Cynicism vs. Skepticism

"Cynicism is a lack of faith in people; skepticism is a lack of faith in our assumptions."

Last week, I had Jamil Zaki on the podcast (episode is here) to discuss his newest book, Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness. If you’ve come across me in person in the last few months, I’ve likely pushed this book on you. While I can drum up enthusiasm for most things, I am uber-enthusiastic about this one: I really, really want everyone to read Zaki’s book.

Richard Misrach, “Diving Board, Salton Sea, 1983,” SFMoMA, Custom Print

Jamil is a neuroscientist who runs a lab at Stanford that studies things like empathy and kindness. (I first met him years ago after he released his first book, The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World). While empathy and kindness are the focus of his work, like many of us, Jamil found himself running low on both in recent years, worn down by COVID and the world-at-large. And thus began his latest project, which is a posthumous collaboration with one of his former colleagues, Emile Bruneau, who died in 2020 at the age of 47 from brain cancer (here’s a beautiful piece about his work and life). Emile founded the Peace and Conflict Neuroscience Lab at UPenn. Despite his diagnosis and early death, and despite visiting war zones and areas of devastation all over the globe, Emile retained his cheerfulness, love of humanity, and belief in peoples’ goodness—and Jamil wanted to both harness and understand that more deeply…and continue the work that his friend loved. This is a note from Emile to his wife Stephanie shortly after his diagnosis, to give you a sense of his disposition: “As a neuroscientist, I learned that our brains don’t really see the world, they just interpret it. So, losing my body is not really a loss after all! What I am to you is really a reflection of your own mind. I am, and always was, there, in you.”

Ultimately, Jamil wanted to understand how Emile never became cynical despite ample reasons to go that way—with the hope that Jamil might be able to harness his point-of-view. The resulting book is an examination of cynicism on one level—and why we think it’s some sort of intellectual superpower—and ultimately, how cynicism leads to political polarization and wariness. As Jamil shows, the former drives the latter.

First, Jamil topples three myths about cynicism:

Myth #1: Cynicism is clever. What is the opposite of a cynic? That’s easy: a rube, chump, or mark, whose naïve optimism sets them up for betrayal. … Most people are wrong. In fact, cynics do less well at cognitive tests and have a harder time spotting liars than non-cynics.

Myth #2: Cynicism is safe.

Myth #3: Cynicism is moral. Isn’t hope a privilege? Not everyone can afford to assume the best about people, especially if they have been harmed by a cruel system.

I’ll admit that these myths held me in their thrall, particularly the first one. I think of myself as very open-minded, which has made me easy to mock at times (I’m very open to outside beliefs and ways of understanding the world). But as I followed Jamil’s train of thought throughout the book, I realized that while I am avowedly not cynical, I’m actually pretty skeptical. And there’s a critical difference.

Here’s more from Jamil on cynicism: "Most people also think cynics are socially smart, able to slice through insincerity and dig out the truth. If cynicism a sign of intelligence, then someone who wants to appear smart might put it on, like wearing a suit to a job interview. And indeed, when researchers ask people to appear as competent as possible, they respond by picking fights, criticizing people, and removing friendly language from emails—performing the gloomiest version of themselves to impress others. Most of us valorize people who don’t like people. But it turns out cynicism is not a sign of wisdom, and more often it’s the opposite. In studies of over two hundred thousand individuals across thirty nations, cynics scored less well on tasks that measure cognitive ability, problem-solving, and mathematical skill. Cynics aren’t socially sharp, either, performing worse than non-cynics at identifying liars.”

Take that in for a second: The way we value the performance of intelligence might be giving us terrible information about…intelligence. In fact, Jamil argues—according to a growing amount of science—that wisdom arrives when you operate from a place of acknowledging that you don’t know. Here we arrive at skepticism. He writes, “Social wisdom doesn’t mean believing in everyone or no one. It means believing in evidence—by thinking less like a lawyer and more like a scientist. And despite the different instruments they use, all sorts of scientists share an intellectual tool: skepticism, the questioning of old wisdom and hunger for more information. Skeptics update their beliefs based on new information, allowing them to adjust to a complex world.” This to me suggests cognitive flexibility—a willingness to acknowledge where you’re wrong, where you’re short on information, and where you’re available to have your mind changed. We desperately need to cultivate this quality.

While the front of the book is fascinating, Jamil really made my pulse beat faster when he dove into polarization and our assumption that we are deeply divided. A ton in this book gives me hope, including this section, which examines the reality of our political views versus the radical nature of the “other” we’ve built up in our own minds.

I’m going to quote at length here:

“During the same era in which Americans lost trust in one another, they grew contempt for people with whom we disagree. In 1980, US Republican and Democrats felt lots of warmth toward their own party (from now on, we'll call them a person's ‘insiders’) and neutral about the other we call them ‘rivals’). By 2020, each party disliked the other side more than they liked their own.

“People fear and loathe rivals— and increasingly avoid them. In the 1970s, the US had blue and red states like it does now, but many counties within those states were indigo or amethyst. Since then, Americans have "sorted," moving away from rivals so much that counties are as politically segregated as they were during the Civil War.

“As people interact less across political lines, we lose real-world knowledge about rivals. That doesn't mean we stop thinking about them. The information vacuum fills with media and our imagination. As we've seen, both these forces are dominated by negativity bias, and tip us toward cynicism.

“Let's return to the ‘average’ political rival you just imagined. Across dozens of studies, Americans have been asked to answer questions like you did; they answer incorrectly in virtually every way scientists can measure. Even outside of politics, we guess wrong about one another's lives. Democrats think 44 percent of Republicans earn more than $250,000 a year. In fact, only 2 percent do. Republicans think 43 percent of Democrats are part of a labor union, but just 10 percent really are. Republican cat people guess that Democrats favor dogs, and Republican dog-lovers think Democrats must like cats.

“Both Democrats and Republicans also imagine rivals are more extreme than they really are, a pattern researchers call ‘false polarization.’ On issues like immigration and abortion, people guess the average rival is more extreme than 80 percent of actual people in the other party. Asked about the middle, we conjure up the fringe. The more specific the question. the more wrong we become. Democrats think 35 percent of Republicans would agree that ‘Americans have a responsibility to learn from our past and fix our mistakes.’ The real figure is 93 percent. Republicans think 40 percent of Democrats believe that ‘the Constitution should be preserved) and respected.’ In fact, 80 percent do.

“False polarization mixes negativity bias with ideology. If I believe in something, my enemy must believe the opposite. These cynical misperceptions obscure an entire landscape of national consensus. In 2019, Emile and his collaborators asked Americans how much immigration should be restricted on a 0-100 scale, where 0 meant all borders should be open and 100 meant they should all be closed. They also asked them to guess how the average political outsider would answer that same question. They discovered two landscapes. One, made up of real people, looked like a hill with two peaks: Democrats wanted more openness. Republicans less, but there was a lot of overlap in the middle. The second, made up of our perceptions, looked is too separate hill, each populated with extreme, unconnected opinions.”

This is the chart and isn’t it staggering? The top is a map of the reality of peoples’ positions; the chart below represents how they assume people in the other party feel. There is wayyyyyyyy more commonality than we’ve been led to believe exists.

Here’s more: “A 2021 survey of more than eighty thousand people identified nearly 150 issues on which Republicans and Democrats agreed. Several were endorsed by more than two-thirds of both parties. These included overturning Citizens United so that companies could not fund political campaigns, giving immigrants who arrived in the US as children a path to citizenship, and tax incentives to promote clean energy. And yet, in our imagination, shared values have eroded into tiny islands, barely visible above the waves.” Jamil goes on to explain that when it comes to the environment, we’re very aligned: “Americans think that barely one-third of the nation supports aggressive climate reform. The real number is closer to two-thirds. If you want US policy to preserve the environment, you are part of a supermajority, one you might not realize is all around you.”

Does this not give you hope?

If you haven’t already, tune in to our podcast conversation—it was one of my favorites to date. And please, please order his book, Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness.

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THE LATEST FROM THE PODCAST:

9/5: Why cynicism is not smart with Jamil Zaki, PhD
Apple | Spotify | Transcript

8/29: Contending with the Inner Critic with Tara Mohr
Apple | Spotify | Transcript

8/22: Navigating the Upper Limit Problem with Katie Hendricks, PhD
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8/15: Magical overthinking with Amanda Montell
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8/8: Qualities of good leaders with Jerry Colonna
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8/1: Staying with discomfort in Part 2 with Thomas Hübl
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7/29: My long-awaited conversation with the singular Carol Gilligan
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7/25: Finding shadow in the body with Thomas Hübl
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7/22: Recognizing signs of high intuition with Carissa Schumacher
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