Even In Today’s Tumultuous World, There’s Hope For Cynics

If you watch the evening news or listen to podcast grenade-throwers, you might think the world is coming apart.

Yes, there’s plenty to give people the night sweats. Wars, and threats of more wars. Fragile economies. Politicians spewing vile rhetoric rather than proposing remedies that unite more than divide. Even family squabbles at holiday dinner tables.

It doesn’t have to be that way. It’s possible to hold strong opinions while maintaining respectful and nurturing relationships.

On that score, Dr. Jamil Zaki offers some excellent advice in his book Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness.

Zaki is a psychology professor at Stanford University and director of the Stanford Neuroscience Lab. He trained at Columbia and Harvard, studying empathy and kindness in the human brain. His work focuses on how people can learn to connect better with others.

In these increasingly cynical times, Zaki says hope is actually a skill that can be deliberately nourished.

“In 1972, about half of Americans believed most people could be trusted,” he says. “By 2018, that had fallen to a third of Americans—a drop as big as the stock exchange took in the financial collapse of 2008. Over the same period, the country’s faith in institutions—education, science, medicine, and government—all plummeted. We’re experiencing a five-decade trust deficit, and a rise in cynicism: the belief that people are selfish, greedy, and dishonest. We’ve even glamorized cynical thinking as a form of wisdom. The musician and mathematician Tom Lehrer put it well: ‘always predict the worse and you’ll be hailed as a prophet.’”

Against this backdrop, Zaki says, hope has been stereotyped as naïve, blinkered, and even toxic. “This reflects a misunderstanding of what it is. Optimism is the belief that things will turn out well. It can leave people rosy but complacent, waiting passively for a bright future to arrive. Hope is the belief that things could turn out well, but we don’t know the future. In that uncertainty there’s room for our actions to matter. Hopeful people, more than optimists, act, magnetizing themselves towards a world they want.”

The activist Mariame Kaba once said, “hope is a discipline,” and Zaki says it can be trained. “To practice it, start by envisioning a goal you want. Next, chart a path toward that goal, and third, take small steps along that path. Regularly engaging this cycle of thought and action can build our capacity for hope, and for reaching our goals.”

Zaki writes about “hopeful skepticism.” He explains what that is and how can a person mindfully practice it.

“Skepticism and cynicism are often confused, but in fact are quite different,” he says. “Cynics think like lawyers in the prosecution against humanity. They begin with a conclusion—everyone is out for themselves—and seek evidence to bolster that claim. This might appear wise but in fact it’s quite naïve. Cynics, compared to non-cynics, are worse at telling the difference between people who are lying and telling the truth. When we try to defend a black and white conclusion, we end up missing a lot of evidence.”

Zaki says skeptics don’t begin with any assumption about people, but rather with curiosity. “They think less like lawyers and more like scientists. Because of that, they’re more able to learn and adapt, and to achieve wisdom. ‘Hopeful skepticism’ adds a second component to this mindset. Cynicism often reflects an ancient cognitive bias: to pay much more attention to threats than positive information. That evolved for a reason—in order to survive, we must be vigilant to danger—but it has run amok. Our modern media ecosystem pours gasoline on the fire of negativity bias, and the upshot is that we are often demonstrably too gloomy about humanity. The good news is that when we pay closer attention and let go of our assumptions, through skepticism, people are often better than we think, and pleasant surprises are everywhere.”

Most of us have run across people who seem to think that cynicism makes them seem smart. What does Zaki’s research show?

One of his favorite studies is titled “The Cynical Genius Illusion.” Researchers presented readers with stories of a highly cynical person and someone who was more trusting, then asked them to guess who would perform better at a series of tasks. The research showed that 70% believed cynics would outperform non-cynics on cognitive tasks. “In other words,” Zaki says, “most of us put faith in people who don’t have faith in people. Most of us are wrong. In fact, cynics perform less well on cognitive tasks than non-cynics.”

And yet many people continue to place cynicism on a pedestal, even in the way they parent, he says. He cites a recent survey finding that most parents believe that, in order to succeed, their children should view the world as competitive, not cooperative. “In fact, people with a zero-sum world view are less happy and prosperous than those with a collaborative mindset,” he says. “I think many of us would be better off if we could dethrone cynicism and understand it for what it is—not a form of wisdom at all, but a psychological dead end.”

How does cynicism impact personal relationships?

Zaki says cynicism is poison for relationships because it keeps people on their guard and prevents them from opening up or being vulnerable. “Without vulnerability, we lose the vast and varied benefits of connection,” he says. “Cynics are less willing to be vulnerable among friends, family, and colleagues. If connection is psychological nourishment, they have trouble metabolizing its calories.”

The good news, Zaki reports, is that practicing “hopeful skepticism” allows people to recoup the benefits of personal interpersonal connection. “Leaps of faith, in which we take chances on other people and allow them to show us who they are,” he says, “can rebuild vulnerability and relationships bit by bit, even for hardened cynics.”