How To Be More Hopeful In A Cynical World - Dr Jamil Zaki

Why do people tend towards cynicism? Th- why is it so alluring?

Well, uh, it's a great question, maybe let's define cynicism first, just so we have our terms straight. Uh, the way that psychologists like me refer to cynicism is different than the ancient Greek school of philosophy, led by Antisthenes and Diogenes, we can talk about that all you want in a moment, but as psychology now defines cynicism, it's a theory about people. The idea that, in general, people are selfish, greedy, and dishonest, and therefore we might not wanna trust them. Now, why do we tend towards thinking this way, to your question. I think that this is actually a pretty ancient bias in the way that our minds work, uh, something that researchers call negativity bias, so it turns out that our minds are built such that we pay much more attention to harmful or threatening information than to the good stuff, so we pay more visual attention to, um, to threats than to positive information. We remember negative events more than positive ones, and we make decisions more based on what we'd like not to lose than what we would like to gain. And you can see how this bias might be there for a reason. It might have helped us survive, maybe 200,000 years ago a person who was worried about a predator on the horizon might do better than their friend who was blissed out by the sunset on the opposite horizon, so a useful bias in some ways, but one that I think has gotten us in a lot of trouble in our modern context.

Draw the line between negativity bias and cynicism. Is cynicism simply negativity interpersonally at work at scale?

I think that cynicism is what happens when you turn negativity bias into an entire worldview, uh, when you allow it not only to color the information that you're taking in, but your expectations of the future as well, right? So, I teach a class of about 500 students every year, and at the end of the course, I get all these, uh, different, uh, pieces of feedback, reviews of the class, and usually around 480 of them are positive, but of course, three nights later, I'm trying to fall asleep, and I'm only remembering (laughs) the two or three most negative informa- uh, reviews that I've received, and again that's a- that's simple negativity bias. If I were to then transform that into a view of undergraduate students or people in my class and say, "Ah, kids these days, they're not respectful, they don't like their teachers, uh, they don't wanna learn," that would be turning negativity bias into cynicism, not just, uh, taking in information asymmetrically, focusing on the negative, but really almost elevating that into a philosophy.

Right, so as opposed to just absorbing it, you're then projecting it, you're using it to predict the future too.

Exactly, that's exactly right.