Derek shares his biggest frustrations about the 2024 election, like the lack of a policy debate and blind spots in news coverage and polling analysis. Then he welcomes Jamil Zaki to the show: a professor of psychology at Stanford University and the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab. Zaki is the author of Hope for Cynics, a new book that explores tension at the heart of human affairs. On one hand, social cooperation is the basis of human civilization. And yet cynicism—a baseline aversion to social cooperation and assumption that most people are greedy, selfish, and dishonest—is also core to the human experience. We are constantly violating the secret of our own success by assuming the worst in others, and Professor Zaki explains why.
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In the following excerpt, Jamil Zaki and Derek distinguish between cynicism, skepticism, and negativity and explore whether there are age-related patterns when it comes to cynicism.
Derek Thompson: I want to start with a very basic question. What is cynicism?
Jamil Zaki: So cynicism, I want to separate two versions of it. The first is an Ancient Greek school of philosophy headed by Antisthenes and Diogenes. That’s not what I talk about when I describe modern cynicism. Modern cynicism, as psychologists think about it, is a theory about people. It’s a theory that any of us might carry around, and it’s the idea that, in general, people are selfish, greedy, and dishonest. Now, that’s not to say that a cynic would be shocked if somebody donated to charity or helped a stranger, but they might suspect the person’s motives, saying, “I bet they’re just out for a tax break or trying to look good in front of other people.” So cynicism is not a theory about what people do, but rather who we are at the deepest level.
Thompson: How would you distinguish cynicism from two terms that I feel like might encroach on some of its real estate, skepticism and negativity? Why is cynicism distinct from skepticism on the one hand and mere negativity on the other?
Zaki: Yeah, let’s start with the negativity one, because I think this is probably the finer cut. So cynics are quite negative, but not necessarily about the natural world or about the future or about the past. Specifically, cynicism is a hostile form of negativity about people and humanity. Now, it stands to reason that if you feel really negative about people, you might also feel that the future will not unfold very well because, of course, the future in many ways depends on what people decide to do with it. The cut between cynicism and skepticism is much deeper, and I think even more important. It turns out that skepticism is very different from cynicism, in part because cynics, again, have this assumption.
A theory, as you know, Derek, if you’re a scientist and you have a theory, it shapes the questions that you ask and the way that you look for evidence. It almost can leave you thinking and acting like a lawyer. So a cynic might be considered a lawyer in the trial against humanity. They’re on the prosecution, and so they are looking for evidence that people are awful and dismissing or explaining away evidence that people are pretty great. A skeptic doesn’t think like a lawyer, but rather like a scientist. They don’t assume that people are untrustworthy or that they’re trustworthy, but rather look for evidence about each person and each situation.
Thompson: One thing I want to do right off the bat is make sure that I have a really concrete idea of who cynics are among us, where they might be distributed in terms of age or occupation, where they live, and who they are. So let’s start with age. When I think about cynicism as an archetype, interestingly, I think about old people and I think about young people, but in slightly different ways.
So when I think about an old cynic, I think of a grouchy, crotchety, get-off-my-lawn, Clint Eastwood, snarling type. But when I think about young cynics, I think about the research that the Danish political scientist Michael Bang Petersen has done in poli-sci on the need for chaos—which is his term—the need for chaos among some voters on the far right and also on the far left. And these are people, often younger, often less educated, who feel like the world is so terrible that their political opinions are often to burn everything down rather than focus on incremental solutions. They might have good reasons to want to burn everything down; they might not have good reasons to burn everything down. But they have this, what Petersen calls, need for chaos.
And I think of these as two different faces of, maybe not pure cynicism, maybe not pure misanthropy, but something in that zone. And I wonder if you think, in a strange way, the get-off-my-lawn attitudes of the old and the burn-it-all-down views of young radicals, how you see these as maybe being different faces of cynicism or connected in some way.
Zaki: It’s a beautiful description. It’s almost like a generational horseshoe theory for cynicism, that people from different generations for different reasons arrive at similar conclusions. Certainly, the Clint Eastwood yelling at a chair during a political convention comes to mind as the crotchety older cynic. The data are much less clear on age, and especially older adults and cynicism. It turns out that, in fact, cynicism tends to be pretty stable across somebody’s life if they don’t intervene in some way. So if something terrible or great doesn’t happen to you, you tend to stay at a relatively similar level of cynicism.
It’s also true that contrary to many of our intuitions, older adults tend to be more positive in a lot of ways. They experience more positive emotions than younger adults. And if you look at happiness and at prosocial, kind behavior, you see that both escalate over time. So I think that that stereotype is there for a reason, but there aren’t great data showing that older people necessarily are actually more cynical.
This excerpt was edited for clarity. Listen to the rest of the episode here and follow the Plain English feed on Spotify.
Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Jamil Zaki
Producer: Devon Baroldi
Subscribe: Spotify
