How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki

1. 0:00 – 2:12

   Dr. Jamil Zaki

   1. AHAndrew Huberman0:00

      (uptempo music) Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Jamil Zaki. Dr. Jamil Zaki is a professor of psychology at Stanford University. He is also the director of the Social Neuroscience Laboratory at Stanford. His laboratory focuses on key aspects of the human experience such as empathy and cynicism, which lie at the heart of our ability to learn and can be barriers to learning, such is the case with cynicism. Today, you'll learn the optimal mindsets to adopt when trying to understand how to learn, conflict resolution, and how to navigate relationships of all kinds and in all contexts, including personal relationships and in the workplace. What sets Dr. Zaki's work apart from others is that he's able to take laboratory research and apply that to real-world scenarios to direct optimal strategies for things like how to set personal boundaries, how to learn information in uncertain and sometimes even uncomfortable environments, and then how to bring that to bear in terms of your relationship to yourself, your relationship to others, and how to collaborate with others in more effective ways. I want to be very clear that today's discussion, while focused on cynicism, trust, and empathy, is anything but squishy. In fact, it focuses on experimental data derived from real-world context, so it is both grounded in solid research and it is very practical, such that by the end of today's episode, you'll be armed with new knowledge about what cynicism is and is not, what empathy is and is not. This is very important because there's a lot of confusion about these words and what they mean. But I can assure you that by the end of today's discussion, you will have new frameworks and indeed new tools, protocols that you can use as strategies to better navigate situations and relationships of all kinds, and indeed, to learn better. I'd also like to mention that Dr. Zaki has authored a terrific new book entitled Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness. And I've read this book, and it is spectacular. There's a link to the book in the show note captions.

2. 2:12 – 6:59

   Sponsors: Maui Nui, Joovv & Waking Up

   1. AHAndrew Huberman2:12

      Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero-cost-to-consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is Maui Nui. Maui Nui venison is the most nutrient-dense and delicious red meat available. I've spoken before on this podcast about the fact that most of us should be seeking to get about one gram of quality protein per pound of body weight every day. That protein provides critical building blocks for things like muscle repair and synthesis, but also promotes overall health given the importance of muscle as an organ. Eating enough quality protein each day is also a terrific way to stave off hunger. 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Responsible population management of the axis deer on the island of Maui means that they will not go beyond harvest capacity. Signing up for a membership is therefore the best way to ensure access to their high-quality meat. If you'd like to try Maui Nui venison, you can go to mauinuivenison.com/huberman to get 20% off your membership or first order. Again, that's mauinuivenison.com/huberman. Today's episode is also brought to us by Joovv. Joovv makes medical-grade red light therapy devices. Now, if there's one thing I've consistently emphasized on this podcast, it's the incredible impact that light can have on our biology. Now, in addition to sunlight, red light and near-infrared light have been shown to have positive effects on improving numerous aspects of cellular and organ health, including faster muscle recovery, improved skin health and wound healing, even improvements in acne, reducing pain and inflammation, improving mitochondrial function, and even improving vision itself. What sets Joovv lights apart, and why they're my preferred red light therapy devices, is that they use clinically proven wavelengths, meaning it uses specific wavelengths of red light and near-infrared light in combination to trigger the optimal cellular adaptations. Personally, I use the Joovv handheld light both at home and when I travel. It's only about the size of a sandwich, so it's super portable and convenient to use. I also have a Joovv whole-body panel, and I use that about three or four times per week. If you'd like to try Joovv, you can go to Joovv, spelled J-O-O-V-V, .com/huberman. Joovv is offering an exclusive discount to all Huberman Lab listeners with up to $400 off select Joovv products. Again, that's Joovv, J-O-O-V-V, .com/huberman to get $400 off select Joovv products. Today's episode is also brought to us by Waking Up. Waking Up is a meditation app that offers hundreds of guided meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, yoga nidra sessions, and more.I started practicing meditation when I was about 15 years old, and it made a profound impact on my life. And by now, there are thousands of quality peer-reviewed studies that emphasize how useful mindfulness meditation can be for improving our focus, managing stress and anxiety, improving our mood, and much more. In recent years, I started using the Waking Up app for my meditations because I find it to be a terrific resource for allowing me to really be consistent with my meditation practice. Many people start a meditation practice and experience some benefits. But many people also have challenges keeping up with that practice. What I and so many other people love about the Waking Up app is that it has a lot of different meditations to choose from, and those meditations are of different durations, so it makes it very easy to keep up with your meditation practice, both from the perspective of novelty, you never get tired of those meditations, there's always something new to explore and to learn about yourself and about the effectiveness of meditation, and you can always fit meditation into your schedule even if you only have two or three minutes per day in which to meditate. I also really like doing yoga nidra, or what is sometimes called non-sleep deep rest, for about 10 or 20 minutes because it is a great way to restore mental and physical vigor without the tiredness that some people experience when they wake up from a conventional nap. If you'd like to try the Waking Up app, please go to wakingup.com/huberman where you can access a free 30-day trial. Again, that's wakingup.com/huberman to access a free 30-day trial. And now for my discussion with Dr. Jamil Zaki.

3. 6:59 – 12:38

   Cynicism

   1. AHAndrew Huberman6:59

      Dr. Jamil Zaki, welcome.

   2. JZDr. Jamil Zaki7:02

      Thanks so much for having me.

   3. AHAndrew Huberman7:03

      Delighted to have you here and to learn from you. Uh, you have decided to tackle an enormous number of very interesting and challenging topics, challenging because my read of it, not just your book, but of these fields and the science that you've done, is that people default to some complicated states and emotions sometimes that in some ways serve them well, in some ways serve them less well. So I'd like to talk about this at the level of the individual and interactions between pairs and larger groups and, and so on. But just to kick things off, what is cynicism? You know, I, I have my own ideas, but what is cynicism? What does it serve in terms of its role in the human mind?

   4. JZDr. Jamil Zaki7:53

      The way that psychologists think of cynicism these days is as a theory, a theory about human beings. It's the idea that generally people at their core are selfish, greedy, and dishonest. Now, that's not to say that a cynical person will deny that somebody could act kindly, for instance, could donate to charity, could help a stranger, but they would say all of that, all of that kind and friendly behavior is a thin veneer covering up who we really are, which is self-interested. Another way of putting this is, you know, there are these ancient philosophical questions about people. Are we good or bad, kind or cruel, caring or callous? And cynicism is answering all of those in the relatively bleak way that you might.

   5. AHAndrew Huberman8:47

      I believe in your book you quote Kurt Vonnegut who says, "We are who we pretend to be, so we need to be careful who we pretend to be." What, what do you think that quote means? How do you interpret that quote?

   6. JZDr. Jamil Zaki9:00

      Uh, thanks for bringing that up. Kurt Vonnegut one of my favorite, uh, authors, and to me that quote is enormously powerful because it expresses the idea of self-fulfilling prophecies. You know, there's this subjective sense that people have that our version of the world is the world, that we are passively taking in information veridically, uh, dispassionately. And in fact, that's not the case. We each construct our own version of the world. And so for instance, if you think about cynicism, right? Are people kind or cruel? That's pretty much an unanswerable question at the level of science. It's a philosophical, some could argue even a theological question, but it turns out that the way you answer that goes a long way in constructing and shaping the life that you live, the decisions that you make. So cynics, maybe it's not so much about who they pretend to be, but it's about who they pretend everybody else is, right? If you decide that other people are selfish, for instance, you'll be far less likely to trust them. And there's a lot of evidence that cynics, when they're put in situations with new people, even when they interact with their friends, romantic partners and families, that they still have their guard up, that they're not able to make trusting and deep connections with other people. But guess what? When you treat other people in that way, a couple of things happen. One, you are not able to receive what most of us need from social connections. There's one really classic and very sad study where people, uh, were forced to give an extemporaneous speech about a subject they don't know much about, a very stressful experience that raised people's blood pressure. Uh, some of these folks had a cheerleader, not, not an actual cheerleader, but a, a, a friendly stranger who was with them while they prepared saying, "You've got this. I know you can do it. I'm in your corner." Other people had no support. As you know, one of the great things about social support is that it buffers us from stress. So, uh, most people when they had this friendly person by their side, their blood pressure as they prepared for the speech went up only half as much as when they were alone. But cynical people had a spike in their blood pressure that was indistinguishable, uh, in, in magnitude whether or not a person was by their side or not. One way that I think about this is...Social connection is a deep and necessary form of psychological nourishment, and living a cynical life, making the decision that most people can't be trusted, stops you from being able to metabolize those calories, leaves you malnourished in a social, uh, in a social way. Uh, a second thing that happens when you choose to pretend that others are selfish, greedy and dishonest is that you bring out the worst in them. There's a lot of research that finds that cynical people tend to do things like monitoring others, spying on them, or threatening them to make sure that that other person doesn't betray them. But of course, other people can tell how we're treating them and they reciprocate our kindness and retaliate against our unkindness. So cynical people end up bringing out the most selfish qualities of others, telling a story full of villains and then ending up stuck living in that story.

4. 12:38 – 17:29

   Children, Attachment Styles & Cynicism

   1. JZDr. Jamil Zaki12:38

   2. AHAndrew Huberman12:38

      How early in life does cynicism show up? I'm thinking about Sesame Street characters, which to me embody different neural circuits. Um, you know, you've got Cookie Monster, some strong dopaminergic-

   3. JZDr. Jamil Zaki12:52

      (laughs)

   4. AHAndrew Huberman12:52

      ... drive there. Knows what he wants, knows what he likes and he's gonna get it.

   5. JZDr. Jamil Zaki12:56

      That great prefrontal system maybe.

   6. AHAndrew Huberman12:58

      Right. Even if he has to eat the box-

   7. JZDr. Jamil Zaki13:00

      (laughs)

   8. AHAndrew Huberman13:00

      ... uh, in order to, uh, get to the cookie quicker. Um, you have Elmo who's all loving, and you have Oscar the Grouch. Somewhat cynical-

   9. JZDr. Jamil Zaki13:12

      Yeah.

   10. AHAndrew Huberman13:12

       ... but certainly grouchy.

   11. JZDr. Jamil Zaki13:13

       (laughs)

   12. AHAndrew Huberman13:13

       And then in, you know, essentially every fairy tale or every Christmas story or, uh, you know, there seems to be sort of a skeptic or somebody that can't be brought on board the celebration-

   13. JZDr. Jamil Zaki13:28

       Yeah.

   14. AHAndrew Huberman13:28

       ... that one would otherwise have. But even though kids are learning about cynicism and grouchiness and, um, curmudgeons, I often think about those phenotypes in older folks, because that's how they've been written into most of those stories.

   15. JZDr. Jamil Zaki13:46

       Mm-hmm.

   16. AHAndrew Huberman13:47

       I guess Oscar the Grouch is, we don't know how old Oscar is.

   17. JZDr. Jamil Zaki13:50

       (laughs)

   18. AHAndrew Huberman13:51

       If one observes children, how early can you observe classically defined cynicism?

   19. JZDr. Jamil Zaki13:59

       That's a great question. Uh, classically defined cynicism would be hard to measure very early in life because y- you typically measure it through self-report, so people have to have relatively well-developed, elaborated stories that they can tell you about the ver- their version of the world. That said, one early experience and one early phenotype that's very strongly correlated with generalized mistrust and unwillingness to count on other people would be insecure attachment early in life. So for instance, you might know, uh, but just for listeners, um, insecure attachment is, uh, a way of describing how kids experience the social world. It's often tested using something known as the strange situation, where a one-year-old is brought to a lab with their caregiver, mother, father, uh, whoever is caring for them, uh, they're in a novel environment, and, uh, researchers are observing, how much do they explore the space? How comfortable do they seem? Then after that, uh, a stranger enters the room. A couple minutes after that, their mother leaves the room or their caregiver leaves the room, which is, of course, incredibly strange and stressful for most one-year-olds. Uh, the caregiver then returns after a minute, and what researchers look at is a few things. One, how comfortable is the child exploring a space with their caregiver present? Two, how comfortable are they when other people are around? Three, how do they react when their caregiver leaves? And four, how do they react at the reunion with their caregiver? And the majority of kids, approximately two thirds of them, are securely attached, meaning that they are comfortable exploring a new space, they get really freaked out, of course, as you might when their caregiver leaves, but then they soothe quickly when their caregiver returns. The remaining third or so of kids are insecurely attached, meaning that they're skittish in new environments even when their parent or caregiver is there, they really freak out when their caregiver leaves, and they're not very soothed upon their return. Now, for a long time, attachment style was viewed in very emotional terms, and it, it is, it is an emotional reaction first and foremost, but researchers more recently have started to think about, well, what are the cognitive schemas? What are the underpinnings, the ways that children think when they are securely or insecurely attached? And one brilliant study used looking time. Looking time in kids is a metric of what surprises them, if something really surprising happens, they look for a very long time, and researchers found that insecurely attached kids, when they saw a video of, uh, of a reunion, of a, of a caregiver and, and, and infant acting in a way that felt loving and stable, they looked longer, as though that was surprising. Kids who were securely attached didn't look very long at those stable interactions, but looked longer at interactions that were unstable.

   20. AHAndrew Huberman17:06

       Interesting.

   21. JZDr. Jamil Zaki17:07

       It's almost as though there is a setup that kids develop very early, "Can I count on people?"

   22. AHAndrew Huberman17:13

       Mm-hmm.

   23. JZDr. Jamil Zaki17:14

       "Am I safe with people?" And insecure attachment is a signal coming early in life, "No, you're not safe with people," that I think, well, and the datas show, elaborates later in life into mistrust in other relationships.

5. 17:29 – 23:30

   Cynicism vs. Skepticism, Complexity

   1. JZDr. Jamil Zaki17:30

   2. AHAndrew Huberman17:30

      How different is cynicism from skepticism? You know, I can think of some places where they might overlap, um, but cynicism seems to carry, um...... something of a lack of anticipation about any possibility of a positive future. Is that one way to think about it?

   3. JZDr. Jamil Zaki17:49

      That's a very sharp way of thinking about it, actually. And I wish that people knew more about the- the discrepancy between these two ways of viewing the world. Cynicism and skepticism, people often use them interchangeably. In fact, they're quite different, and I would argue that one is much more useful for learning about the world and building relationships than the other. Again, cynicism is a theory that's kind of locked in, that no matter what people show you, their true colors are, uh, again, untrustworthy and self-oriented. It's a hyper-Darwinian view, right, that- that ultimately people are red in tooth and claw. Um, skepticism is instead, uh, the, I guess, restlessness, uh, with our assumptions, a desire for new information. One way I often think about it is that cynics think a little bit like lawyers, right? They have a decision that they've already made about you and about everybody, and they're just waiting for evidence that supports their point. And when evidence comes in that doesn't support their point, they explain it away, right? And you see this actually, that cynical people will offer more ulterior motives when, uh, they see an act of kindness, for instance. They'll explain it away. In that way, I think cynics actually are quite similar to the naive, trusting, gullible folks that they love to make fun of, right? Naivete, gullibility is trusting people in a credulous, unthinking way. I would say cynicism is mistrusting people in a credulous and unthinking way. S- so if- if cynics then think like lawyers, sort of in the prosecution against humanity, skeptics think more like scientists. Uh, skepticism, you know, classically in philosophy is the belief that you can never truly know anything. But as we think ab- about it now, it's more, uh, the desire for evidence to underlie any claim that you believe. Uh, and the great thing about skepticism is it doesn't require an ounce of naivete. You can be absolutely sharp in deciding, "I don't want to trust this person," or, "I do want to trust this person," but it allows you to update and learn from specific acts, specific instances, and specific people.

   4. AHAndrew Huberman20:11

      When I think about scientists, one of the first things I think about is not just their willingness, but their excitement to embrace complexity.

   5. JZDr. Jamil Zaki20:19

      Yes.

   6. AHAndrew Huberman20:19

      Like, okay, these two groups disagree, or, um, these two sets of data disagree, and it's the complexity of that interaction that excites them. Whereas when I think of cynics in the way that it's framed up in my mind, which I'm getting more educated now, but I- I, admittedly, my- my understanding of cynicism, um, is still rather, uh, superficial. Um, you'll change that in the course-

   7. JZDr. Jamil Zaki20:44

      (laughs)

   8. AHAndrew Huberman20:44

      ... of the, uh, our discussion. Uh, but that cynics, um, are not embracing the complexity of disagreement. They are moving away from the, um, certainly any notion of excitement by complexity. It seems like it's a- a heuristic. It's a way to simplify-

   9. JZDr. Jamil Zaki21:02

      Yes.

   10. AHAndrew Huberman21:02

       ... the world around you.

   11. JZDr. Jamil Zaki21:04

       That's exactly right. Uh, uh, Phil Tetlock has a great, uh, term for this called integrative complexity. To what extent can you hold different versions of the world, different arguments in mind? To what extent can you pick from each one what you believe based on the best evidence available, right? And integrative complexity is a great way to learn about the world and about the social world. Whereas cynicism, as you rightly point out, is much more of a heuristic. It's a black and white form of thinking. And the really sad thing is that cynicism then puts us in a position where we can't learn very much. This is what in learning theory is called a wicked learning environment, where, and I don't want to get too nerdy. Well, I guess I can get nerdy here, can't I? (laughs)

   12. AHAndrew Huberman21:51

       You can get as nerdy as you want. Uh, this audience likes nerdy.

   13. JZDr. Jamil Zaki21:54

       So let's think in Bayesian terms, right? So B- Bayesian statistics is where you have a set of beliefs about the world. You take new information in, and that new information allows you to update your priors, right, into a posterior distribution, into a new set of beliefs. Um, and that's great. That's a great way to learn about the world, to adapt to new information and new circumstances. A wicked learning environment is where your priors prevent you from gathering the information that you would need to confirm or disconfirm them. So think about mistrust, for instance, right? It's easy to understand why people mistrust. You know, some of us are insecurely attached, and we've been hurt in the past. We're trying to stay safe. We don't want to be betrayed. This is a completely natural response. It's a totally understandable response, but when we decide to mistrust, we never are able to learn whether the people who we are mistrusting, uh, would have been trustworthy or not. When we trust, we can learn whether we've been right or not, right? Somebody can betray us, and that hurts, and we remember it for years, or more often than- than not, the data turn out to show us they can honor that trust. We can build a relationship. We can, uh, we can start a collaboration. We can live a full social life. And it turns out that the problem is that trusting people incorrectly, you do learn from, but mistrusting people incorrectly, you don't learn from because the missed opportunities are invisible to us.

6. 23:30 – 26:28

   Culture Variability & Trust

   1. JZDr. Jamil Zaki23:30

   2. AHAndrew Huberman23:30

      Well, there's certainly a lot there that maps to many people's experience. So you pointed out that some degree of cynicism likely has roots in insecure attachment. That said, if one looks internationally-... do we find cultures where it's very hard to find cynics? Um, and there could be any number of reasons for this. Or perhaps even more interestingly, uh, do we find cultures where there really isn't even a word for cynicism?

   3. JZDr. Jamil Zaki24:01

      Wow. Uh, I, I love that question. There is a lot of variance in... Uh, and the, the data on cynicism are much more local to the US typically. I mean, for, for, uh, for better and for worse, a lot of research on this is done in an American context, but that said, uh, there's a lot of data on generalized trust, which you could say is an inverse of cynicism, right? So for instance, there are national and international, uh, samples of, uh, m- major surveys which ask people whether they agree or disagree that most people can be trusted, and there's a lot of variance around the world. In general, the cultures that are most trusting have a couple of things in common. One, they are more economically equal than untrusting cultures. So there's a lot of great work, um, from, uh, Kate Willett and, uh, Richard Wilkinson, um, that, uh, they, they have a book called The Spirit Level where they look at inequality across the world and relate it to public health outcomes, and one of them is trust. Um, there's also variance in trust over time, you know? So you can look at not just are there places or cultures that trust more than others, but when does a culture trust more or less? And in the US, that's sadly a story of decline. In 1972, about half of Americans believed that most people can be trusted, and by 2018, that had fallen to about a third of Americans. And that's a drop as big, just to put it in perspective, as the stock market took in the financial collapse of 2008. So, so there's a lot of variance here, um, both across space and time, and one of the, not the only, but one of the, uh, seeming characteristics of cultures that tracks that is how unequal they are. In part because research suggests that when you are in a highly unequal society, economically, there is a sense of zero-sum competition that develops. There's a sense that, "Wait a minute, anything that another person gets, I lose." And if you have that inherent sense of zero-sum, uh, uh, competition, then it's very difficult to form bonds. It's very difficult to trust other people because you might think, "Well, in order to survive, this person has to try to outrun me. They have to try to trip me. They have to try to make me fail, uh, for themselves to succeed."

7. 26:28 – 27:40

   Sponsor: AG1

   1. JZDr. Jamil Zaki26:28

   2. AHAndrew Huberman26:28

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8. 27:40 – 35:59

   Negative Health Outcomes; Cynicism: Perception & Intelligence

   1. AHAndrew Huberman27:40

      What is the relationship, if any, between cynicism and happiness or lack of happiness? When I think of somebody who's really cynical, I think of an Oscar the Grouch-

   2. JZDr. Jamil Zaki27:50

      (laughs) .

   3. AHAndrew Huberman27:50

      ... or a curmudgeon-like, uh, character, and as I ask this question, I'm thinking specifically about what you said earlier about, uh, how cynicism prevents us from certain forms of imp- learning that are important and very valuable to us. Here's the reason why, I'll give just a little bit of context. I remember when I was a kid, my dad, who went to, um, classic boarding schools, he grew up in South America, but he went to these, um, boarding schools w- that were very strict.

   4. JZDr. Jamil Zaki28:15

      Yeah.

   5. AHAndrew Huberman28:15

      And he was taught, he told me, that, um, to be cheerful and happy, people would accuse you of being kind of dumb.

   6. JZDr. Jamil Zaki28:26

      (laughs)

   7. AHAndrew Huberman28:26

      Whereas if you were cynical and you acted a little bored with everything-

   8. JZDr. Jamil Zaki28:29

      Yeah.

   9. AHAndrew Huberman28:30

      ... people thought that you were more discerning.

   10. JZDr. Jamil Zaki28:32

       Yeah.

   11. AHAndrew Huberman28:32

       But that he felt it was a terrible model for going through life because it-

   12. JZDr. Jamil Zaki28:37

       (laughs)

   13. AHAndrew Huberman28:37

       ... it veered into cynicism. My dad happens to be a scientist.

   14. JZDr. Jamil Zaki28:41

       Yeah.

   15. AHAndrew Huberman28:41

       Uh, he's a, uh, I think a relatively happy person. Um, sorry dad, a, a happy-

   16. JZDr. Jamil Zaki28:45

       (laughs) .

   17. AHAndrew Huberman28:45

       ... person. Seems happy, but meaning, um, he's a person who has happiness and he has other emotions too.

   18. JZDr. Jamil Zaki28:51

       Sure.

   19. AHAndrew Huberman28:51

       I wouldn't say he's happy all the time, but-

   20. JZDr. Jamil Zaki28:52

       Of course.

   21. AHAndrew Huberman28:53

       ... he ex- experiences joy and pleasure in daily acti- small things and big things in life.

   22. JZDr. Jamil Zaki28:57

       Yeah.

   23. AHAndrew Huberman28:57

       So clearly he rescued himself from that, um, the forces that were kind of pushing him down that path. But, um, that's the anecdote, but I use that question more as a, uh, as a way to frame up the possible collaboration between cynicism and, and, and, you know, exuding boredom or, or a challenge in shifting somebody towards a, like, happier affect.

   24. JZDr. Jamil Zaki29:18

       Yeah.

   25. AHAndrew Huberman29:18

       Um, uh, 'cause when I think about cynics, I think that they're, they're like kind of unhappy people.

   26. JZDr. Jamil Zaki29:23

       Yeah.

   27. AHAndrew Huberman29:23

       Um, and when I think about people who are not very cynical, I think of them as kind of ch- uh, kind of cheerful and curious and, um, there's some ebullience there. They might not be Tigger-like in their-

   28. JZDr. Jamil Zaki29:31

       (laughs) .

   29. AHAndrew Huberman29:31

       ... um, in their affect, but you know, they kind of veer that direction.

   30. JZDr. Jamil Zaki29:36

       Andrew, I love this trip down memory lane. I'm having all these childhood memories of, uh, of, uh, of Tigger and Sesame Street. Uh, there's so much in what you're saying. I, I want to try to pull on a couple of threads here if that's okay. First, and this one is, is pretty straightforward, the effect of cynicism on wellbeing is just really documented and, and quite negative. So there are large prospective studies, um, with tens of thousands of people, several of these studies, that measure cynicism and then measure life outcomes, uh, in the years and decades afterwards and the news is, is, is pretty bleak for cynics, right? So, uh, absolutely lower levels of happiness, flourishing satisfaction with life, uh, greater incidents of depression, uh, greater loneliness. But, you know, it's not just the neck up that cynicism affects. Cynics over the course of their lives also tend to have greater degrees of cellular inflammation. Uh, more incidents of heart disease and, uh, they even, uh, have higher rates of all cause mortality, so shorter lives than non-cynics. And again, this might sound like, wait a minute, you go from a philosophical theory to a shorter life. Uh, the answer is, yeah, you do, because, uh, and again, these are correlational studies, so I don't want to draw too many causal claims, but they're quite rigorous in control for a lot of other factors. Uh, but I would say that this is consistent with the idea that really one of the great protectors of our health is our sense of connection to other people. And if you are unable or unwilling to be vulnerable around others, to really touch in to that type of connection, it stands to reason that things like chronic stress and isolation would impact not just your mind but, you know, all through your, your body and your organ systems. So, uh, again, the news here is not great and I often think about, you know, one of the best encapsulations of a cynical view of life comes from Thomas Hobbes, the philosopher, who in his book Leviathan said, "We need a restrictive government because left to our own devices, human life is nasty, brutish, and short." And ironically, (laughs) I think that might describe the lives, lives of cynics themselves more than most people. So that's point one, right? Uh, is that there is this pretty, uh, stark negative correlation between cynicism and a lot of life outcomes that we might want for ourselves. But point two, I think, uh, is related to what your dad also noticed, which is that, right? If cynicism hurts us so much, why would we adopt it? If it was a pill, if there was a pill that as its side effects listed depression, loneliness, heart disease and early death, it would be a poison, right? It would have a skull and crossbones on the bottle. But yet we're swallowing it. More of us are swallowing it than we did in years and decades past. Why? Well, one of the answers I think is because our culture glamorizes cynicism. It's because of the very stereotype that your father pointed out which is that if you're happy-go-lucky, if you trust people, that kind of seems dull. It seems like maybe you're not that sharp, maybe you don't understand the world. And there is that strong, uh, relationship in our stereotypes, in our models of the world. Susan Fiske and many other psychologists have studied warmth and competence, right? How friendly and, uh, caring does somebody seem and how able do they seem to accomplish hard things. And it turns out that in many studies people's perception is that these are inversely correlated, that if you're warm maybe you're not that competent and if you're competent, maybe you shouldn't be that warm. And in fact, if you tell people to act as competently as they can, they'll often respond by being a little bit less nice, uh, a little bit less warm than they would be otherwise. There's also data that find that, uh, you know, where, where people are presented in surveys with a cynic and a non-cynic. They're told about, here's one person they really think that people are great overall and they tend to be trusting. Here's another person who thinks that people are kind of out for themselves and really doesn't trust most folks. And then they'll ask those people, "Who should we pick for this difficult intellectual task?" Uh, and 70% of respondents pick a cynical person over a non-cynic for difficult intellectual tasks. 85% of people think that cynics are socially wiser, that they'd be able, for instance, to detect who's lying and who's telling the truth. So most of us put a lot of faith in people who don't have a lot of faith in people, (laughs) ironically. And even more ironically, we're wrong to do so. Olga Stavrova, this great psychologist who studies cynicism has this paper called The Cynical Genius Illusion where she, uh, documents all these biases, the way that we think cynics are bright and wise, and then uses national data, tens of thousands of people to show that actually cynics do less well on cognitive tests, on mathematical tests. (laughs) That trust is related with things like intelligence ed- and education. And, um, that in, in other work, uh, this is not from Olga Stavrova but from others, that actually cynics do less well than non-cynics in detecting liars because if you have a blanket assumption about people, you're not actually attending to evidence in a sharp way. You're not actually taking in new information and making wise decisions.
9. 35:59 – 39:48

   Stereotypes, Threats

   1. AHAndrew Huberman35:59

      that's very interesting because I would think that if we view cynics as smarter, which clearly they're not as a group, right? You're saying cynics are not more intelligent, right? You, you, I believe that's covered in, in your book. And, um, and if one knows that, then, you know, why do we send cynics in, uh, kinda like razors to, uh, you know, to, uh, assess what, um, what the environment is like? Is that because, um, we'd rather have others, um, deployed for us to, to kind of like weed people out? Is it that we're willing to, um, accept some false negatives, meaning, um, for those that, I guess we're using a little bit of a semi-technical language here, false negatives who would be, you know, you're trying to assess a group of people that would be, uh, terrific employees-

   2. JZDr. Jamil Zaki36:45

      Yeah.

   3. AHAndrew Huberman36:45

      ... and you send in somebody to interview them that's, uh, very cynical. So presumably, in one's mind, that filter of cynicism is only going to allow in people that are really, really right for the job-

   4. JZDr. Jamil Zaki36:57

      Yeah.

   5. AHAndrew Huberman36:58

      ... and we're willing to accept that, you know, there are probably two or three, uh, candidates that would also be right for the job, but we're willing to let them go, some false, some false negatives. Um, as opposed to having someone get through the filter who really can't do the job.

   6. JZDr. Jamil Zaki37:12

      Yeah.

   7. AHAndrew Huberman37:12

      Like, we're willing to let certain opportunities go by being cynical or by deploying a cynic as the, you know, I'm imagining the person with a clipboard, you know, um, very rigid.

   8. JZDr. Jamil Zaki37:21

      Yeah.

   9. AHAndrew Huberman37:22

      Like, cynicism and rigidity seem to go together, so that's why I'm lumping these kind of, uh, psychological phenotypes.

   10. JZDr. Jamil Zaki37:27

       No, I, I think that's absolutely right. And so, uh, a couple of things. One, you know, you said that if we know that cynics aren't smarter than non-cynics, why are we deploying them? Well, let's be clear. We know this, meaning you (laughs) and, you and I know this and scientists know this, but the data show that most people don't know this, that we maintain the stereotype in our culture that being negative about people means that you've been around the block enough times, that it is a form of wisdom. So that's a stereotype that I think we need to dispel first of all. But I do think that, to your point, when we deploy cynics out in the field, you know, when we say, "Uh, I'm gonna be nice, but I want somebody who's really pretty negative, who's really pretty suspicious to protect me or to protect my community," I think that's a really, again, understandable instinct almost from an evolutionary perspective. You know, we are built to pay lots of attention to threats in our environment and threats to our community. And in the early social world, you know, if you wind... I mean, just to do some back of the envelope evolutionary psychology, if you wind the clock back 100, 150,000 years, what's, you know, what is the greatest threat to early communities? It's, it's people, right? It's people who would take advantage of our communal nature, right? The thing that allows human beings to thrive is that we collaborate. Um, but that collaboration means that a free rider, somebody who chooses to not pitch in, but still take out from the common pool anything that they want, can do exceptionally well. They can live a life of leisure on the backs of a community that's working hard, and if, if you select then for that type of person, if that type of person proliferates, then the community collapses. So it makes sense that we, uh, depend on cynics from that perspective, from a threat mitigation perspective, from a risk aversion perspective, but it doesn't make sense from the perspective of trying to optimize our actual social lives, right? And I think that oftentimes, you know, we are risk averse in general, meaning that we're more scared of negative outcomes than we are, uh, enticed by positive outcomes. But in the social world, that risk aversion is, I, I, I think, quite harmful in a lot of demonstrable ways.

10. 39:48 – 44:05

    Cooperative Environments, Collaboration & Trust

    1. AHAndrew Huberman39:48

       Is cynicism domain-specific? And there, again, I'm using jargon meaning if somebody is cynical in one environment, like cynical about the markets, like, "Well, things are up now, but, you know, have an election come so things could go this way or that way depending on..."

    2. JZDr. Jamil Zaki40:04

       Yeah.

    3. AHAndrew Huberman40:04

       You know? Um, do they tend to be cynical about other aspects of life, other domains?

    4. JZDr. Jamil Zaki40:10

       So there's, uh, a little bit of data on this, um, and it suggests a couple of things. One, left to our own devices, our levels of cynicism tend to be pretty stable over time, uh, and also decline in older adulthood, uh, uh, contra the stereotype of the curmudgeonly older person. But another is that cynicism does tend to be pretty domain general. So for instance, cynics, uh, you know, pe- uh, and, and this makes sense if you look at questionnaires that assess cynicism, which are things like people are honest chiefly through fear of getting caught, or most people really don't like helping each other. I mean, if you're answering those questions positively, you're just not a fan of, uh, you're probably not great at parties. You're not (laughs) you're not a fan of people. And it turns out that people who answer the, this is, uh, an old scale developed by a couple of psychologists named Walter Cook and Donald Medley in the 1950s. If you answer the Cook-Medley Hostility Scale, if you answer these questions positively, you tend to be less trusting of strangers, but you also ha- uh, tend to, for instance, have less trust in your romantic partnerships, you have less trust in your friends, and you have less trust in your colleagues. So this is sort of an all-purpose view of the world, at least as Cook and Medley first, uh, first thought about it, but I do wanna build on a great intuition you have, which is that different environments-... might bring out cynicism or tamp it down, and it turns out that that's also very true. As trait-like as cynicism can be, there's lots of evidence that the type of social environment we're in matters a lot. One of my favorite studies in this domain, um, came from, uh, southeastern Brazil. There are two fishing villages in southeastern Brazil. They're separated by about 30, 40 miles. They're similar in socioeconomic status, religion, culture, but there's one big difference between them. One of the villages sits on the ocean and in order to fish on the ocean, you need big boats, heavy equipment. You can't do it alone. You must work together. The other village is on a lake where fishermen strike out on small boats alone, and they compete with one another. About 10 years ago, economists... This was a study led by Andreas Lebrun, a really great economist, they went to these villages and they gave the, the folks who worked there a bunch of social games to play. These were not with fellow fishermen, but with strangers. Games like, "Would you trust somebody with some money?" And see if they then want to share dividends with you. Or, given some money yourself, would you like to share some of it with another person? And they found that when they start in their careers, lake fishermen and ocean fishermen were equally trusting and equally trustworthy as well. But over the course of their careers, they diverged. Being in a collaborative en- environment where people must count on one another to survive made people over time more trusting and more trustworthy. Being in a competitive zero sum environment over time made people less trusting and less trustworthy. Now one thing that always amazes me about this work is that people in both of these environments are right. If you're in a competitive environment, you don't trust and you're right to not trust. If you're in a collaborative environment, you do trust and you're right to trust. And this is from the point of view of economic games, and I think much broadly construed as well. So one question then becomes, well, which of these environments do we want to be in, right? I think the cost in terms of wellbeing and relationships is quite obvious if you're in a competitive environment, and then the, the second question, of course, is how do we put ourselves in the type of environment that we want knowing that that environment will change who we are over the course of our lives?

11. 44:05 – 48:46

    Competition, Conflict, Judgement

    1. JZDr. Jamil Zaki44:05

    2. AHAndrew Huberman44:06

       So much of schooling in this country is based on, at first, cooperation. Like, we're all gonna sit around and listen to a story and then we're gonna work in small groups. But, uh, in my experience, over time, it evolves into more independent learning and competition.

    3. JZDr. Jamil Zaki44:21

       Yeah.

    4. AHAndrew Huberman44:21

       They post the distribution of scores. That's largely, uh, the distribution of individual scores. There are exceptions to this, of course. Like, I think... I've never been to business school, but I think they form small groups and work on projects. It's true in computer science at the undergraduate level and, and so on, but, uh, to what extent do you think having a mixture of cooperative learning, still competition perhaps between groups, as well as individual learning and competition can foster, um, kind of a, an erosion of cynicism? Because it sounds like being cynical is... I, I, I don't wanna be hard on the cynics here-

    5. JZDr. Jamil Zaki44:57

       (laughs)

    6. AHAndrew Huberman44:58

       ... but, um, they're probably already hard on themselves and everybody else. Um, we know they're hard on everybody else, but, um... Oh, there, there's my presumption. Okay.

    7. JZDr. Jamil Zaki45:05

       (laughs)

    8. AHAndrew Huberman45:05

       I'm gonna stay open-minded. Maybe they're not. You'll tell me. Um, that, you know, that they are on average less intelligent is what I'm hearing that, um, and that there's a, something really big to be gained from anybody who decides to embrace novel ideas, even if they decide to stick with their original decision about others or something, you know? Provided they explore the data in an open-minded way even transiently, it sounds like there's an opportunity there. Uh, you gave a long-term example of these two, uh, fishing scenarios. Um, so the neuroplasticity takes, you know, years, but we know neuroplasticity can be pretty quick.

    9. JZDr. Jamil Zaki45:42

       Yeah.

    10. AHAndrew Huberman45:43

        I would imagine if you expose a cynic to a, um, to a counter-example to their belief that it's not going to erode all of their cynicism, but it might make a little dent in that neural circuit for cynicism.

    11. JZDr. Jamil Zaki45:54

        Yeah, this is a, a, a great perspective and, you know, a couple of things I wanna be clear on. One, I am not here to judge or impugn cynics. I should confess that I myself struggle with cynicism and have for my entire life. Part of my (laughs) journey to learn more about it, and even to write this book was an attempt to understand myself and to see if it is possible to unlearn cynicism because frankly I wanted to, so y- you will get no judgment from me of people who feel like it's hard to trust. Um, uh, I, I think that another point that you're bringing out that I want to co-sign is that saying that competition over the long term, zero sum competition can erode our trust isn't the same as saying that we should never compete. Competition is beautiful. I mean, it, it's... The Olympics are going on right now and it's amazing to see what people do when they are at odds trying to best one another. That's a, it's, in- incredible feats are accomplished when we focus on the great things that we can do and oftentimes we are driven to greatness by people we respect who are trying to be greater than us. So absolutely competition can be part of a very healthy social structure and a very healthy life. Um, I think that the broader question is whether we construe that competition at the level of a task or at the level of the person. I- In fact, there's a lot of work in the science of conflict and conflict resolution that looks at the difference between task conflict and personal conflict. You know, you can imagine in a workplace, two people have different ideas for how they want, uh, for what direction they wanna take a project in.... well, that's great if it leads to healthy debate and if that is mutually respectful. But the minute that that turns into blanket judgments about the other person, "Oh, the reason that they want this direction is because they're not so bright or because they don't have vision or because they're trying to gain favor," that's when we go from healthy, skeptical conflict into cynical and destructive conflict, right? And you see this with athletes as well. Athletes often are very good friends and some of the people that they respect the most are the folks who they're battling, in the case of- of, uh, of- of contact sports and boxing, literally battling. But they can have immense and positive regard for one another outside of the ring in those contexts. So, I think that there's a huge difference between competition that's oriented on tasks which can help us be the best version of ourselves and competition that bleeds into judgment, suspicion and mistrust.

12. 48:46 – 55:26

    Cynics, Awe, “Moral Beauty”

    1. JZDr. Jamil Zaki48:46

    2. AHAndrew Huberman48:46

       I'd like to take us back just briefly to these developmental stages. Um, maybe I'm, um, bridging two things that don't belong together, but I'm thinking about the young brain, which of course is hyperplastic-

    3. JZDr. Jamil Zaki48:58

       Mm-hmm.

    4. AHAndrew Huberman48:58

       ... um, and comparing that to the older brain. But the young brain learns a number of things while it does a number of things. It handles heart rate, digestion, et cetera, unconsciously, and then in many ways, the neuroplasticity that occurs early in life is to establish these maps of prediction, you know? If, uh, you know, if things fall down, not up, in general-

    5. JZDr. Jamil Zaki49:19

       Yeah. (laughs)

    6. AHAndrew Huberman49:20

       ... things fall down, not up, um, and so on, so that mental real estate can be used for other things and learning new things. So I'm thinking about the sort of classic example of object permanence.

    7. JZDr. Jamil Zaki49:32

       Mm.

    8. AHAndrew Huberman49:32

       You know, you- you show a baby a, um, you know, a block or a toy and then you hide that toy and they, at a certain age, a very young age, will look as if it's gone and then you bring it back and then they're amazed.

    9. JZDr. Jamil Zaki49:45

       (laughs)

    10. AHAndrew Huberman49:45

        And then at some point along their developmental trajectory, they learn object permanence. They know that it's behind your back, okay? And then, uh, we hear that characters like Santa Claus are real and then eventually we learn that they're not, and so on and so on. In many ways, we go from being, um, completely non-cynical about the physical world-

    11. JZDr. Jamil Zaki50:08

        Mm-hmm.

    12. AHAndrew Huberman50:09

        ... to being, um, one could sort of view it as cynical about the physical world, right? Like, uh, I love to see magic. In fact, we had wha- probably the world's best or among the very best magicians, uh, on this podcast, uh, Ozi Wind. He's a mentalist and magician, and to see him do magic even as an adult who understands that the laws of physics apply, they seem to defy the laws of physics in- in real time.

    13. JZDr. Jamil Zaki50:35

        Wow.

    14. AHAndrew Huberman50:35

        And it just blows your mind to the point where you, like, how ... That can't be but y- you sort of want it to be and at some point you just go, "You know what? It's- it's what we call magic."

    15. JZDr. Jamil Zaki50:45

        (laughs)

    16. AHAndrew Huberman50:45

        So, it seems to me that cynics, um, apply almost physics-like rules to social interaction, like that, um, they talk in terms of, like, first principles of human interactions.

    17. JZDr. Jamil Zaki50:57

        Yes. Yeah.

    18. AHAndrew Huberman50:57

        Right? They talk about, um, this group always this and that group always that, right? The- these, like, strict categories, thick black lines between-

    19. JZDr. Jamil Zaki51:06

        Yeah.

    20. AHAndrew Huberman51:06

        ... between categories as opposed to any kind of blending of- of understanding or a blending of rules. And one can see how that would be a really useful heuristic, but as we're learning, it's- it's not good in the sense that we don't wanna judge, but it's not good if our goal is to learn more about the world or learn the most information about the world. Can we say that?

    21. JZDr. Jamil Zaki51:26

        Uh, yes, and I- I- I appreciate you saying ... Yeah, I- I- I of- also try to avoid good, bad language-

    22. AHAndrew Huberman51:32

        Yeah.

    23. JZDr. Jamil Zaki51:32

        ... or moral judgment, but I think that many of us have the goals of having strong relationships and of l- uh, of flourishing psychologically and of learning accurately about the world, and if those are your goals, I think it's fair to say that cynicism can block your way towards them.

    24. AHAndrew Huberman51:49

        Mm-hmm.

    25. JZDr. Jamil Zaki51:49

        I love this p- I- I've never thought about it in this way, but I- I love that perspective, and there is almost a philosophical certainty. Maybe it's not a happy philosophical certainty, but we love to, right? Human beings love explanatory power. We love to be able to have laws that determine what will happen and the laws of physics are some of our most reliable, right? A- and really, we all use theories to predict the world, right? I mean, we all have a theory of gravity that lives inside our head. We don't think objects with mass attract one another, but we know if we drop a bowling ball on our foot, we're gonna probably maybe not walk for the next week or at least, right? So- so we use theories, uh, to provide explanatory simplicity to a vast and overwhelmingly complex world and absolutely, I think cynicism has a great function in simplifying, but of course, in simplifying, we lose a lot of the detail. We lose a lot of the wonder that maybe we experienced, uh, earlier in life. And, you know, I do wanna ... Uh, I ... Your- your beautiful description of kids and their sort of sense of, I suppose, perennial surprise, um, makes me think about another aspect of what we lose to cynicism which is the ability to witness the beauty of human action and human kindness. My friend, Dacher Keltner, studies awe, you know, this emotion of experiencing something vast and e- and also experiencing ourselves as small and a part of that vastness and he- he wrote a great book on awe. Um, and in it, he talks about his research where he, uh, cataloged what are the experiences that most commonly-... produce awe in a large sample, uh, large representative sample of people. Now, I don't know about you, Andrew, but when I think about awe, my first, uh, go-to is Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot. This image of a kind of nebula band or, you know, s- a sort of, uh, s- sort of, uh, s- cluster basically, stardust really, and there's one dot in it with an arrow and, and Carl Sagan says, "That dot is Earth, and every king and tyrant and mother and father, and every f- person who's f- ever fallen in love, and every person who's ever had their heart broken, they're all on that tiny dot there." I go to that, I s- show that to my kids all the time. When I think of awe, I think of outer space, I think of groves of redwood trees, I think of drone footage of the Himalayas, right? But Dacher finds that if you ask people what they experience awe in response to, the number one category is what he calls moral beauty, everyday acts of kindness, giving, compassion, and connection. This also related to what Dacher and Jon Haidt talk about in terms of moral elevation, witnessing positive actions that actually make us feel like we're capable of more. And moral beauty is everywhere. If you are open to it, it is the most common thing that will make you feel the vastness of our species, and to have a lawful physics-like prediction about the world that blinkers you from seeing that, that, that, that, that gives you tunnel vision and prevents you from experiencing moral beauty seems like a tragic form of simplicity.

13. 55:26 – 57:13

    Sponsor: Function

    1. JZDr. Jamil Zaki55:26

    2. AHAndrew Huberman55:26

       I'd like to take a quick break and thank one of our sponsors, Function. I recently became a Function member after searching for the most comprehensive approach to lab testing. While I've long been a fan of blood testing, I really wanted to find a more in-depth program for analyzing blood, urine, and saliva to get a full picture of my heart health, my hormone status, my immune system regulation, my metabolic function, my vitamin and mineral status, and other critical areas of my overall health and vitality. Function not only provides testing of over 100 biomarkers key to physical and mental health, but it also analyzes these results and provides insights from top doctors on your results. For example, in one of my first tests with Function, I learned that I had too high levels of mercury in my blood. This was totally surprising to me. I had no idea prior to taking the test. Function not only helped me detect this, but offered medical doctor informed insights on how to best reduce those mercury levels, which included limiting my tuna consumption, because I'd been eating a lot of tuna, while also making an effort to eat more leafy greens and supplementing with NAC, N-acetylcysteine, both of which can support glutathione production and detoxification, and worked to reduce my mercury levels. Comprehensive lab testing like this is so important for health, and while I've been doing it for years, I've always found it to be overly complicated and expensive. I've been so impressed by Function, both at the level of ease of use, that is getting the test done, as well as how comprehensive and how actionable the tests are, that I recently joined their advisory board, and I'm thrilled that they're sponsoring the podcast. If you'd like to try Function, go to functionhealth.com/huberman. Function currently has a wait list of over 250,000 people, but they're offering early access to Huberman Lab listeners. Again, that's functionhealth.com/huberman to get early access to Function.

14. 57:13 – 1:04:19

    Cynicism, Creativity & Workplace

    1. AHAndrew Huberman57:13

       I love that your examples of awe, both Pale Blue Dot and, uh, everyday compassion, bridge the two, uh, what I think of as, um, time domains that the-

    2. JZDr. Jamil Zaki57:24

       Mm.

    3. AHAndrew Huberman57:24

       ... or I should say spacetime domains that the brain can encompass. You know, th- this has long fascinated me about the human brain, and presumably other animals' brains as well, which is that, you know, we can sharpen our, um, aperture to, you know, something so, so small and pay attention to just, like, the, the immense beauty and ... You know, like, I have a lot of ants in my yard right now, and lately I've been watching them interact 'cause they were driving me crazy.

    4. JZDr. Jamil Zaki57:49

       (laughs)

    5. AHAndrew Huberman57:49

       They were just like, I, you know (laughs) they're, like, everywhere this summer and they're climbing on me and I thought, I'm just gonna, like, watch what they do and clearly there's a structure there. I know, um, Deborah Gordon at Stanford has, has studied ant behavior and others, and it's like, there's a lot going on there, but then you look up from there, you're like, "Wow, there's a big yard." And then the sense of awe for me is that interactions like that must be going on everywhere-

    6. JZDr. Jamil Zaki58:11

       Yes.

    7. AHAndrew Huberman58:12

       ... in this, in this yard. And, you know, it frames up that the aperture of our cognition in space and in time, you know, covering small distances quickly or s- small distances slowly, and then, and then we can zoom out literally and think about us on this ball s- in space, right? You know?

    8. JZDr. Jamil Zaki58:30

       Yeah.

    9. AHAndrew Huberman58:30

       And, um, and that ability, I think, is, is incredible. And that awe can be captured at, um, these different extremes of spacetime, um, cognition. Amazing. It seems to me that what you're saying is that cynicism and awe are also at opposite ends of the continuum, and that's, uh, taking us in a direction slightly different than I was going to try and take us. But I, I love that we're talking about awe, because, um, to me, it feels like it's, uh, a more extreme example of delight.

    10. JZDr. Jamil Zaki58:56

        Mm.

    11. AHAndrew Huberman58:57

        Um, and I'd like you to, um, perhaps if the, if there's any examples of, of research on this, you know, um, touch on to what extent, uh, a sense of cynicism divorces us from delight and awe or, uh, I guess, their, um, collaborator, uh, which is creativity.

    12. JZDr. Jamil Zaki59:15

        Mm.

    13. AHAndrew Huberman59:16

        To me, everything you're saying about cynicism makes it sound anti-creative because you're, by definition, you're eliminating possibility, and creativity, of course, is the unique, uh, original combination of existing things or the creation of new things altogether, creativity.

    14. JZDr. Jamil Zaki59:31

        Yeah.

    15. AHAndrew Huberman59:32

        Um, so what, if anything, has been studied about the relationship between, uh, cynicism, I guess we call it, uh, open-mindedness-

    16. JZDr. Jamil Zaki59:40

        Mm-hmm.

    17. AHAndrew Huberman59:40

        ... and, uh, creativity and/or awe?

    18. JZDr. Jamil Zaki59:43

        Yeah. Great questions, and they're...... is some work on this, and a lot of it comes actually in the context of the workplace, right? So you can examine every, I mean, these Brazilian fish- fishing villages were, after all, workplaces, right, that led people to more or less cynicism. But other workplaces also have structures that make people more or less able to trust one another. One version of this is what's known as stack ranking and, um, you know, this is where people, managers are forced to pick the highest performing and lowest performing members of their team and, in essence, eliminate the people who are at the bottom 10% every six or 12 months. Stack ranking has thankfully mostly fallen out of favor in d- in the corporate world but it was very, uh, de rigueur, um, in the late 20th and early 21st century, you know, up until 10 or so years ago, and it still exists in some places. And the idea, again, was if you want people to be creative, if you want them to do their best, tap into who they really are. And who are we really? We are really a hyper-individualistic, uh, again, Darwinian species. It's really, stack ranking is a social Darwinist approach to management, and the idea is, well, great, if you threaten people, if you make them want to defeat one another, they will be at their most creative, uh, when they are trying to do that, right, that- that it will bring out their best. The opposite is true. I mean, stack ranked workplaces, of course, are miserable. The people in them are, (laughs) uh, quite unhappy and more likely to leave their jobs, but some of the more interesting work pertains to what stack ranking does to creativity, because it turns out that if your job is to just not be at the bottom of the pile, then the last thing you want to do is take a creative risk. You do not want to go out on a limb, you do not want to try something new if other people are going to go after you for doing that, and if you screw up or if it doesn't go well, you're eliminated from the group, right? So- so I think you're exactly right, that these cynical environments are also highly conservative. I, of course, don't mean politically conservative, I mean conservative in terms of the types of choices that people make, and that's sort of, I think, at the level of individual creativity. But there's also a cost at the level of what we might call group creativity, right? A lot of our best ideas come not from our minds but from the space between us, from dialogue, uh, or from group conversation, and it turns out that in stacked rank zero sum environments, people are less willing to share knowledge and perspective, because doing so amounts to helping your enemy (laughs) succeed, which is the same as helping yourself fail. So to the extent that creativity requires a- a sort of collaborative mindset, then cynicism is- uh, is- is preventative of that. And there's actually some terrific work, um, uh, by- by Anita Woolley and colleagues, uh, that looks at group intelligence, collective intelligence. This is the idea that, of course, people have levels of intelligence that can be measured in various ways and have various forms of intelligence as well, but groups, when they get together, have a type of intelligence, and especially creative problem-solving intelligence that goes above and beyond the sum of their parts, that can't be explained, and actually, in some cases, is almost orthogonal to the intelligence of the individuals in that group, right? Controlling for the intelligence of individuals, there's a group factor that still matters. And so Anita Woolley and others have looked at, well, what predicts that type of collective intelligence? And a couple of factors matter. One is people, uh, people's ability to understand each other's emotions, so interpersonal sensitivity, but another is their willingness to, in essence, pass the mic, to share the conversation and to collaborate. And so again, uh, succeeding, thriving, optimizing, and being creative both at the individual and at the group level require environments where we feel free and where we feel safe and where we feel that contributing to somebody else can also contribute to ourselves.

15. 1:04:19 – 1:11:11

    Assessing Cynicism; Assumptions & Opportunities

    1. JZDr. Jamil Zaki1:04:20

    2. AHAndrew Huberman1:04:20

       It's so interesting to think about all of this in the context of neuroplasticity. I- I feel like one of the holy grails of neuroscience is to finally understand, you know, what are the gates to neuroplasticity? We understand a lot about the cellular mechanisms. We know it's possible throughout the lifespan. We know that there's sure a- an involvement of different neuromodulators and- and so on, but, um, at the level of, um, kind of human behavior and emotional stance, uh, not technical, uh, not a technical term-

    3. JZDr. Jamil Zaki1:04:49

       (laughs)

    4. AHAndrew Huberman1:04:49

       ... but I'll use it, of- of say being, um, curious. Like, to me, curiosity is an interest in the outcome with no specific emotional attachment to the outcome.

    5. JZDr. Jamil Zaki1:04:59

       Yeah. Mm-hmm.

    6. AHAndrew Huberman1:05:00

       But of course, we could say you're curious with the hope of getting a certain result, you know? So one could modify it, but there is something about that, uh, childlike mind, so-called beginner's mind...

    7. JZDr. Jamil Zaki1:05:11

       Mm-hmm.

    8. AHAndrew Huberman1:05:11

       ... where you're open to different outcomes, and it seems like the examples that you're giving keep bringing me back to these developmental themes, because if it's true that cynics, you know, exclude a lot of data that could be useful to them, um, it seems that the opportunities for neuroplasticity are reduced for cynics. Um, to flip it on its head, um, w- to what extent are we all a little bit...... cynical? And how would we explore that? Like, if, if I were in your laboratory and you had 10 minutes with me and you, you... What questions would you ask me, um, to determine how cynical I might be or how, um, not cynical I might be?

    9. JZDr. Jamil Zaki1:05:51

       Well, the first thing that I would do is give you that classic questionnaire from Cooke and Medley-

    10. AHAndrew Huberman1:05:55

        Mm-hmm.

    11. JZDr. Jamil Zaki1:05:55

        ... which would just ask you about your theories of the world. What do you think people are like? Do you think that people are generally honest? Do you think that they are generally trustworthy?

    12. AHAndrew Huberman1:06:05

        So it loads the questions or it's open-ended where I would... Would you say, "W- what, what are people like?" And then I would, um, just kind of free-associate about that?

    13. JZDr. Jamil Zaki1:06:11

        No, it, it's a series of 50 statements.

    14. AHAndrew Huberman1:06:13

        Hmm.

    15. JZDr. Jamil Zaki1:06:14

        And you're asked in a binary way, "Do you agree or disagree with each of these statements?" Since then, Olga Starova and others have adapted Cooke-Medley and made it a shorter scale and turned the questions into continuous one to nine or one to seven, uh, answers. Um, but generally speaking, these are discrete questions that numerically, uh, uh, or quantitatively tap our general theories of people. If you were in my lab, I might also ask you to play some different economic games. You know, the trust game being the number one that we might use here. So I can explain it, um, so the trust game involves two players. Uh, and one of them is an investor. They start out with some amount of money, let's just say $10. They can send as much of that money as they want to a trustee. The money is then tripled in value, so if the investor sends $10, it... The... In the hands of the trustee, it becomes $30. The trustee can then choose to give back whatever amount they want to the investor. So they can be exactly fair and give 15 back, in which case both people end up pretty much better off than they would have without an active trust. The trustee can keep all $30 themselves, betraying the investor, or the trustee can give more than 50% back. They can say, "Well, I started out with nothing, why don't you take two thirds back?" And this is one terrific behavioral measure of trust, and it could be played in a couple of different ways. One is binary, uh, where I would say, "Andrew, do... You, you can send $10 to an internet stranger or you can send nothing, and they can choose to send you back half or they can choose to send you back nothing. Would you do it?" I, I actually would. I'm curious, would you, would you do that?

    16. AHAndrew Huberman1:08:01

        Oh, I absolutely zip it over to them.

    17. JZDr. Jamil Zaki1:08:03

        Yeah.

    18. AHAndrew Huberman1:08:03

        Yeah, I'm curious.

    19. JZDr. Jamil Zaki1:08:04

        Great.

    20. AHAndrew Huberman1:08:05

        You know, and, and I'm willing to lose the money, um, so I suppose that factors in as well.

    21. JZDr. Jamil Zaki1:08:09

        Yeah. Follow-up question: In that type of study, what percentage of trustees do you think make the trustworthy decision of sending back the money?

    22. AHAndrew Huberman1:08:18

        Hmm. Gosh. 55%.

    23. JZDr. Jamil Zaki1:08:28

        Yeah. So your prediction there is quite aligned with most people's. Uh, um, there's a great study by Fechenhauer and, and, uh, and Dunning, uh, that found that, uh, people when they're asked to forecast, they say, "I bet 52, 55% of people will send this money back, will make this binary trust decision." Uh, in fact, 80% of trustees make the pro-social and trustworthy decision. Uh, and again, what Fechenhauer and Dunning found is that when we h- when we have negative assumptions, we're less likely to send over the money, and therefore less likely to learn that we were wrong.

    24. AHAndrew Huberman1:09:07

        Mm-hmm.

    25. JZDr. Jamil Zaki1:09:07

        Right? Uh, and so that's one of... This... It's another example of where cynical beliefs... I mean, he... You, you're interesting because you had the belief that it's a 50% chance, but you still chose to trust, right?

    26. AHAndrew Huberman1:09:18

        Mm-hmm.

    27. JZDr. Jamil Zaki1:09:18

        So from a Bayesian perspective, when that person actually sent the money back, which they would have an 80% chance of doing, and if, if I were to ask you again, "What percentage of people give back?" you might update your perception.

    28. AHAndrew Huberman1:09:31

        Absolutely.

    29. JZDr. Jamil Zaki1:09:32

        Right?

    30. AHAndrew Huberman1:09:32

        Mm-hmm.
16. 1:11:11 – 1:18:35

    Social Media & Cynicism, “Mean World Syndrome”

    1. JZDr. Jamil Zaki1:11:11

       each other.

    2. AHAndrew Huberman1:11:12

       There does seem to be a salience about, uh, negative interactions or somebody stealing from us or doing something that we consider cruel to us or to others. Nowadays with social media, we get a window into, gosh, probably billions of social interactions in the form of comments and clap backs and-

    3. JZDr. Jamil Zaki1:11:35

       (laughs)

    4. AHAndrew Huberman1:11:36

       ... retweets and, and there certainly is benevolence on social media, but I...... what, if any, data exists about, um, how social media either feeds, uh, or impedes cynicism, or maybe it doesn't change it at all. Um, and I should say that there's also the kind of, um... I have to be careful, I'm trying not to be cynical.

    5. JZDr. Jamil Zaki1:11:57

       (laughs)

    6. AHAndrew Huberman1:11:57

       Um, there, I, I maintain the, the view that certain social media platforms, um... encourage, uh, a bit more negativity than others. Um, and certainly there are accounts, I'm trying to think of, like, accounts, like, uh, on Instagram, like Upworthy.

    7. JZDr. Jamil Zaki1:12:15

       Mm-hmm.

    8. AHAndrew Huberman1:12:15

       Which its whole basis is to, uh, you know, promote positive stuff. I like that account very much. Um, but certainly you can find the full array of emotions on social media. Uh, to what extent is just being on social media, regardless of platform, increasing or decreasing cynicism?

    9. JZDr. Jamil Zaki1:12:35

       It's a, it's a terrific question. Uh, it's hard to provide a very clear answer, and I don't want to get out over my skis with what is known and what's not known. Social media has been a tectonic shift in our lives. It has coincided with a rise in cynicism. But, as you know, history is not an experiment, so you can't take two temporal trends that are coincident with one another and say that one caused the other. That said, my own intuition and a lot of the data suggests that, in at least some ways, social media is a cynicism factory, right? I mean, so, so let's first stipulate how much time we're spending on there. I mean, the average person, uh, goes through 300 feet of social media feed a day.

    10. AHAndrew Huberman1:13:21

        Is that right?

    11. JZDr. Jamil Zaki1:13:21

        Yeah.

    12. AHAndrew Huberman1:13:22

        They've measured it in feet?

    13. JZDr. Jamil Zaki1:13:23

        Approximately the height of the Statue of Liberty. Yeah, so we're, we're doing one Statue of Liberty worth of scrolling a day, much of it doomscrolling if, i- if y- if you're anything like me, at least. Um, and so then the question becomes, what are we seeing when we scroll for that long? Who are we seeing, and are they representative of what people are really like? And the answer, in a lot of ways, is, uh, no, that what we see on social media is not representative of the human population. So there's a lot of evidence, uh, a lot of this comes from, uh, from William Brady, now at Northwestern, and Molly Crockett, uh, that when people tweet, for instance ... I mean, this, a lot of this is done on, on the site formerly known as Twitter. When people tweet in outrage, and when they tweet negatively, and when they tweet about, in particular, immorality, right? Moral outrage. That algorithmically, those tweets are broadcast further, they're shared more, and this does a couple of things. One, it reinforces the people who are already tweeting in that way. So W- W- William Brady has this great work using a kind of reinforcement learning model, right? Reinforcement learning is where you do something, you're rewarded, and that reward makes you more likely to do that same thing again. And it turns out that, uh, that Brady found that when people tweet in outrage and then get egged on, and oftentimes, I should say, this is tribal in nature. It's somebody tweeting against somebody who's an outsider, and then being rewarded by people who they consider to be part of their group, right? When that happens, that person is more likely, in their future tweets, to turn up the volume on that outrage and on that moral outrage in particular. So there's a sort of ratchet effect, right? On the people who are sharing. But a second question becomes, well, what about the people watching? What about the rest of us? Claire Robertson has a great paper on this where she documents that a, a vast majority, I mean, 90-plus percent of tweets, are created by the 10% of the most active users, right? And this is in the political sphere. And these are probably not representative, these folks, not representative of the rest of us in terms of how extreme, uh, and maybe how, how bitter their opinions are. And so we, when we're scrolling that Statue of Liberty's worth of information, we think that we're seeing the world. We think that we're seeing our fellow citizens. We think that we're getting a picture of what people are like. In fact, we're pulling from the fringes, and what this leads to is a misconstrue of what the world is really like. This is, by the way, not just, uh, uh, part of social media. It's also part of legacy media. Communication theorists talk about something called the mean world syndrome, right? Where the more time that you spend looking at the news, for instance, the more you think violent crime is up in your area, the more you think you're in danger of violent crime, even during years when violent crime is decreasing. I'm old enough to remember, uh, when stranger danger was this big, uh, massive story, and every time you wanted cereal, the milk carton would have a picture of a kid who had been kidnapped by a stranger. And during that time, if you asked people, "How many kids are being kidnapped by strangers in the US?" They would s- they would, in many cases, say, "50,000 children are being kidnapped each year in the US." 50 ... Can you imagine what the world would ... It, it, it would be ... There would be SWAT teams on every corner. The real number in those years was closer to 100 kids per year. Now, let me be clear. Each one of those is an absolute tragedy, but there's a big difference here. And oftentimes, when we tune into media, we end up with these enormously warped perceptions where we think that the world is much more dangerous than it really is. We think that people are much more extreme than they really are, and because stories of immorality go viral so much more often than stories of everyday goodness, I mean, I love Upworthy as well, but it's not winning right now in the, in the, in the social media wars.

    14. AHAndrew Huberman1:17:45

        Not yet.

    15. JZDr. Jamil Zaki1:17:45

        (laughs) Not yet, not yet. A- a- and so this leaves us all-... absolutely exhausted and also feeling alone. People who feel like, "Wow, I actually don't feel that much outrage or I don't want to feel that much outrage. I actually don't want to hate everybody who's different from me," for instance. Uh, "I'm just exhausted by all this." We feel like, "Well, I guess I'm the only one because everybody else seems real excited about this battle royale that we've put ourselves in." But in fact, most people are just like the exhausted majority, right? We're paying so much attention to a, to a tiny minority of what, uh, the journalist, Amanda Ripley calls conflict entrepreneurs, people who stoke conflict on purpose, that we're confusing them with the average.

    16. AHAndrew Huberman1:18:34

        Oof.

17. 1:18:35 – 1:24:03

    Negativity Bias, Gossip

    1. AHAndrew Huberman1:18:35

       So much there.

    2. JZDr. Jamil Zaki1:18:35

       (laughs)

    3. AHAndrew Huberman1:18:36

       Um, I, I have a, I suppose, a mixed relationship to social media. I teach there and I learn there, and I also have to be very discerning in terms of how I interact with it. And, um, y- you made this point that I've never heard anyone make before, um, which is that many people feel alone by virtue of the fact that they don't share in this warring nature, um, that they see on social media. It's almost like, um... Sometimes I feel like I'm watching a combat sport that I don't feel quite, um, cut out for.

    4. JZDr. Jamil Zaki1:19:07

       Yeah.

    5. AHAndrew Huberman1:19:08

       And, um, and then when I'm away from it, I feel better. Um, but I, like everybody else, sometimes will, you know, get sucked into the, you know, highly salient nature of a, of a c- combat between, between groups on social media. It's, it's, um... It can be very alluring, um, in the worst ways.

    6. JZDr. Jamil Zaki1:19:27

       Yeah.

    7. AHAndrew Huberman1:19:27

       Um, this mean world syndrome, uh, what's the inverse of that? A kind world syndrome, I suppose.

    8. JZDr. Jamil Zaki1:19:35

       (laughs)

    9. AHAndrew Huberman1:19:35

       Um, but attempts at creating those sorts of social media platforms, uh, have been made, things like Blue Sky-

    10. JZDr. Jamil Zaki1:19:42

        Yeah.

    11. AHAndrew Huberman1:19:42

        ... which has other aspects to it as well, but, um... And while it may be thriving, I don't know, I haven't checked, um, recently, uh, it seems like, hmm, people aren't really interested in being on there as much as they are these other platforms. Clearly, the numbers play out that way. Uh, why do you think that is?

    12. JZDr. Jamil Zaki1:20:00

        Well, we, as a species, I think, are, uh, uh, characterized by what we would call negativity bias, right? Negative events and threats loom larger in our minds, and that happens in a number of domains. Our decision-making, uh, is nega- i- is, is negatively biased-

    13. AHAndrew Huberman1:20:19

        Mm-hmm.

    14. JZDr. Jamil Zaki1:20:19

        ... in that we'd prefer to avoid a negative outcome than to pursue a positive outcome. That's the classic work of Kahneman and Tversky, for instance. Uh, the impressions that we form, uh, are often negatively skewed. So classic work in psychology going back to the 1950s shows that if you, uh, if you teach somebody about a new person who they've never met and you list three positive qualities that this person has and three negative qualities, people will very much judge the person on their worst qualities and also remember more about their negative qualities than about their positive qualities. And again, you can see why this would be part of who we are, because we need to protect one another. We also tend to, by the way, not just think in a negatively biased way, but speak and share in a negatively biased way. In my lab, we had a study where people witnessed other, uh, groups of four playing an economic game where they could be selfish or they could be, um, or, or they could be, uh, positive. And we asked them, "Okay, we're gonna ask you to share a piece of information about one of the people you were playing this game with, um, for a future generation of participants. Who would you like to share about?" And when somebody in a group acted in a selfish way, they, th- people shared information about them three times more often than when they acted in a generous way. So we gossip negatively, and again, that gossip is pro-social. The idea is if there's somebody out there harming my community, of course, I'm gonna shout about them from the rooftops because I wanna protect my friends. It's a very noble instinct in a way, but we further found that when we actually showed a new generation of participants the gossip that the first generation shared, and we asked, "Hey, how generous and how selfish were people in that first generation?" they vastly underestimated that group's generosity. Does that make sense? In other words, in trying to protect our communities, we send highly biased information about who's in our community and give other people the wrong idea of who we are. And I see that unfolding on social media every day of my life, uh, every day that I'm on social media. (laughs) I do try to take br- breaks, but when I'm on there, I, I see it.

    15. AHAndrew Huberman1:22:38

        Yeah.

    16. JZDr. Jamil Zaki1:22:38

        And to your question, you know, w- what do we do here? Uh, uh, you know, why don't positive networks, positive information, why doesn't it, uh, proliferate more? I think it's because of these ingrained biases in our mind, and I understand that that can sound fatalistic because it's like, "Oh, maybe this is just who we are." But I don't think that we generally accept our instincts and biases as, uh, as a life sentence, as, as a, as a, as destiny. A lot of us, well, human beings in general, have the instinct to trust and be kinder towards people who look like us versus people who don't, for instance, who share our racial makeup. None of us, I think, or a few of us sit here and say, "Well, I have that bias in my mind, so I guess I'm always going to be racially biased." We try to counteract those instincts. We try to become aware of those biases. Depressed people have the bias to see themselves as worthless and to interpret new information they receive through that framework. Well, therapy is the attempt to say, "I don't wanna feel this way anymore. I want to fight the default settings in my mind. I want to try to explore curiosity, to, to explore something new." So to say that-... this toxic environment that we're in corresponds with some of our biases is, to me, not the same as saying we are destined to remain in that situation.

18. 1:24:03 – 1:32:59

    Social Media & Cynicism, Polarization, “Hopeful Skepticism”

    1. JZDr. Jamil Zaki1:24:03

    2. AHAndrew Huberman1:24:03

       Do you think it's possible to be adequately informed about threats to be able to live one's life in the most adaptive way, uh, while not being on social media? None of, none of the social media platforms. Um, can, can you have a, a great life that way? Uh, a safe life?

    3. JZDr. Jamil Zaki1:24:24

       This is a quasi-philosophical question, but from my perspective, absolutely. I mean, I think some of the threats that we learn about on social media are simply wrong. They're, they're, they're, they're phantom threats. They, we're, we're, we're made to fear something that actually is not happening, made to fear a group of people who are not as dangerous as they're made out to be on social media. Of course, I think being informed about the world around us matters to staying safe, but again, I think we can also more broadly construe what safety is. You know, if being on social media makes you avoidant of taking chances on people, if it makes you feel as though anybody who's different from you ideologically, for instance, is bloodthirsty and extreme, that's going to limit your life in very important ways. And you can talk about being safe in terms of safe from acute threats, but as we've talked about, living a diminished and disconnected life is its own form of danger over a longer time horizon. So really, you know, there is a lot, there are a lot of ways in which in, in, in the attempt to stay safe right now, we introduce ourselves to long-term danger.

    4. AHAndrew Huberman1:25:42

       I'm not anti-social media, but, um, I have to circle back on this yet again.

    5. JZDr. Jamil Zaki1:25:48

       (laughs)

    6. AHAndrew Huberman1:25:48

       A former guest on this podcast, one of our most popular episodes is with a former Navy SEAL, David Goggins, who's, um, known for many things, but, um, chief among them is striving and pushing one's self. And David has said many times that nowadays it's easier than ever to be extraordinary because most people are basically spending time just consuming, um, experiences on social media and doing a lot less, just literally doing a lot less-

    7. JZDr. Jamil Zaki1:26:17

       Yeah.

    8. AHAndrew Huberman1:26:17

       ... not just exercising and running as he does, although, by the way, he's in school to become a paramedic, so he's-

    9. JZDr. Jamil Zaki1:26:22

       Wow.

    10. AHAndrew Huberman1:26:22

        ... essentially going to medical school, um, and is always doing a bunch of other things as well, so, um, he's also an intellectual learner. Um, now, I don't know if I agree with him completely, but it's an interesting statement, you know? If social media is, um, bringing out our cynicism, polarizing us, and perhaps, um, taking away, I- I would probably agree with David, uh, at least to some extent, taking away our, um, time where we could be generative, writing, thinking, uh, socializing-

    11. JZDr. Jamil Zaki1:26:59

        Yeah.

    12. AHAndrew Huberman1:27:00

        ... um, building and other ways that, uh, that one builds their life, then I guess an important question is, do you think social media could be leveraged to decrease cynicism or, as you referred to it, to generate hopeful skepticism? Like this notion of hopeful cis- uh, skepticism as a replacement for cynicism is something that I- is really intriguing. Like, what would that look like? Like, if we were just gonna do the gedankenexperiment here, it, like, what- what would a feed on social media look like that, um, fed hopeful, uh, skepticism as opposed to cynicism?

Episode duration: 2:16:41