicism here, it’s naive in terms of the way that people are thinking, which is resting on assumptions. And it’s also demonstrably wrong when you compare our cynical assumptions to the data about what people are really like.

00:25:07 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And you talk about moving from cynicism to something that you call skepticism or maybe hopeful skepticism. I mean, it’s not just plain skepticism, but it’s a skepticism with a modifier.

00:25:22 – Jamil Zaki
That’s right. No, you nailed it. It’s hopeful skepticism. Yeah. Again, I love the opportunity to help people understand when two words that they’re using interchangeably mean completely different things. That’s like one of my jobs as a research psychologist. And that’s true here as well. We often think that cynicism and skepticism are the same, but they’re really not at all. So cynicism, again, a blanket assumption about people that we use to argue basically for how bad everybody is. A cynic will pick up any evidence that somebody does something negative or harmful, and they’ll say, aha, that’s who they really are. And they’ll explain away evidence about the person’s positive qualities. Right. They’re thinking like a lawyer in the prosecution against humanity. Skepticism is not a lack of faith in people. It’s a lack of faith in our assumptions. If cynics think like lawyers, skeptics think like scientists. They say, wait a minute. What evidence do I have to support each claim that I’m making, each belief that I’m carrying? And it turns out that skeptics, well, first of all, skepticism and cynicism not correlated with each other in people, right? So being one doesn’t mean that you’re the other. And second, whereas cynics tend to fall for conspiracy theories more, they tend to do worse at understanding other people, skeptics do much better they learn more quickly and they’re more adaptable. And then the hopeful piece to hopeful skepticism is simply an understanding that oftentimes our factory settings, our default mode, is too negative. So it’s an open mindedness to the evidence that the world and other people bring, plus knowledge that we have a bias and preparedness to push against that bias.

00:27:10 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, you say in the book that cynics imagine humanity is awful. Skeptics gather information about who they can trust. And then this last part in particular, being less cynical then, is simply a matter of noticing more precisely. And I really love that idea of just like you said, set our assumptions aside and let’s actually notice and pay closer attention and question our own default settings about the way things are.

00:27:44 – Jamil Zaki
Yeah, that’s exactly right. And I think that oftentimes, again, skepticism here can actually not be simply different from cynicism. It can be a treatment for cynicism. When you think about cognitive behavioral therapy for depression and anxiety, what a therapist will often do is say, a patient will say, okay, I think that I’m awful or worthless, or I have personally, Eric, some social anxiety. So I’ll often think that people are judging me or don’t like me. And when I was in therapy, my therapist would say, okay, well, Jamil, you’re a scientist. Defend that claim. What evidence do you have that people really don’t like you? Has anybody ever acted like they like you? If so, then you’re maybe not making a complete argument. And that idea of what I call turning our skepticism on our cynicism, being skeptical about our cynical assumptions, is a mindset shift that can allow us to say, well, wait a minute. Where is all of this coming from? And I think oftentimes we trust our instincts. People are even proud. They say, I’ve got a lot of intuition. I trust my gut. To which I say, fine, you can do that. But oftentimes our gut instincts are really awful. We have gut instincts that tell us, be nicer to people who are your same race than somebody who’s a different race. Or when you’re hungry, judge people more morally. We would never trust those instincts and the instinct to always look at the worst parts of people’s behavior, the worst parts of the world is adaptive in certain ways. Maybe it helped us survive 200,000 years ago, but that doesn’t mean it’s helping us now. So I think that we don’t need to trust our gut when it comes to cynical judgments. We can be skeptical. We can be open minded instead.

00:29:35 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, I’m always a little bit skeptical of the intuition. It’s a big thing in personal development, which is just trust your intuition, trust your gut. And I’m like, well, kinda sometimes there’s plenty of times our gut sense leads us way wrong. And a lot of the research, particularly if you look at some of the stuff about, like, even Malcolm Gladwell’s, that’s Kahneman thinking fast and slow. But this idea of intuition, people who are trusting their intuition in those stories he’s telling, are people who have thousands of hours of experience in that very thing, to the point where they’ve internalized vast amounts of information. And so it’s not that I’m totally against intuition, but I’m just not a believer that, like you said, like, it’s always right. I think it’s used right. It is an input into a system that should have multiple inputs.

00:30:29 – Jamil Zaki
This is brilliantly put. This is a really nuanced and important point. You’re saying that, hey, wait a minute. Intuition is more useful if you have expertise, because you have a crude experience that feeds into that intuition. I do want to complicate that even more. Eric, if I may, please.

00:30:46 – Eric Zimmer
I love complication.

00:30:48 – Jamil Zaki
I can tell your game for this, which is awesome. So a lot of people would say, yeah, in fact, my cynicism counts as expertise because I’ve been around people. If you feel hope or you trust people, that’s because you’re naive. I am not naive. I’ve been around the block, and I’ve learned, through tough one lessons, through betrayals, through disappointments, that people can’t be trusted. And I think that that’s actually the illusion of expertise more than its real expertise. Because, as you said, expertise means you’ve got a lot of information that’s going into your intuitions. But one thing about cynicism is that it causes us to take information in in an uneven way.

00:31:29 – Eric Zimmer
Yes.

00:31:30 – Jamil Zaki
I’ll give you an example. Right. So when you trust somebody, and that was the wrong choice. Oh, you get feedback. Right. You learn that that was a mistake. You maybe think about that mistake for months or years or decades, but when you don’t trust somebody, and that is a mistake, when you miss an opportunity for a friendship or the love of your life or the greatest business partnership you would ever have, you don’t know that betrayals are visible. Missed opportunities are invisible. And that means that the information that we’re taking in is only really half of the information that we could take in. And in that way, our experiences don’t always lead to expertise. If we’re taking in information in a way that’s biasing us more as we gain more experience.

00:32:19 – Eric Zimmer
Absolutely. And because those experiences that are negative like that, we weigh far higher also, right?

00:32:28 – Jamil Zaki
Yes.

00:32:28 – Eric Zimmer
It’s an example of a trauma perpetrated on somebody. They obviously and rightfully so, weigh that very, very highly. But it’s not indicative of the reality out there. And I love that idea of saying that. It’s that we’re not taking in information in a balanced way. And I think that’s why what you’re saying about our experiences of people, right, because the news is unquestionably and always going to point out the negative. It’s the person who went into Starbucks today, refused to wear a mask and threw their coffee at the barista.

00:33:04 – Jamil Zaki
Yep.

00:33:05 – Eric Zimmer
Right?

00:33:05 – Jamil Zaki
Yep.

00:33:06 – Eric Zimmer
And that’s what you hear. But simple. Paying attention will tell me that I’ve been into thousands of Starbucks thousands of times and I’ve never once seen a bit of behavior like that. And it just is this sort of not fully bringing things in. And one of my favorite sort of counters to cynicism is, I think about there’s uncertainly people behaving poorly right at this very minute. Of course there are. And there are also so many people behaving kindly and decently and nobly, or just fine, decently. You drive down the road and that’s the case. It’s like we are all somehow hurtling down the road at 70 miles an hour, largely obeying the rules and getting along. And the occasional person that counters, that is the exception, not the rule, but it’s the one that we then say people are idiots, like you said. Can we take in more information and keep the negative information from assuming too big of a role? It’s like we weight it with like ten points of preference for every good thing we see. But it’s probably even way worse than that. The ratio, if we were to give it a ratio.

00:34:19 – Jamil Zaki
The person who cuts me off in traffic is the star of my day’s story. The 950 people who follow traffic laws all around me on that same drive float into the landfill of my lost memories. That’s true of so many things. Plane crashes is a major news story, and it should be. It’s a tragedy. Of course. 60,000 planes land without crashing is a non story. In some ways, the exceptions are what we focus on rather than the rules that make those exceptions exceptional.

00:34:56 – Eric Zimmer
Precisely. Yeah. If 1000 planes crashed a day, we would cease to pay much attention to it. We’d just be like, well, planes crash all the time. I mean, it wouldn’t make the news anymore. It’s the same thing I always think. Like, we talk about things that are dangerous, and I’m like, I think statistically, the most dangerous thing that we do, and we all do it every day, is get in a car, is drive.

00:35:15 – Jamil Zaki
Absolutely.

00:35:16 – Eric Zimmer
It’s far more dangerous than all these other things that we worry about, and we do it every day with barely thinking about it, which shows you that we’re not actually adding up the reality in a coherent way.

00:35:29 – Jamil Zaki
Exactly. Last year, I surveyed 1000 AmEricans, and I asked them, in general, do you think that the pandemic. So 2020, early pandemic, 20, 2021, and 22, do you think that people around the world during those years became kinder, less kind, or did they stay just as kind as they had in the years before the pandemic? And 60% of my sample believed that the world had become less kind during the pandemic. Barely 20% thought that it had become kinder. But the data from this massive project called the World Happiness Report are clear and go in the exact opposite direction. Volunteering, donating to charity, and helping strangers all increased enormously over the pandemic. So there’s two pieces of news there. One, the good news. When push came to shove during one of the hardest times, the worst disasters most living people have experienced, we showed up for each other. That says a lot. The second thing, most people don’t know that that happened, which I think is a tragedy. And again, whenever I talk about this stuff, people will say, wait a minute. You can’t discount people who commit murder or assault or do awful things. It’s like you said, right? Saying that plane crashes almost never happen would be a disservice to people who really are devastated by those events. And, of course, I in no way want to diminish the real harm that is going on all around the world right now. The question for me is not, is everybody good? Is everybody helpful, is everybody kind? But rather, can we correctly understand the average person? And I would say that it’s very clear that the average person underestimates the average person. And that is both a really sad state of affairs and, again, an opportunity. Because if we recalibrate, not only will we know each other better, there will be much more reason to have hope for the future that we can build as a community.

00:37:30 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, I love that idea. Let’s talk about two neighborhoods in a japanese city. I don’t know how to pronounce Japanese.

00:37:39 – Jamil Zaki
Kobe.

00:37:39 – Eric Zimmer
Kobe. Thank you. Yeah. And I’m not even gonna pronounce the two neighborhoods. I’ll let you. I’ll let you. I’m just gonna stay out of this. Or let you do that.

00:37:45 – Jamil Zaki
Yeah. So we were talking earlier about how cynicism hurts individuals, and trust and vulnerability can help individuals and how that’s also true at the community level. And I was telling you that trusting versus less trusting communities tend to be more civically engaged, more economically prosperous. But it’s also true that trust, the bonds between people in a community, strengthen that community, especially during difficult times. And one amazing example of that that I write about and learned a lot about for the book is this disaster, this earthquake that occurred in the japanese city of Kobe in 1995. And it was a horrible disaster. Thousands of people died and hundreds of thousands of buildings were destroyed. There are two neighborhoods in the general Kobe area that are not that far apart, Mano and Mikura. And they’re similar in socioeconomic status, population size, et cetera. But they were different in a key way, which is that Mano had this history of organizing together as a community to advocate for environmental protection. The details matter less, but what you need to know is that these people counted on one another. They had been through struggles together. The level of interconnection in this neighborhood was high. Makura had less of that history. And when the earthquake struck, there were fires that followed the earthquake, massive fires. And the trust that folks in Mano had made a huge difference. People in Makura kind of waited for the fire department to arrive, and many of them lost their homes and sadly, many lost their lives. People in Mono did not wait. They organized kind of in a grassroots way. Came up with a bucket brigade and pulled hoses from factories and were taking water from the rivers around there. The tragedy was still a tragedy in both neighborhoods, of course, but the number of homes lost in Mano was a quarter of what it was in Makura. The number of lives lost in Mano was one 10th of what it was in Makura. So we think about trust as great when things are good, but trust is probably even more powerful when things are going terribly. And it’s one of the fundamental needs that we have in times of adversity is to be able to count on one another.

00:40:26 – Eric Zimmer
There’s another story in the book about. Actually, I’m just gonna tee it up and let you tell it. But it’s about two villages.

00:40:34 – Jamil Zaki
Yeah, absolutely. It’s funny, you know, because we’ve been talking about the parable of the wolfy feed. And I think that’s often a parable at the individual level. Right? Like about personal development, I think of the brazilian fishing village example as actually one version of when we feed a different wolf as a community than another community does. So in southeastern Brazil, there are two villages separated by about 30, 40 miles. Again, similar in a lot of ways, religion, socioeconomic status. Theyre both fishing villages. And one village is by the ocean. And it turns out that in order to fish on the ocean, you need heavy equipment and large boats because the waves are large and its pretty dangerous. And so that type of work is fundamentally cooperative. Fishermen work in teams on the lake because theres no waves and the fish are smaller. People work independently, and actually, they often run into each other on their small boats only when they’re competing for the best fishing spots. And about ten years ago, economists, including a friend of mine, Andreas Liebrandt, went to those villages, and they gave the fishermen in those villages different social games to play, assessing how trustworthy they were and how generous they were. And it turned out that when fishermen started their career, it didn’t matter which village they were in, they were equally trusting, equally trustworthy, and equally generous. But over time, the environment shaped these people. If you were in a cutthroat, competitive workplace, you became less trusting and less trustworthy over time. And if you were in a cooperative, positive sum workplace, you became more trusting and more generous over time.

00:42:23 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, it gets back to what we talked about earlier, which is where your view of other people will shape the behavior you get back from them.

00:42:33 – Jamil Zaki
Exactly, yeah. And I think it’s also not just your view of other people, but the structures that you are in. I think that one thing about today’s culture is just how unequal we are. Times of great economic inequality tend to be less trusting. Times and places that are more unequal tend to be less trusting as well. And that’s not because people have a bad attitude. It’s because structurally, when things are very unequal, people often feel like they have to compete, like their lives are a zero sum struggle to meet their basic necessities.

00:43:08 – Eric Zimmer
There was something that you said in the book. You say that it didn’t matter who they were. Rural and urban, liberal and conservative baby boomers and Gen Z may not agree on much, but they all believe humanity is in a state of vicious decline and that we yearn for a gentler, friendlier past that never was. Is this just a feature of human beings as we age?

00:43:34 – Jamil Zaki
It’s an interesting question. So this is work by Adam Mastrioni and Dan Gilbert, who look at this illusion of moral decline. They look at surveys over a 70 year period, hundreds of thousands of people. And at all times, people say things were great 20 years ago, but they’re terrible now in terms of morality. Right. People were great 20 years ago and not so much now. And the irony, of course, is that some of the people in these surveys, they’re now other people’s 20 years ago. Right. So people in 1970 think that 1970s AmErica is very untrustworthy and unkind compared to the 1950s, but people in the 1990s think that 1970s AmErica was great.

00:44:14 – Eric Zimmer
Right? Right, exactly.

00:44:16 – Jamil Zaki
And so I do think that there is a little bit of nostalgia here. I think that because we have this negativity bias when we’re thinking about what’s happening now, we’re so hyper focused on the threats in our environment. There’s also something known as the psychological immune system, which is the idea that over time, we acclimate to our circumstances and even block out some negative things that have happened in the past. So Dan and Adam think that it’s a combination of these two effects that we’re seeing. One, I’m so focused on everything bad that’s happening now. And two, I tend to sugarcoat the past, and you put those together and you get this illusion that things are getting worse, even when they’re demonstrably, in some cases, getting much better.

00:44:59 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. I always think of it as a sure sign of getting old, and I’m exaggerating a little bit. But when I look at the sort of ways in which we ossify potentially as we get older, it’s one of the big ones. On my internal checking, like, am I starting to say things like, it was better when, as, like, a sign that tells me that, like, I need to keep, like you say, keep taking in more data.

00:45:28 – Jamil Zaki
I feel the same way about being confused by younger generations. And, you know, I think the worst version of that is being judgmental of younger generations. I hear all the time, because a lot of my work focuses on empathy and kindness. Aren’t young people just jerks? Aren’t they self centered, narcissistic influencers? And I think, no. And I also want to know how many of these folks do you know, I teach college students every day. I think I have a lot of experience with young adults, and they are some of the least selfish, most globally conscious people I’ve ever known, much more than I was at their age. So I think when we start stereotyping people who are younger than us, that’s a red flag that maybe we’re getting older than we realize.

00:46:09 – Eric Zimmer
Exactly. Talk to me about what solutions journalists.

00:46:14 – Jamil Zaki
Are solutions journalism is an attempt to provide an antidote, or at least counter programming to many of the things we’ve been talking about as we’ve been talking about. Generally, journalists and news organizations focus on the negative because that’s what will keep us clicking and scrolling and watching. But that gives us a biased sense of the world. Right? We’re basically only being shown the worst half of humanity by news organizations. So solutions journalists try to do the opposite. Now, I should say that when I say do the opposite, I do not mean puff pieces about a dog that was stuck in a tree but is rescued. Or even great stories, like a veteran comes home to their family who doesn’t know that they’re there. There are all these beautiful stories that we call human interest stories that are of just lovely anecdotes. That’s really great, and that’s completely fine. But solutions journalism is not that. It’s instead using journalism and storytelling to teach people about folks who are really trying to address big problems that we’re facing. So, for instance, young people engaged in activism to combat the climate crisis, or to roll back gerrymandering and re empower voters in the midwest, or people who have been imprisoned advocating for their rights to vote. This is news about positive trends that are directly related to the negative news that we hear all the time, not disembodied or apart from news. Oftentimes, I think the old stereotype is you hear four days and 55 minutes of bad news and then the last five minutes on Friday is a human interest story that’s supposed to basically be an escape from reality. Solutions journalism is not an escape. It’s a confrontation with negative journalism by saying, yeah, these same issues. There are positive developments on those fronts.

00:48:16 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, I loved the story about gerrymandering in Michigan that you tell. Do you want to walk us through that very briefly?

00:48:24 – Jamil Zaki
Sure.

00:48:25 – Eric Zimmer
Because I think it’s a great example of this and the sort of example of something positive happening around an issue that often seems intractable.

00:48:34 – Jamil Zaki
Yeah, this is the story of Katie Fahey, 26 year old Michigander, who worked in a recycling plant. I mean, really not somebody who was high up in politics or involved at all, although she was engaged. And after the 2016 election, she wanted to find a nonpartisan issue, something that people generally agreed on that she could make movement on. And it was gerrymandering. Right. Kind of anti democratic splitting of districts such that votes don’t count as much. And she created this grassroots campaign, and people laughed her out of every meeting that she had at first, she’s, again, this young woman, not taken seriously, but she did it. She collected 300,000 signatures from around Michigan and got a ballot initiative passed. And now Michigan is one of the most democratic states in the nation, meaning that people’s votes are relatively counted compared to more gerrymandered states. I think it’s such a great example of how not being willing to lose faith in each other can actually create positive change.

00:49:40 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, it’s a really great story. And to hear about how she did it and the different people who came together. And it is an example of this solutions journalism that is really useful. And you talk about your couple of hot button issues. One is democratic institutions crumbling, and this is a great piece of solutions journalism to that. And you’re also, you said I’ve become a climate doomer. I also think there is good news on the climate front along with all the bad news. It’s not that they replace each other, but I’ve spent more time looking for stories that highlight some of the good things that are happening again, not as a way of becoming optimistic necessarily, but as a way of seeing a more full picture.

00:50:30 – Jamil Zaki
That’s right. And I think it’s important this point you raise, finding and seeking out positive news is not a matter of putting rose colored glasses on and being complacent. Finding good news a makes us more accurate because having only bad news in our feeds is like wearing mud colored glasses. Right. So trying to balance the information that we get is not putting on a pair of rose colored glasses. It’s taking off the bias that we’re already wearing, or at least most of us are. And second, it’s not complacent. You know, when we read, when we learn that other people support climate action, in many cases of social movements that empowers us, people with hope are more likely to agitate, to take part in protests, to pressure lawmakers to make change. So being hopeful is not being complacent. In fact, it’s the opposite.

00:51:21 – Eric Zimmer
There’s a book, you’re probably familiar with it, Hans Roslane, and it’s called possibilism. Is that the. No. What’s the name? Factfulness. But he talks about, he says in the book, I’m not an optimist or a pessimist, I’m a possibilist. I love that idea. Because what he’s saying is that both the positive and the negative, they’re both true. There are negative things in the world, there are positive things in the world, but that he’s focused on possibilism and he basically says that recognizing the good things that are happening does not make him naive. It makes him somebody who can believe in positive action happening. And you sort of say this somewhere else also, that when we don’t believe that good things can happen, you say it forecloses on the possibility of anything better. And I love that idea of cynicism becomes, again, as we’ve mentioned, in different ways, self fulfilling prophecy to a certain extent, because if you don’t believe that things can get better or have gotten better in certain ways, you won’t do anything different.

00:52:31 – Jamil Zaki
And I want to be really clear, that’s helpful to a certain group of people, that’s helpful to elites or others who want the status quo to remain. I mean, autocrats, authoritarians, they use cynicism. They cultivate cynicism in their people because a population that doesn’t trust itself is much easier to control. Right. So I think we often confuse cynicism with a radical emotion. And actually, it’s the opposite. It’s often a tool of people in power to remain in power. Yeah. I love, of course, factfulness. I’ve often, when I was writing hope for cynics, felt like I was in conversation with Hans, and he’s a public health scholar and focuses on trends in the world that are positive. And I think that as a psychologist, I’m very focused on our view of each other. And I think that those are really bound up with one another because to the extent that we believe in each other now, we can also believe that those positive trends can continue, that we can continue them. And to the extent that we lose faith in each other, we also lose faith in the future that we can build.

00:53:35 – Eric Zimmer
Well, I think that is a beautiful place to wrap up. Thank you so much, Jamil. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. I really enjoyed the book. It’s called hope for the surprising science of human goodness. We’ll have links in the show notes to where people can get the book and find other parts of your work.

00:53:52 – Jamil Zaki
Thanks so much, Eric. This has been totally delightful.

00:54:11 – Chris Forbes
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