Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - How And Why To Avoid The Siren Call Of Cynicism | Dr. Jamil Zaki

Episode Date: September 9, 2024

This Stanford psychologist has evidence that being a cynic is bad for your health, and offers a non-corny alternative. Dr. Jamil Zaki is a professor of psychology at Stanford University and the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab. He’s the author of The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World, and his new book is called Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness.In this episode we talk about:What cynicism is, and why it’s so appealingHis own history as a “recovering cynic,”How to know if you yourself are a cynicA step-by-step guide to start developing the “hopeful skeptic” mindsetHow to get better at disagreeing with other people, including some rules of engagementAnd how to encourage kids not to become cynicalRelated Episodes:How (and Why) to Hack Your Empathy | Jamil ZakiReversing the Golden Rule | Jamil ZakiSign up for Dan’s weekly newsletter hereFollow Dan on social: Instagram, TikTokTen Percent Happier online bookstoreSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelOur favorite playlists on: Anxiety, Sleep, Relationships, Most Popular EpisodesFull Shownotes: https://happierapp.com/podcast/tph/jamil-zaki-cynicAdditional Resources:Download the Ten Percent Happier app today: https://10percenthappier.app.link/installSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to 10% happier early and ad free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, my fellow suffering beings. How we doing? It is easy, very easy in these turbulent times, in this post-truth era, to succumb to the siren call of cynicism. But cynicism, where you lose faith in other people, is bad for your health.

The science shows it can lead to depression, heart disease, and isolation. It can also make you more likely to fall for conspiracy theories. Today we're going to talk to a Stanford scientist about a healthier and happier alternative, which he calls hopeful skepticism. I should say we're recording and releasing this episode in the middle of a tumultuous presidential election in the United States but the wisdom here is Evergreen and universal so if you're listening to this later, or if you're listening from another country It's still deeply relevant. My guest is dr. Jamil Zaki

He's a professor of psychology at Stanford and the director of the Stanford social neuroscience lab He came on the show several years ago to talk about a previous book that he wrote called The War for Kindness, Building Empathy in a Fractured World. His new book is called Hope for Cynics, The Surprising Science of Human Goodness. We talked about what cynicism is exactly and why it's so appealing,

his own history as a recovering cynic, how to know if you're a cynic, a step-by-step guide to developing the hopeful skeptic mindset, how to get better at disagreeing with other people, including some rules of engagement, and how to encourage kids not to become cynical. Dr. Jamil Zaki coming up right after this. But first a few announcements. You might notice that the show art, the little image that pops up in your podcast player

changed. After seven years. We figured it was time for an aesthetic refresh. Big thank you to my wife, Bianca, who's been leading the charge. She has much better taste than I do. Before I go, I just wanna say something about the 10% Happier app. Many of you are familiar with the great teachings

of Joseph Goldstein, the amazing meditation teacher. We've got six courses and more than 50 guided meditations from Joseph over on the app, including our free introductory course, The Basics. Download the 10% Happier app today, wherever you get your apps and get started for free. I'll also link to it in the show notes. Listening to Audible helps your imagination soar.

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Enjoy Audible anytime while doing other things. Household chores, exercising on the road, commuting, you name it. My wife Bianca and I have been listening to many audiobooks as we drive around for summer vacations. We listen to Life by Keith Richards. Keith, if you're listening, I'd love to have you on the show. We also listen to Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. And Yuval, if you're listening to this, we would'd love to have you on the show. We also listen to Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. And Yuval, if you're listening to this, we would also love to have you on the show.

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I'm Peter Frankenbaum. And in our podcast, Legacy of the World, we're going to talk about audio books. And we're going to talk about audio books. And we're going to talk about audio books. And we're going to talk about audio books. And we're going to talk about audio books. And we're going to talk about audio books. I'm Afua Hirsch. I'm Peter Frankenpann. And in our podcast Legacy, we explore the lives of some of the biggest characters in history. This season, we're revisiting the life of Cecil Rhodes. From sickly child to diamond tycoon to leading colonialist in South Africa, he was a bastion

of British imperialism. Over the past few years, campuses around the world have been met by students chanting Rhodes must fall. His legacy has been completely transformed. It's unbelievable how relevant Rhodes still feels and how often his name is invoked by people contesting really polarizing parts of our contemporary life. But one of the questions about Rhodes

is that he takes all the flak and therefore hides away all the other people who were responsible for doing things that may be not quite so bad. That's why I think it's important to think not just about Rhodes and his own life, but about what that period of British and colonial history meant. And one of the things people often say is you have to judge these figures by the standards of their time. That's exactly what we're going to do, Peter, isn't it? So follow Legacy now from wherever you get your podcasts. Or binge entire seasons early and ad free on Wondery+.

Dr. Jamil Zaki, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Great to see you again. I don't know why I said welcome to the show. I should have said welcome back to the show. You're a frequent flyer, so nice to have you back. What is, I'm starting with a very basic question here. What is, I'm starting with a very basic question here, what is cynicism?

Cynicism you can think of as a theory about the world and about people in particular. It's the theory that humanity at our core is a selfish species. That's not to say that every single action we take will be selfish. A cynic can believe that somebody will donate to charity or help a stranger.

It's just that underneath all of that veneer, who we truly are, is an animal that fundamentally looks out for ourselves above anybody else. This is a debate that has been raging in political science, science, science, philosophy, religion for a long time. You know, in science you have people like Richard Dawkins arguing that, you know, he wrote a book called The Selfish Gene.

We are inherently selfish. You have political philosophers like Hobbes, who said life is nasty, brutish, and short. And then on the other side of the coin, you have people like Rousseau, who argued that we have like a natural compassion to us. It sounds like you're taking a side in this long-running debate. I think that this perennial question about who we are, whether our species is kind or

cruel, compassionate or callous, good or bad, I'm not sure that I want to take a position in that debate. I think it's one of the most unanswerable questions that we have because whatever answer you want to come up with, you can marshal tons of evidence for it. If you want to decide that people are awful, just turn on the news and you can support your claim. If you want to decide that people are wonderful,

look around you and you'll find helpers everywhere. I think what I've become more fascinated with recently as a psychologist is what happens to us when we choose to answer the question one way or the other. Right, so a cynic chooses to answer that question in a bleak way. They choose to say, well, I think my theory is the Hobbesian notion, the idea that life is nasty, brutish, and

short, and I'm going to run with that. And it turns out that making that decision about how we view the world, our answer to the question matters for the life that we live, the way that we treat other people. Right. But what's interesting to me is that you've written a book in vain against cynicism, laying out all the dangers on a micro level, on a macro level. And yet you seem to acknowledge from the jump in this interview that the cynics might be right about human nature. I think that human nature is not a binary construct. I think that it's potentially

too simplistic to try to decide whether at our core we are good or bad. My own view as a psychologist is that we are adaptive, that we change in response to our environment and that people are capable of horrible cruelty if you put them in the wrong circumstances and they're capable of incredible beauty if you place them in the right circumstances. I don't wanna put my thumb on the scale too much here. It's also, maybe Dan has to do with the fact that I myself, although I wrote a book, as you said,

Inveying Against Cynicism, struggle mightily with it myself. In fact, one of the passages that I opened the book with is confessing that even though I've been what you could call a positive psychologist, studying empathy and compassion and kindness for 20 years now, that sometimes internally, privately, I have a hard time seeing the best in people. So I kind of wrote this book, at least at the beginning,

to explore what was happening with me and why I was struggling to believe the science that I and many other researchers were putting out into the world. Did it help? Are you less of a cynic now? I consider myself a recovering cynic, not an ex-cynic. I think I still have the bias in my mind

that many of us have, which is to pay attention to threats in my environment, to remember the negative things that people say to me more than the compliments, to focus on and really ruminate over terrible things that I read about and see. So I still have those biases. There's a few things that are different for me personally now compared to when I started.

One is that I can see those biases as they operate. I'm more aware of the triggers and mental reflexes that drive me and I think drives so many other people. Two, I know what those instincts are doing to me. I know the ways that that worldview is harming me. And three, I've become more open to evidence that runs counter to my sometimes cynical default mode. What are the ways in which cynicism can harm you

and everybody else? Oh man, it's really easy to make the case that cynicism is harmful. There's decades of research now that find that cynics suffer in terms of their mental health. They're more prone to depression, anxiety, and loneliness. Their physical health is worse. They tend to have more heart disease, diabetes.

Cynics even die younger than non-cynics. And their relationships suffer as well. You mentioned this Thomas Hobbes quote, which is maybe the most famous encapsulation of a cynical view of the world, that life is nasty, brutish, and short. Ironically, I think that phrase best applies to cynics themselves whose lives turn out that way, in part because of the way that they see the

world. And again, this is not at all to lay judgment at the feet of cynical people, as I myself have often been one, but it's more to acknowledge that there's a real consequence to viewing the world in this way. You also asked about what does it do not just to us as individuals but as communities, and it turns out that it hurts us there as well. One of the things that we need most in order to form connections with people, but also to build communities, whether those are families or classrooms or companies or nations, is a sense of trust,

belief that we can be vulnerable to people in small or large ways and that they will have our back, that they will honor our expectations. If you have a cynical worldview, placing a bet on other people in that way, which is what trust really is, is for suckers. You will be a chump more times than not if you count on other people.

And so cynics withdraw from those social contracts. But guess what happens? As cynicism rises, and it is rising, more people pull away. And that in turn makes it much harder to maintain a functioning social fabric. Again, at any level that we measure, whether that's a town, a family, a country,

even internationally. So it turns out that cynicism is pretty poisonous for us as individuals, for our relationships, and even at the broadest levels. Just to pick up on that, I'm going to read a bracing quote from you in your book. If cynicism were a pill, you write, its warning label would list depression, heart disease, and isolation. In other words, it would be a poison. Yeah, it's pretty strong warning against falling prey or actually, I would argue because I'm less of a

cynic than you being suckered by this seductive argument. I completely agree and I have been suckered by it myself and I'm not the only one. Unfortunately more of us are taking this even though it's poisonous than ever before, in 1972, about half of Americans believed that most people can be trusted. By 2018, that had fallen to a third of Americans. So to put that in perspective, that drop is about as big a hit as the stock market took during the financial collapse of 2008. So we are in a national trust deficit now, and at the same time as

we've lost faith in ourselves and each other, we've lost even more faith in our institutions, whether that's public education, science, the media, business, government, you name it. I mean, all of the graphs for trust and faith in people and institutions go in the same direction, down and to the right. It's a massive social trend and one I think we need to pay a lot of attention to. Couldn't you make the case that some of the degradation in trust of institutions is richly deserved? Absolutely.

And again, I in no way am making the case here that we should trust all politicians or send our bank information to princes who email us with offers of $17 million or influencers who say that there's one weird trick that will give us passive income and clear up our skin at the same time. You know, rejecting cynicism is not the same as trusting naively. I think that's one of the mistakes that a lot of people make, and really one of the ways that our culture has glamorized cynicism in a way that, as you put it, suckers us into accepting it. We are taught that really there are two poles. On one side, you can disbelieve everybody and imagine that human beings are generally out to get each other.

On the other side, you can be really naive and put on rose-colored glasses. I don't think that those are actually so different from one another. I think that people who are naive credulously, unthinkingly put their faith in people, and that's a huge mistake. And people who are cynical, credulously and unthinkingly remove their faith from people. And I think that's also a mistake. And I think there are very similar mistakes.

In fact, I think what is different than both cynicism and naivete is skepticism, taking a more scientific perspective and opening ourselves to the data. And if you do that, then as you're saying, it might be that we don't trust certain institutions or politicians, for instance, but we do learn that we should trust our fellow citizens more, right? We all have to make these decisions, but I think we can make them based on data, as opposed to black and white assumptions about what the world is like and what people are like. Let me, I can't believe I'm gonna say this I always make fun of myself for saying this.

Let me double click on that for a second. In the book you make quite a point of arguing for skepticism as a sort of middle path to use Buddhist speak between the poles of naivete and cynicism. Can you say more about skepticism and how it differs from cynicism? Absolutely, yes. So cynicism again is this general theory about people. I'll speak as a researcher here. In science we have theories and they guide what we do and what we predict about the world, but the rest of us do that too.

You have a theory of gravity, which is that objects with mass attract each other, and even if you don't think about that theory, you know that if you drop a bowling ball that's gonna fall faster than if you drop a feather, and that's because you're using that theory to predict the world. Well, sometimes when you have a theory, you make predictions and you kind of get stuck to them.

Like you start to think, well, my predictions are probably right. And then you start looking at evidence in a biased way, right, you try to confirm your initial assumptions. And I think cynics do that quite a bit, right? And it's not just what I think, there's a lot of evidence for this. So a cynic, for instance, if you show them a video

of one person consoling another, they're likely to suspect that kind looking person, they actually have ulterior motives. If you ask them, how much faith do you have that somebody will honor your trust in a economic game? They say, oh no, I think that person will run away with the money, even if they have evidence to the contrary. I think that when you have a theory and lean into it too hard, you start to be less like

a scientist and more like a lawyer. You start to have a point that you're trying to make and you start to look at the world and experience it through your argument as opposed to what it's bringing to you. So that's how I see cynicism as sort of being on the prosecution in a trial against humanity. Skepticism, instead of thinking like a lawyer, involves thinking like a true scientist. That is, of course you have views about the world, you're not totally naive,

but you're open to new information. You're open to your theories and your predictions being disconfirmed. In fact, one of the great joys of science is being wrong and using evidence to become a little bit less wrong over time. I love, though, the way that you're describing this, which is a middle path, because I

think that's actually a really powerful way of viewing it. Openness to evidence is something that science and I think Buddhist traditions have in common, right? You try to detach from what you are bringing to the world and just listen, just be aware and allow what the world brings to you to enter into your mind freely. There's a quote from the Buddha that I like, I'm not a dogmatist, but instead an analyst.

That's beautiful and I think absolutely consistent with the skeptical worldview, right? You don't need to believe everybody, but you don't have to believe in nobody either. You can be an analyst instead. In the book you talk about some of the myths. I kind of think of them as like the siren calls of cynicism. They include, well actually I'll let you list them. Why do we fall for cynicism? What are the myths? Yeah, I think cynicism unfortunately has become very de rigueur. It's sort of cool and unfortunately has become very de rigueur. It's sort of cool and seems interesting and it's clearly very popular. So why is that?

There are three myths that I lay out in the book as you say. The first is that cynicism is smart. So in surveys, if you ask people to imagine a very cynical person and a very non-cynical person, 70% of people in those surveys report that the cynic would be smarter than the non-cynic, and 85% of people think that the cynic would be socially smarter than the non-cynic. So for instance, would do a better job figuring out who's lying and who's telling the truth.

So in other words, most of us put faith in people who don't put faith in people, which turns out to be a mistake. The data cut in the opposite direction. Cynics do less well on cognitive tests than non-cynics, and they're worse at spotting liars than non-cynics. Because again, if you have an assumption that people are terrible, you stop paying attention to the actual evidence for who might be honest and who might be dishonest.

This is what psychologists call the cynical genius illusion, the sort of veneer of smarts that we have. If you look at everybody, a scant, if you're kind of sneering, it seems as though you've got hard earned wisdom, but it turns out that's not always the case. So that's myth number one. Myth number two is that cynicism is safe. And this goes back to this idea of taking social bets that we were talking about earlier,

right? Trust in people requires becoming vulnerable and you can absolutely be hurt when you trust others. I think we can all remember times that somebody has let us down and those experiences live for a long time, in many cases quite painfully in our memory, and they shape us. And one way that they shape us is that they make us less willing to take risks in the future. George Carlin once said, if you scratch a cynic, you'll find a disappointed idealist. And I think that that's true. I think a lot of cynics might have bluster, might seem like they're really confident, but in fact, they're actually responding to pain and they're trying to stay safe. They're trying to prevent

themselves from being heard again. The reason I think of this idea of that cynicism is safe as a myth is because when you close yourself off to other people, yeah, sure, you might not get hurt again, but you'll also lose out on so much of what makes life beautiful, the ability to connect with people, to discover new relationships, and to learn from each other. So that's myth number two. And then myth number three is the idea that cynicism is moral. These days when I talk about hope and trying to build hope as a skill and a practice, a lot of people tell me, come on, Zaki, you're the definition of privilege.

You're a professor at a fancy university. You've succeeded in all these ways. Of course, you can be hopeful. That's toxic. You know, you're telling me to be hopeful, but I've lived a very different life than you. There is this sense that hope is a privilege, that it's a way of shutting off conversation about the difficult parts of life and that cynicism has a laser view of those same difficulties,

that cynics are radical and maybe hopeful people are, I don't know, in some way uncaring, that they're not focused on problems and therefore don't do anything about them. This again, turns out to be basically the opposite of the truth. It turns out that cynics are less likely to do things like vote or take part in social movements. They see problems, but they don't imagine that those problems are solvable because they imagine that we ourselves are the problem,

our whole species. And it turns out that people who reject cynicism are actually much more likely to take action, to support causes that they believe in, and that hope is especially important not for people with lots of privilege, but in times of struggle. So a long answer, but I hope that's helpful in unpacking these myths. Long answers are fine. So you talked about hope. Well, first of all, you mentioned George Carlin, who there's some evidence that he himself

was a cynic. One of his jokes is we claim to be good people, but we take bread from the middle of the loaf. So he had a dim view of human nature, at least from what I can tell. But anyway, back to hope. What do you mean by hope? That seems like something we should, to use this term again, double click on. I use that term all the time myself, Dan, and my friends make fun of me because I don't know about you, I have not actually double clicked on a mouse in probably 15 years. I remember double clicking all the time, but it's a very Clinton era memory. Yes, yes, showing our age.

We are, yeah, I think another big distinction that I wanna make, we've differentiated between cynicism and skepticism. I also wanna differentiate between hope and optimism. So optimism is the belief that things will turn out well, generally a positive view of the future. Hope is the belief that things could turn out well. And I know that sounds subtle,

but it's actually a pretty huge difference. If you think that things will turn out well, that can be a pretty complacent perspective. And also again, like cynicism and like naive faith, sort of makes an assumption. It enforces your assumptions on the world, in this case on the future. Hope is much more uncertain.

It acknowledges that we have no idea what's going to happen and yet that things could turn out better, right? It allows us to envision a future that we might want, not that will happen, but that could, and therefore, if optimism is complacent, hope is much more action-oriented. Research finds that when people experience hope, more than when they experience optimism,

they are driven to act in ways that make that possible future that they want more likely to happen. You can think of hope as sort of a magnet pulling us towards the version of the world that we want to see unfold. And I think that oftentimes when people say that hope is toxic, or when they talk about hope washing, they actually are talking about optimism. When you think about an issue like climate change, right?

I think it would be ridiculous, in my opinion, to be optimistic about climate change, right? To say, oh, actually, I think that everything is gonna turn out fine. The evidence is really frightening. But I don't think it's ridiculous at all to be hopeful about climate change because when we think, well, there is a world in which we turn the ship more towards a sustainable future, that actually inspires people, evidence shows, to work much harder on actions

themselves that help mitigate climate change and on pressuring systems, governments, and elites to help with that as well. Coming up, Dr. Zache helps me figure out if I'm actually a cynic and you can answer some of these questions yourself and assess your own level of cynicism. He also talks about why cynicism can arise from our natural impulse to keep ourselves safe. Alice and Matt here from British Scandal. Matt, if we had a bingo card, what would be on there? Oh, compelling storytelling, egotistical white men,

and dubious humour. If that sounds like your cup of tea, you will love our podcast, British Scandal, the show where every week we bring you stories from this green and not always so pleasant land. We've looked at spies, politicians, media magnates, a king, no one is safe. And knowing our country,

we won't be out of a job anytime soon. Follow British Scandal wherever you listen to your podcasts. Flat on the ground at the battlefield of Gettysburg, we creep forwards under the baking July sun, stumbling to our feet to crouch beneath the bullets and bayonets bearing down upon us when we stride down the cream-walled corridors of the West Wing. Yet another political scandal to be stashed in the folder we carry. Turning the doorknob, we enter into the Oval Office as the Great Plains stretch out around us, the horizon free of any sign of life. A strangely terrifying prospect on this wagon trail west, our family and possessions at nature's mercy.

prospect on this wagon trail west, our family and possessions at nature's mercy. Suddenly, the horse's rear spoke by... We wait at midnight, glued to the television screen, as one by one the states turn red or blue, as the 47th President of the United States will be chosen tonight and... Wait a second, that's not happened yet. Let's leave that speculation in conjecture to the rest of the podcasts. Instead, join me, Don Wildman, and my esteemed guests, as I journey through the events that have made the United States the country it is today. We'll visit the battlefields and debate floors where this nation was formed,

meet the characters who have altered it with their touch, and, yes, count the votes that have changed the direction of our laws and leadership. Find American History Hit twice a week, every week, wherever you get your podcasts. American History Hit, a podcast from History Hit. Looking too deep in your meditation practice with a dash of both wisdom and humor? Dive into the 10% Happier Meditation app, download it for free wherever you get your apps and get started today. How can I tell if I'm a cynic?

Is there a way to self-diagnose? Yes, there actually is a test that psychologists developed in the 1950s called the Cook-Medley cynical hostility scale that was developed back in the 1950s by two psychologists. They wanted to make a test for teachers who might or might not get along with their students. They had teachers fill out 50 statements and they were asked whether in general they agree with each of these statements I'll give you three of these Dan now and you can tell me if you agree with them. Okay. Here's the first one in general Do you agree or disagree that no one cares much what happens to you? I disagree

Okay in general, do you agree or disagree that most people dislike helping others? Disagree. Okay. And in general, do you agree or disagree that most people are honest chiefly through fear of getting caught? I disagree with that. Okay. That might be the one I would be most tempted to slightly agree with, but I still disagree with it. But I think numbers are closer to, you know, 65, 35 on that one. Yeah, yeah.

So you, as you said, are pretty unsynaical in that regard. And people can find this test online. It's called the cynical hostility scale. And it turns out that most people answer affirmatively to about a third of the questions here. If you were to have answered one of those positively, you'd be generally as cynical as the population. But a lot of people answer most of these questions

positively and they would be on the high end of cynicism. So that's one way is just to ask yourself your general theories on the world and on people. But for people who don't wanna go online and take a whole questionnaire, I think another thing you can do is just notice your reaction to other people. If you find that when somebody does something nice, you're wondering whether

they really mean it or whether they're actually you have some ulterior motive. That's a clue that you might be feeling cynical. If you find that when you decide whether or not you want to trust somebody, whether you have a new acquaintance and you want to open up about your struggles with them, whether you want to loan somebody your bike, when you want a new babysitter to come and watch your kids. If you find yourself going to all the things that person could do wrong and feeling really hesitant and anxious, that's another sign that maybe you're on the cynical side. There's all sorts of signs that our mind sends to us that really is cynicism talking to us through those

signs. Yeah, I mean, I'm thinking about all of those examples, specifically the, am I suspicious or cynical of somebody when they do something nice for me or give me a gift? I mean, generally speaking, no, but I'm not, I'm not naive and I, I'm free to use my intuition. Sometimes my intuition is polluted by my biases. It's not like I'm willfully blind. I think I've just have a healthy skepticism and sometimes I miss things. Sometimes I catch them.

Sometimes I overindex on the skepticism. But generally speaking, it's not my first instinct anytime I get a gift to think, oh, somebody wants something from me. I would say, Dan, it sounds like you're a hopeful skeptic, which is the mindset that I try to advocate for in the book, right? Which is to have an open mind,

to take in evidence about people, not at all to be naive, to trust your intuition, but also to test your intuition and ask yourself whether what you're receiving from the world matches it. That's the skepticism part. And then the hopeful part is that your default seems to be relatively positive, right? That in a vacuum, before somebody gives you evidence otherwise, you

think, yeah, if you're doing something nice, it's probably because you're a nice person or you have positive intention. How do we develop the mindset that you're recommending, which is hopeful skeptic? Is that what? Yeah, hopeful skepticism. Yeah. Hopeful skepticism. How do we develop that? And I'm curious just to come back to you because it sounds like you've made a bit of a round trip on this. I stole that expression from my brother.

He used that phone call with me yesterday. I'm going to use it a lot now. That you, your sort of factory settings bend towards cynicism and you still retain some of those proclivities and yet you hold out this North Star of hopeful skepticism. How can we work toward that? Cynicism certainly is one of my factory settings. And so I know personally what it's like to try to grow out of it. And one of the things that I would say is, again, it's important to be aware of what your factory settings are.

And Dan, I think you might be aware of what your factory settings are. And Dan, I think you might be blessed with relatively positive factory settings. I think mine turn out to be pretty common. Researchers and psychologists talk about negativity bias. This is the idea that it's really quite easy to pay more attention to negative information than to positive information. And that's probably smart from an evolutionary perspective. If something's threatening our life, we better pay a lot of attention to it.

And if something just happens to be beautiful or remarkable, it's kind of okay if you miss it. It's not great, but you're not going to die from ignoring a sunset. You might die from ignoring a sunset. You might die from ignoring a tsunami, right? So I think because of that, a lot of us are set to look for threats and one of the biggest threats in our environment can be other people and their desire to take advantage of us

or their untrustworthiness. So to me, and I think the evidence backs this up, getting beyond cynicism is first acknowledging it. First being mindful of the fact that, hey, a lot of us, this is the way that we see the world. Second is to realize that other people also talk in ways that brings out our cynicism. We have antenna up for negative information,

and we also tend to emit lots of negative information. One star Yelp reviews are everywhere and I think a lot of people go around giving one star Yelp reviews of life itself. If we look at, in my own lab, we've looked at what causes people to gossip. So we give people examples of folks acting in generous ways and in selfish ways and we ask who do you want to talk about to another

participant who you're not going to meet? Which of these people do you want to share a story about? And we find that people gossip three times more often about selfish people than about generous people. So not only do we think negatively, we share negatively. And of course we do that as individuals, but our media ecosystem does that even more. So we've got this kind of toxic combination between a bias in our minds for negativity

and a bunch of chatter all over our screens that plays into that negativity and makes it stronger. So I think for me, one big step in overcoming cynicism was being quite aware of that. Fighting our biases is an ongoing process. It's not something where you can take a day off because they will come back for you. If you stop thinking about your biases, it's like stopping moving forward on a treadmill. You won't stay still, you'll be pulled backwards. And I think that's one of the most important things.

What I try to do is encourage people to fact check their cynical feelings, to be skeptical about their cynicism. And I do this myself as well. If I find myself being suspicious of people or coming to enormous black and white conclusions about how terrible the world is or how terrible people are, I ask myself, well, wait a minute, Jamil,

what evidence do you have for this claim? I try to bring that analyst perspective back towards my own mind. I try to bring that analyst perspective back towards my own mind. And again, there's a self-interested case for doing this. It's not like you're just doing it to be a good citizen. You're doing it because your life is going to improve and your decision making will get better as well. Oh yeah, I think that's right. And so one, I think skepticism is a much smarter way

of going through the world and you end up learning so much more. But as you said, life improves. And I would say it improves not just in terms of, wow, you are just blissed out all the time. It improves because you're able to more deeply connect with people, which is one of the most powerful experiences in life.

There's this really interesting, and to me, quite sad study where people were asked to give a speech, impromptu speech, about a subject they don't know very much about, which of course is not fun at all and raised everybody's blood pressure. Half of these people had a cheerleader next to them, a stranger who just was there to be supportive

and said, you got this, I know you can do it, you're gonna crush this speech, just a friendly stranger. And it turns out that non-Synics, when they had this friendly person around them, their blood pressure rose half as much as when they were alone. But cynics, when they had this friendly stranger around them, their blood pressure was half as much as when they were alone. But cynics, when they had this friendly stranger around them, their blood pressure was just as high as when they were alone.

And I've experienced this in my more cynical moments and more cynical years. I've also been lonelier because I think social connection is this deep psychological nourishment and cynicism makes it impossible for us to metabolize it. It just makes it hard to internalize the care that other people feel for us and to share our care with them.

So to me, overcoming cynicism, as you said, it's got this great business case, but the business case for it is also about citizenship and about relationships, because it turns out that being there for other people is one of the best ways to be there for ourselves. Exactly. I don't want to take up too much airtime here talking about myself, but just to make sure I'm fully honest, I do think that my factory settings

may resemble yours. It's just that I've now, I think, made the same round trip you've made by practicing a lot of meditation, specifically loving kindness meditation and working on the quality of my relationships and working on the quality of my relationships and working on my mind, which of course is a way to work on your relationships. And so I think I've gotten to hopeful optimist,

but I don't wanna pretend that I came out of the womb that way. And actually that's much more powerful because you and the contemplative work you've done and that you share with others is a commitment to the idea that we are malleable, that our factory settings don't have to be

the only settings that we ever operate under. And I think that's one of the core messages of actually all of psychology and neuroscience over the last century is that we change much more than we realize. And that can be a kind of destabilizing notion for people, but to me it's incredibly empowering. We can choose the direction that we sail

the ship of our life in. And you know, actually I'm curious, you of course have practiced meta a lot and a lot of other types of techniques as well. Do you see contemplative techniques as, in your experience, as directly combating cynicism? Have you seen the way that those techniques change your openness to evidence, for instance, about other people? Meta, M-E-T-T-A, just for people who've never heard of this,

it's also called loving-kindness meditation. It's a specific form of meditation where you It's also called loving kindness meditation. It's a specific form of meditation where you envision a series of people or animals, beings, and send them good vibes by repeating silently in your mind phrases like maybe happy, safe, healthy, live with ease. And as I've said a million times on the show, it can be very annoying to a cynic or a skeptic because it feels quite forced.

And yet there's a ton of data to show that it can have physiological, psychological, and behavioral benefits. I have not seen any data on cynicism specifically, but I can just talk about what's happened in my own, you know, and of one laboratory, which is, I do think it kind of gives you a new, or for me, it has given me a new baseline. Deny me of sleep, give me news that provokes anxiety,

and I'll go back to old baselines or worse. It's not magic, but it's pretty magical that you can, generally speaking, to turn the dial toward warmth. I experienced the same thing when I practiced loving kindness. It's remarkable how you can harness your own mind and point it in a way that is more pro-social.

And it turns out that there is evidence that the times that we are most cynical is often the times that we're most stressed and least able to connect with ourselves. Cynicism is actually one of the four main components of burnout. Christina Maslach, the sort of scientific godmother of burnout, talked about, well, when you're depleted, you have no room for other people in your mind or in your heart,

and it's very easy to feel like everybody's out to get you in some way. Interestingly, research finds that when we ask people to pause and not to say, well, how do you feel about this person or how do you feel about people in general? Actually, if you want to evoke cynicism from somebody, ask them about people in general. If you want to evoke skepticism and hope from people, ask them about an individual, especially somebody who they know, but even a stranger. There's a bunch of research that finds if you ask people, what is a person like deep down?

Who are they really? You hear a story about somebody and you say, who is this person really? People believe that an individual's true self is generally good, right? So cynicism is really prevalent on our screens and in our generalities. In abstractions, it's very easy to be cynical. When there's a real human being in front of us,

when we're paying attention to them and looking at the totality and complexity and really bewildering beauty of just a human life, it's much harder to be cynical and much easier to feel open. I've always thought that that finding relates to me a little bit to contemplative practice also, because when you are really, when you're meditating

and focusing on somebody else in a meditative way, you are forgetting your assumptions about what people are like, and you're focusing on that life in front of you And it's hard not to see the beauty there. I Think that's true. It just kind of inexorably scales at least for me as I think this through I think though the mechanism is less about seeing the the good and potential in individuals, although for sure that's there. It's more like our capacity for warmth, for caring, for giving a shit, for love, whatever you want to call it is a muscle. And this is a way to improve that muscle.

And so to me that, again, I'm not speaking as a scientist, you're the scientist, I'm not speaking as a scientist you're the scientist I'm just speaking as a practitioner that feels like what's happening more than learning to see the good one person and then that leads to you know an omnidirectional warmth which I do think happens too but it's more the former than the latter am I making any sense is that name of that land for you oh yeah absolutely I think that in, when we work the muscles of our own care, we also, well, a bunch of things happen. One, we become more open to humanity in general, right? And two, I think maybe we also open ourselves to common humanity, right? I mean, if I'm working on my awareness, my connection,

my sense of care, if I'm building that muscle, I'm also realizing how much I have in terms of shared experience with really, I mean, one could argue every human being or even every being. And that sense of universality, I think, is another way to overcome cynical thinking. Beyond what we think, there's also actions that we can take to try to build a muscle of hopeful

skepticism. I often think about and try in my own life to take calculated leaps of faith on other people. Ernest Hemingway once wrote, "'If you want to find out if you can trust somebody, trust them.'" If you think about a skeptical worldview as being open and saying, well, wait, what are my assumptions based on? And fact checking and wondering what evidence you would need in order to really believe a claim,

leaps of faith are a way of gathering that evidence of doing science in your own life. And the only way to do science with your own life is to take chances. And they don't have to be enormous chances, but in general, what I try to do these days is I look for opportunities where I feel

just a bit apprehensive, right? If I have a person who I'm getting to know and I ask myself, should I go with small talk here or should I disclose this thing that's really been on my mind that's maybe a little bit difficult or complicated? Or if somebody in my lab wants to start a new project and say, well, should I really make sure

that they're doing everything right or should I give them more freedom? I try to catch myself being nervous about what other people will do and then jump in anyways. And I found that the data that I get back from those little tiny experiments is enormously hopeful, full of pleasant surprises and

acts as a countermeasure to my cynicism the next time because I can say, well wait a minute, what did I learn a week ago when I took that leap of faith on somebody? Well, they responded beautifully so maybe my apprehension this time I don't have to listen to as much. Isn't it possible that what's going on here, that there are two things going on here simultaneously on the one on your side, when you take a leap of faith, there's the leap of faith that's happening on the other side, people generally, and I took, I'm taking this line from an old movie lean on me where the principal of the school says, people tend to rise to the level

of expectation. If the expectation is, I trust you, that tends to call forth people's better angels. Am I speaking with some degree of accuracy here? That is absolutely accurate. In fact, economists have a term for that, earned trust. That is, you know, we tend to think that some people are trustworthy and others are not. And that's true to some degree, but it's also true that our actions matter in shaping the way that other people behave, right? As the quote from Lina Amigos, people rise to our expectations, but they also fall to the level of our expectations if those expectations are low. So one finding from the science of cynicism

is that cynics often treat people as though they are untrustworthy and selfish, so they might threaten them or micromanage them or spy on them, for instance, and that brings out the very worst in people. Cynics tell a story full of villains and end up living inside it because they create the conditions for their bleak prophecies to come true.

But that has some power to it as well, because if we can acknowledge and own our own influence over other people, then we can wield it to bring out the best in them by taking those leaps of faith, absolutely. In my lab, we actually find that even teaching people what we call a reciprocity mindset, that is telling people, hey, your actions matter. If you trust somebody, yeah, you're taking a chance,

but you're also giving somebody a gift, and they're more likely to repay that gift. Just teaching people that makes them more willing to trust and makes the people around them more trustworthy. So I think you're exactly right. There's this self-fulfilling prophecy angle to these leaps of faith that I think is really important for people to understand.

["The New World"] Coming up, Jamil talks about some of his own missteps on the path toward hopeful skepticism and how to get better at disagreeing with other people while not assuming the worst. Something that is especially useful in the middle of a turbulent election. Hey, it's Guy Raz here, and you might know me as the host of How I Built This. Well, did you know about my other show, The Great Creators? It's where I interview some of the most celebrated actors and musicians of our time about their life, their craft, and where they find their ideas.

You'll hear giants like Tom Hanks. Very rarely do I have a conversation, quite frankly, like this one guy. Jason Sudeikis talked about how he became Ted Lasso. People will say to us, you know, the show saved me. I will say back, me too. Plus musicians like Ellie Golding, Bjork, and Lainey Wilson. I remember having that crazy feeling of, I am going to this. I'm gonna be on that stage. You can check out our newest season and browse our whole catalog, 80 plus episodes by following the great creators on the Wondery app

or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to the great creators early and ad free right now on Wondery Plus. Let me reset for a second here. So the first half of your book really is this evidence-based thundering against the pernicious impacts of cynicism. The second half of the book really turns to sort of ways that we can internally and externally develop this hopeful skepticism. You just listed a few of the examples there,

the reciprocity mindset and leaps of faith, but there's more. One thing that really stuck out to me was how to build, you use the term cultures of trust in your world. That can be in a workplace, it can be your family, it can be your friend group, it can be in your community. So I wanna hear a lot about how to do that, but maybe start by saying how you screwed this up, because I related to that as somebody who has screwed up in worse ways.

So I'll hand you the mic. Yeah, I screw up all the time. And one of those big screw ups was when I had a chance to build a culture of my own for the first time. So I've been at Stanford now for 12 years and this was my first job. It was my first academic job. You know, I worked all sorts of jobs in high school and college, but after getting my doctorate and finishing my training,

I was just landed really the job that I'd been dreaming about for most of my adult life, which is to be a professor at this institution. And I was so excited, but for every ounce of excitement, there were at least three and a half ounces, the airport maximum of fear and anxiety. I was terrified of screwing up this one shot that I had to contribute as a scientist to do work that mattered. For folks who are not in the academic world, jobs like the one I got are also temporary. You're an assistant professor, you've got a few years to do the very best work you can, and then a bunch of people who you don't

know who are much older and more powerful than you get to look at that work and they secretly tell your bosses whether you should keep your job or not. That's called tenure, but it really feels more like going through some tunnel of pain and torture. It's very anxiety provoking, and I know it's also an extremely privileged position to be in, but it was really hard for me as an anxious person as well.

One of the things that made me most anxious was that I didn't have control anymore. As a student, I was the one doing all of the research. If I screwed up, it was me screwing up. And if I did well, it was me doing well. Now that I was a professor, I had to hire people, graduate students, postdocs, research assistants, to hire people, graduate students, postdocs, research assistants, and I had to count on them to do good work. I couldn't do it for them. If they did good work, then that was going to be good for them and for me, and if they didn't, then my shot at Stanford was up.

And I reacted to this in a way that I am deeply unproud of, which is I think I pressured these folks a lot. I think that I micromanaged them. I sort of probably made it too obvious when I was disappointed in their performance. Honestly, Dan, even talking about this many years later, I feel that sort of flush in my face of shame. And your listeners might not know this,

but the irony is that what I do for a living most of the time is study empathy. So here I was running an empathy lab in a toxic way. Again, you can't make this up. One of the people in my lab ended up coming to me and saying, Hey, this is just too stressful. The lab had been open for less than a year. And she said, if you can't find a way to make this a more healthy workplace, I'm gonna leave. And that was like a bucket of cold water on me. I'm so grateful to her, but it really shone a light on everything that I was doing wrong.

I've had very similar experiences. I would argue probably significantly worse, but so you have my empathy to be a little cute. Okay, so you learned the hard way. You've got a bucket of ice water thrown on top of you. So you learned you were screwing it up. How do you not screw it up? How do all of us not screw it up?

I'll talk about what I did, and then I'll try to extrapolate from that to some principles about what any of us can do to build more, I guess, hopeful and trusting cultures. The first thing I did was try to own up to it. I went to different members of my lab and apologized and basically said, I'm really stressed and that's not an excuse, but I've clearly have been letting my stress explode all over this community and if you've got shrapnel from it stuck in you, that's my fault.

I think that as a person who had relative power, it was important for me to take responsibility first. Then I asked the lab to come together and we wrote a manual for all of our expectations. And it started not just with what time do we show up to work or what's the code for the printer. It started with what are our core values that we share. And so we circulated this document where people could talk about, well, what

values do we want represented in this community? What do we care about? And how are we going to show those values in our actions? And that was a conversation that after having it, I couldn't believe we hadn't started there. But I think a lot of communities don't start there. A lot of communities start with, well, what are we doing today? What are our action items? As opposed to why are we here? What is the point of this work? And that was a sort of a north star that we've

kept since then. And then the third step that I took was to be really conscious about these leaps of faith. And I think that we can all take leaps of faith as we've been talking about as individuals, but I think if you're a leader anywhere, those leaps of faith, their power is amplified by an enormous amount. So I have become very intentional about giving all the people who work in my lab lots of freedom. That's not to say that I'm not there for them. I call it underbearing attentiveness. I try to be really super present and available, but not pushy about that availability, right? To say, you come to me when you need something,

otherwise I'm gonna trust you to do it. Last thing I'll say, I also try to trust loudly. That is, not to say, hey, why don't you do this entire project and just come to me whenever you need help. It's, why don't you take the first major steps, the creative steps in this project, come to me if you need help with anything.

But the reason I'm telling you to start is because I know you can do it, right? Because I've seen your work so far and I really believe that you have the capacity to do this. I'm trusting you because you've given me enough evidence to trust you already. I think that we've talked about this reciprocity, this earned trust that people step up to meet your expectations. They do so even more if

you make those expectations clear, right? If you say them out loud instead of letting them sit inside your mind. So that's what you did. You mentioned there may be some things that the rest of us could consider. So that's what you did, you mentioned there may be some things that the rest of us could consider? Yeah, I think that this loud trust is really quite important, especially anybody in leadership. We might trust people more than they even know that we do, and people might feel really skittish around us. And so it's important, I think, to be pretty explicit about your belief in people, especially when you're acting in a way that shows that belief.

Another sort of general principle that we can draw from the values statement that my lab did is to help people see each other's principles. I work with a lot of communities, school systems, hospital systems, companies, and one of the first things that I do, let's say that they want wanna build a more collaborative culture is I'll survey them anonymously and I'll say,

how much do you want collaboration to be at the center of your work? And how much do you think the average person in this community wants that? And every single time, Dan, I get completely different answers. Secretly, people desperately yearn for collaboration, for empathy, for connection, but they don't realize that everybody else is secretly yearning for that as well.

So we sort of hide oftentimes the more positive qualities that we have because they seem cringe or weird. And through our hiding, we induce everybody else around us to hide theirs as well. So one of the things that I encourage people to do is to unhide those qualities. And a good way to do that is by collecting data. Again, I think that hope and skepticism and positivity, they sound so silly and warm and fuzzy. And I know, Dan, you feel this way sometimes about things that you learn about meditation and happiness. And I feel the same way about some things that I study.

And they seem silly because they seem like they're counterculture. Like that's not what people want, but it is what people want. So collecting data, again, being empirical and showing people, Hey, did you know that if you look around you, nine out of 10 people in this room want more connection and collaboration. That's an incredibly powerful experience for people to have. Well, that kind of gets me to another sort of action point in the book, which pertains to how it's kind of citizenship, how we can

orient toward current events and whatever society we happen to live. You and I are recording this in the midst of an incredibly tumultuous presidential campaign in the United States, and we're not going to get too into the details on that if you're listening to this at some point in the future and that race has ended. But it's always tumultuous somewhere and it's actually probably always tumultuous to some degree or another everywhere. So let's talk about polarization. You have this term or you mentioned this term, false polarization, which kind of rhymes with

what you were talking about there in your surveys that you do internally at corporate cultures is that we tend to think that the opposite tribe is more extreme on the issues than it actually is. Can you say a little bit more about that? Yeah, absolutely. And so let's be clear that there is enormous and growing and very troubling division in the US and around the world. So to say that there is such a thing as false polarization

is not the same as saying that polarization is imaginary. It's real and we also imagine it to be much more intense than it is. And when we imagine division to be more intense than it is, it's because we imagine, as you said, the other, whoever that is for us, to be much more extreme than they really are. So research suggests or finds that if you ask people, and this is mostly done in the

US, so I want to be clear about we have a lot of evidence about the US and then some about the rest of the world, but a lot of what I'll be talking about is in an American context. So if you ask US Democrats and Republicans, what does the average person you disagree with think? They will give answers that actually represent the 80th percentile of the other group. So in other words, if you ask me, what does the average person on the other side feel, I tell you something that only the most extreme 20% of people on the other side actually feel.

And it's not just our opinions about specific issues. We also imagine that the other side is about twice as hateful of us as they really are. We think the other side is about twice as willing to overthrow democratic norms as they actually are. And we think that the other side is four times more supportive of political violence than they really are. These are scary realities.

For one, they're scary in our minds, right? I mean, reading these data, I think, wow, my goodness, people who imagine a person they disagree with are really thinking about quite a frightening person, quite a frightening group of people. And this is again not to say that there are not really scary and extreme people in our political environment. Of course there are. The question is not are there terrible people or people who have really extreme and even violent tendencies. The question is is that most people? And we're answering that question incorrectly as a culture, right?

We tend to imagine that way more people are extreme and violent than they really are. And the scary thing about that to me is this again, idea of self-fulfilling prophecies. Because when you imagine that the other side is extreme and violent, that forecloses on any possibility of productive conversation, of compromise, and of peace, which it turns out a super majority

of Americans want desperately, right? We are very divided, but in my lab, we find that more than 80% of Americans also despise how divided we are and wish that there was more opportunity for compromise. But when we imagine the other side is terrible, that opportunity disappears. And I think that's a tragedy because there is so much

that we have in common, but we obscure that through our cynicism in a way that ends up making things worse. So the question I'm coming to, and I suspect a lot of people are coming to, is what do we do about this? And you have a whole long section about how to be better at disagreeing with other people. What specific advice can you give?

Because this may be very relevant to people, both the conversations they're having in their mind with people they're disagreeing with, but also the conversations they may be having with their family members around the dining room table. Well, I actually think that a lot of people are avoiding those conversations. That's true too. There's this incredible study where scientists use geotagging information from phones on

Thanksgiving of 2016. You might recall that that was a politically charged time as well. And what these researchers looked at is whether people in driving to Thanksgiving dinner crossed between a county that had voted blue in the election to one that had voted red or vice versa. In other words, are you going to enemy territory for Thanksgiving dinner? And they found that when people crossed political lines to go to Thanksgiving dinner versus when they didn't, they left 50 minutes earlier. So you've got people sacrificing pie. I mean, pie of all things. They're letting go of pie in order to not talk with somebody they disagree with. And I think the first step in disagreeing better is to have a better view of disagreeing.

We think of it as this really frightening, necessarily toxic thing. We imagine that these conversations are going to be horrible and threatening and that no one will learn anything. In fact, in my lab, we have a study where we ask people, what do you think will happen if a Republican and Democrat come together and talk about political issues? And generally, people think either nothing will change or they think things will get worse.

People will despise each other even more after a conversation than they did before. Well, we then also have people engage in these conversations. We had this study where we brought people together on Zoom to talk again about things they disagree on, not about how the weather is. And we find that after those conversations,

people, when we asked them to rate how pleasant was that conversation on a one to 100 scale, the most common response we get is 100. People are shocked at how positive these conversations are and how reasonable people on the other side are. So again, I think that just if we open ourselves to having a disagreement, it will already be better than we think it is. That said, there are also tools we can use in those disagreements to point them in a productive direction.

One is to try to get beyond your opinions and get to people's stories. When I find myself in a disagreement these days, it's usually, I don't know why, it's usually with an uncle. I feel like everybody disagrees with their uncle. Everybody's got a Facebook uncle that they disagree with. And when I enter a conversation with somebody, I realize that we disagree on something.

I try my best to turn down my sense of threat and turn up my sense of curiosity, not about the person's opinion, but about themselves. And I say, wow, how did you start to feel that way? What's the origin story of your perspective on this? And I find that that disarms people enormously and makes them much more willing to share and then to listen to me.

Another thing I try to do is to point out common ground when I find some and to make sure that we at least agree on what we disagree about. I think a lot of times people disagree about what a conflict even is, which makes it much harder to have a productive one. So I think setting out and being real clear, am I understanding you correctly?

So that type of curiosity on somebody's opinion, on where it came from, and then being open to point out hey actually I think we do agree on XYZ but not so much on ABC. All of these tools it turns out which are known as conversational receptiveness can make for not just friendlier disagreements but more productive ones. What do I mean by productive? Meaning that people actually do discover things that they share in common. And when we are conversationally open, we turn out to learn more from somebody else, but they also turn out to learn more from us. So these are all tools that I think

many of us are very reticent to use because we have this sense that any conversation is between people who disagree is gonna be toxic or is even a betrayal of our own side. And I'd love for people to let go of that. I'm gonna list four of the rules for good disagreement you list in the book. Some of them you've already mentioned,

but I just wanna list them all so that people have them. And then also if there's more you wanna add, I'm very open to hearing it. One, good disagreeers ask questions instead of making statements. Two, they work to get underneath people's opinions to their stories, which you referenced. Three, when they spot common ground, good disagreeers name it. Four, when they're unsure about something, they say so rather than pretending to be confident.

Much more succinct than I was, but yes, those are exactly the principles of conversational receptiveness. And yeah, I do wanna double click on this idea that I think oftentimes even expressing openness itself has gotten a bad rap. There's a sense that we have that if I listen to somebody, I'm platforming them or I'm condoning their view or I'm even losing the argument.

I'm betraying my own side by even listening to somebody who I disagree with. That I think is an understandable but deeply unproductive way to disagree, especially because we are so wrong about the average person that we disagree with. I see this a lot in our culture these days, that listening itself seems to have gotten

a negative reputation, and it's a real problem. If there's one thing that I wanna yell from the rooftops, it's that we need to be at the very least, I'm not saying that you have to agree with anybody or decide that they're right at all, but at the very least we have to reclaim openness and curiosity as virtues as opposed to vices. Yes.

I sometimes think, and I've referenced it before in the show, I sometimes think about a tweet from Ian Bremmer, who's a political scientist. I believe that's his title. Ian, if I screwed that up, I apologize. Anyway, I admire Ian, and he had a tweet, or X, or whatever you want to call it, that said, if you're only following people

who you agree with, you're doing it wrong. I've really tried to consume across the ideological spectrum and I recommend it to everybody. It can be frustrating, but it's good for you. Can you settle a friendly debate I've been having with my friend, Michael? I'm not gonna use Michael's last name because I didn't ask for permission,

but Michael and I, he keeps asking me two things. One, like how do I convince people to meditate who don't want to meditate? And two, how do I talk to people with whom I disagree politically? He and I seem to have the same views politically and when we're encountering somebody who disagrees with us, how do I talk about it?

And I keep telling him, I try to do neither of those things. If I never try to convince anybody to meditate, if somebody asks me what my experiences are, I'll talk about it, but I don't evangelize. And I have learned not to try to talk people out of their points of view, but to do more what you described, which is to get curious about it.

And if I'm asked, I'll say what my points of view are, but not really in a dogmatic way. Even though I may believe them passionately I just don't think it's gonna work to try to convince somebody to see things my way. He actually I Think agrees with me in part, but he's like a dog with a bone He keeps I think part of him thinks that in fact He has said to me you Dan are not helping enough by you need to be more aggressive to try to get people's To change their points of view and I want to be open to his point of view in this conversation. So I'm throwing it to you as the arbiter.

It sounds like Michael has a certain missionary zeal, right? That there's this sense that I've discovered something. It's a crime not to share it with the world and even if the world isn't listening, I have to make them listen. Right. And I think a lot of us feel that way about what we've discovered in our lives. I certainly feel that way about hopeful skepticism, but I think that it's, I would say, Dan, that the data fall more on the side that you're expressing, which is that when we try to convince somebody of something, they can tell that we're trying to convince them of something.

And that puts up people's walls more quickly than almost any other conversational experience they can have, right? When somebody's trying to do something to your mind, a natural response is to resist that, right? It turns out that that's true of politics as well. There's a bunch of research on something known as deep canvassing. This is a technique where canvassers, you've heard of this, right? They go door to door or phone to phone and they

do the opposite of what canvassers usually do, right? Typically a canvasser comes to your door and they say, do you support issue X? And you say yes. And they say, okay, good. Or you say no, and they say, how dare you? Here's 40 statistics and 90 facts that will make you feel terrible

for not supporting issue X. And kind of browbeats you into submission, right? This is sort of conversational wrestling pin of sorts that they try to put you into. That turns out to be much less effective than deep canvassing, which is almost the opposite. Deep canvassers show up and they say, hey, how do you feel about issue X? And you tell them and they say, that's super interesting. Tell me more about why you feel that way. What's your story?

Have you had an experience that led you to feel this way? And then after you share your experience, they share their experience. They say, that's really interesting. Would it be okay for me to tell you about what I've been through? And reciprocity being what it is, once somebody listens to you, you feel much more inclined to listen to them and canvassers then share their story. That type of canvassing is much more compelling and is much more likely to actually change people's attitudes. So in a deep irony, one of the best ways to not change somebody's mind is to try. And one of the best ways to change somebody's mind is to not try. Take that Michael.

I hope I'm changing your mind. Jamil, this has been a pleasure. We only have a few minutes left and I have a few sort of final questions I like to ask people. One is, was there something you were hoping to talk about that we didn't get to? Yeah, yeah. I do want to talk about one other thing. It's quite related to the themes that we've discussed. I'm a parent, you are as well, and I think a lot of cynicism for me and a lot of my mission to fight my own cynicism comes from my experience as a parent. I think a lot of what we do as parents is to try to protect our kids, and I think that

protectionism can get us to a place where we make them cynical by accident. Before I started working on this book, I noticed that I was telling my daughters a lot about threatening things in their environment. We live in a big city. I'm telling them, hey, you know, watch out for people, I was telling them about the world was a story full of threats and human threats in particular. And there is evidence that we are creating inadvertently a very untrusting and very cynical generation by trying to protect kids. We are shrinking their abilities to trust. And anyways, there's lots of abilities to trust. And anyways, there's lots of ways to push against that, many of which we've already talked

about, but basically applying these same techniques of an open mind, leaps of faith, and what I would call positive gossip, sharing positive information, I think implementing that with the next generation is really important. This is the final question. Can you remind everybody of the name of your book and the book you wrote before it and your website and where you are on social media? Can you just plug everything please? Sure. My new book is called Hope for Cynics, the surprising science of human goodness. Before that, I wrote a book called The War for Kindness, Building Empathy in a Fractured World.

My lab is the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab, and you can find us at ssnl.stanford.edu. I'm on social media a little bit. My drug of choice is the site formerly known as Twitter, so you can find me there at ZakiJam, Z-A-K-I-J-A-M. Thank you very much for coming on. Great job. Dan, thanks so much for having me.

Thanks again to Dr. Jamil Zacky. Don't forget to check out his new book, Hope for Cynics. Before I go, I want to thank everybody who worked so incredibly hard to make this show happen. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our managing producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme. If you like 10% happier, and I hope you do, you can listen early and ad free right now

by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey.