Dr. Jamil Zaki
Appearances
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
kids who were securely attached didn't look very long at those stable interactions, but looked longer at interactions that were unstable. Interesting. It's almost as though there is a setup that kids develop very early. Can I count on people? Am I safe with people?
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
And insecure attachment is a signal coming early in life, no, you're not safe with people, that I think, well, and the data show, elaborates later in life into mistrust in other relationships.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
That's a very sharp way of thinking about it, actually. And I wish that people knew more about the discrepancy between these two ways of viewing the world. Cynicism and skepticism, people often use them interchangeably. In fact, they're quite different, and I would argue that one is much more useful for learning about the world and building relationships than the other.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
Again, cynicism is a theory that's kind of locked in, that no matter what people show you, their true colors are, again, untrustworthy and self-oriented. It's a hyper Darwinian view, right? That ultimately people are red in tooth and claw. Skepticism is instead the, I guess, restlessness with our assumptions, a desire for new information.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
One way I often think about it is that cynics think a little bit like lawyers, right? They have a decision that they've already made about you and about everybody. And they're just waiting for evidence that supports their point. And when evidence comes in that doesn't support their point, they explain it away.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
And you see this, actually, that cynical people will offer more ulterior motives when they see an act of kindness, for instance. They'll explain it away. In that way, I think cynics actually are quite similar to the naive, trusting, gullible folks that they love to make fun of. Naivete, gullibility, is trusting people in a credulous, unthinking way.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
I would say cynicism is mistrusting people in a credulous and unthinking way. So if cynics then think like lawyers sort of in the prosecution against humanity, skeptics think more like scientists. Skepticism classically in philosophy is the belief that you can never truly know anything. But as we think about it now, it's more the desire for evidence to underlie any claim that you believe.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
And the great thing about skepticism is it doesn't require an ounce of naivete. You can be absolutely sharp in deciding, I don't want to trust this person or I do want to trust this person. But it allows you to update and learn from specific acts, specific instances, and specific people.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
That's exactly right. Phil Tetlock has a great term for this called integrative complexity. To what extent can you hold different versions of the world, different arguments in mind? To what extent can you pick from each one what you believe based on the best evidence available?
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
And integrative complexity is a great way to learn about the world and about the social world, whereas cynicism, as you rightly point out, is much more of a heuristic. It's a black and white form of thinking. And the really sad thing is that Cynicism then puts us in a position where we can't learn very much. This is what in learning theory is called a wicked learning environment.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
And I don't want to get too nerdy. Well, I guess I can get nerdy here. You can get as nerdy as you want. This audience likes nerdy. So... Let's think in Bayesian terms, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
So Bayesian statistics is where you have a set of beliefs about the world, you take new information in, and that new information allows you to update your priors, right, into a posterior distribution, into a new set of beliefs. And that's great. That's a great way to learn about the world, to adapt to new information and new circumstances.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
A wicked learning environment is where your priors prevent you from gathering the information that you would need to confirm or disconfirm them. So think about mistrust, for instance, right? It's easy to understand why people mistrust. Some of us are insecurely attached, and we've been hurt in the past. We're trying to stay safe. We don't want to be betrayed.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
This is a completely natural response. It's a totally understandable response. But when we decide to mistrust, we never are able to learn whether the people who we are mistrusting would have been trustworthy or not. When we trust, we can learn whether we've been right or not, right? Somebody can betray us and that hurts and we remember it for years.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
Or more often than not, the data turn out to show us they can honor that trust. We can build a relationship. We can start a collaboration. We can live a full social life. It turns out that the problem is that trusting people incorrectly, you do learn from, but mistrusting people incorrectly, you don't learn from because the missed opportunities are invisible to us.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
Wow. I love that question. There is a lot of variance. And the data on cynicism are much more local to the U.S. typically. I mean, for better and for worse, a lot of research on this is done in an American context. But That said, there's a lot of data on generalized trust, which you could say is an inverse of cynicism, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
So for instance, there are national and international samples of major surveys which ask people whether they agree or disagree that most people can be trusted. And there's a lot of variance around the world. In general, the cultures that are most trusting have a couple of things in common. One, they are more economically equal. than untrusting cultures.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
So there's a lot of great work from Kate Willett and Richard Wilkinson that they have a book called The Spirit Level, where they look at inequality across the world and relate it to public health outcomes. And one of them is trust. There's also a variance in trust over time. So you can look at not just are there places or cultures that trust more than others, but when
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
Does the culture trust more or less? And in the US, that's sadly a story of decline. In 1972, about half of Americans believed that most people can be trusted. And by 2018, that had fallen to about a third of Americans. And that's a drop as big, just to put it in perspective, as the stock market took in the financial collapse of 2008. So there's a lot of variance here. both across space and time.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
And one of the, not the only, but one of the seeming characteristics of cultures that tracks that is how unequal they are. In part because research suggests that when you are in a highly unequal society, economically, there's a sense of zero-sum competition that develops. There's a sense that, wait a minute, anything that another person gets I lose.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
And if you have that inherent sense of zero-sum competition, then it's very difficult to form bonds. It's very difficult to trust other people because you might think, well, in order to survive, this person has to try to outrun me. They have to try to trip me. They have to try to make me fail for themselves to succeed.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
Andrew, I love this trip down memory lane. I'm having all these childhood memories of Tigger and Sesame Street. There's so much in what you're saying. I want to try to pull on a couple of threads here, if that's okay. First, and this one is pretty straightforward, the effect of cynicism on well-being is just really documented and quite negative.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
So there are large prospective studies with tens of thousands of people, several of these studies that measure cynicism and then measure life outcomes in the years and decades afterwards. And the news is pretty bleak for cynics, right? So absolutely lower levels of happiness, flourishing satisfaction with life, greater incidence of depression, greater loneliness.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
But, you know, it's not just the neck up. cynicism affects. Cynics over the course of their lives also tend to have greater degrees of cellular inflammation, more incidence of heart disease, and they even have higher rates of all-cause mortality, so shorter lives than non-cynics. And again, this might sound like, wait a minute, you go from a philosophical theory to a shorter life.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
The answer is, yeah, you do, because we're And again, these are correlational studies, so I don't want to draw too many causal claims, but they're quite rigorous and control for a lot of other factors. But I would say that this is consistent with the idea that really one of the great protectors of our health is our sense of connection to other people.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
And if you are unable or unwilling to be vulnerable around others, to really touch in to that type of connection, it stands to reason that things like chronic stress And isolation would impact not just your mind, but all through your body and your organ systems. So again, the news here is not great.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
And I often think about one of the best encapsulations of a cynical view of life comes from Thomas Hobbes, the philosopher, who in his book Leviathan said, we need a restrictive government because left to our own devices, Human life is nasty, brutish, and short. And ironically, I think that might describe the lives of cynics themselves more than most people.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
So that's point one, right, is that there is this pretty stark negative correlation between cynicism and a lot of life outcomes that we might want for ourselves. But point two, I think, is related to what your dad also noticed, right? which is that, right, if cynicism hurts us so much, why would we adopt it?
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
If it was a pill, if there was a pill that as its side effects listed depression, loneliness, heart disease, and early death, it would be a poison, right? It would have a skull and crossbones on the bottle, but yet we're swallowing it. More of us are swallowing it than we did in years and decades past. Why? Well, one of the answers, I think, is because our culture glamorizes cynicism.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
It's because of the very stereotype that your father pointed out, which is that if you're happy-go-lucky, if you trust people, that kind of seems dull. It seems like maybe you're not that sharp. Maybe you don't understand the world. And there is that strong relationship in our stereotypes, in our models of the world that
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
Susan Fiske and many other psychologists have studied warmth and competence, right? How friendly and caring does somebody seem? And how able do they seem to accomplish hard things? And it turns out that in many studies, people's perception is that these are inversely correlated. That if you're warm, maybe you're not that competent. And if you're competent, maybe you shouldn't be that warm.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
And in fact, if you tell people to act as competently as they can, they'll often respond by being a little bit less nice, a little bit less warm than they would be otherwise. There's also data that find that, where people are presented in surveys with a cynic and a non-cynic. They're told about, here's one person, they really think that people are great overall and they tend to be trusting.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
Here's another person who thinks that people are kind of out for themselves and really doesn't trust most folks. And then they'll ask those people, who should we pick for this difficult intellectual task? And 70% of respondents Pick a cynical person over a non-cynic for difficult intellectual tasks.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
85% of people think that cynics are socially wiser, that they'd be able, for instance, to detect who's lying and who's telling the truth. So most of us put a lot of faith in people who don't have a lot of faith in people. Ironically, and even more ironically, we're wrong to do so. Olga Stavrova, this great psychologist who studies cynicism, has this paper called The Cynical Genius Illusion.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
where she documents all these biases the way that we think cynics are bright and wise, and then uses national data, tens of thousands of people, to show that actually cynics do less well on cognitive tests, on mathematical tests. That trust is related with things like intelligence and education.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
And that in other work, this is not from Olga Stavrova, but from others, that actually cynics do less well than non-cynics in detecting liars. Because if you have a blanket assumption about people, you're not actually attending to evidence in a sharp way. You're not actually taking in new information and making wise decisions.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
No, I think that's absolutely right. And so a couple of things. One, you said that if we know that cynics aren't smarter than non-cynics, why are we deploying them? Well, let's be clear. We know this, meaning you and I know this and scientists know this, but the data show that most people don't know this.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
that we maintain the stereotype in our culture that being negative about people means that you've been around the block enough times, that it is a form of wisdom. So that's a stereotype that I think we need to dispel, first of all. But I do think that, to your point,
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
When we deploy cynics out in the field, you know, when we say, I'm going to be nice, but I want somebody who's really pretty negative, who's really pretty suspicious to protect me or to protect my community. I think that's a really, again, understandable instinct, almost from an evolutionary perspective.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
We are built to pay lots of attention to threats in our environment and threats to our community. And in the early social world, just to do some back of the envelope evolutionary psychology, if you wind the clock back 100, 150,000 years, what is the greatest threat to early communities? It's people, right? It's people who would take advantage of our communal nature.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
The thing that allows human beings to thrive is that we collaborate. But that collaboration means that a free rider Somebody who chooses to not pitch in but still take out from the common pool anything that they want can do exceptionally well. They can live a life of leisure on the backs of a community that's working hard.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
And if you select then for that type of person, if that type of person proliferates, then the community collapses. So it makes sense that we depend on cynics from that perspective, from a threat mitigation perspective, from a risk aversion perspective. But it doesn't make sense from the perspective of trying to optimize our actual social lives, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
And I think that oftentimes, you know, we are risk averse in general, meaning that we're more scared of negative outcomes than we are enticed by positive outcomes. But in the social world, that risk aversion is, I think, quite harmful in a lot of demonstrable ways.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
So there's a little bit of data on this and it suggests a couple of things. One, left to our own devices, our levels of cynicism tend to be pretty stable over time. And also decline in older adulthood, contra the stereotype of the curmudgeonly older person. But another is that cynicism does tend to be pretty domain general.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
So, for instance, cynics – and this makes sense if you look at questionnaires that assess cynicism, which are things like people are honest chiefly through fear of getting caught. or most people really don't like helping each other. I mean, if you're answering those questions positively, you're just not a fan of, you're probably not great at parties, you're not a fan of people.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
And it turns out that people who answer those, this is an old scale developed by a couple of psychologists named Walter Cook and Donald Medley in the 1950s. If you answer the Cook-Medley hostility scale, if you answer these questions positively, you tend to be less trusting of strangers. But you also tend to, for instance, have less trust in your romantic partnerships.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
You have less trust in your friends. And you have less trust in your colleagues. So this is sort of an all-purpose view of the world, at least as Cook and Medley first thought about it. But I do want to build on a great intuition you have, which is that different environments might bring out cynicism or tamp it down. And it turns out that that's also very true.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
As trait-like as cynicism can be, there's lots of evidence that the type of social environment we're in matters a lot. One of my favorite studies in this domain came from Southeastern Brazil. There are two fishing villages in southeastern Brazil. They're separated by about 30, 40 miles. They're similar in socioeconomic status, religion, culture, but there's one big difference between them.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
One of the villages sits on the ocean, and in order to fish on the ocean, you need big boats, heavy equipment. You can't do it alone. You must work together. The other village is on a lake where fishermen strike out on small boats alone, and they compete with one another.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
About 10 years ago, economists, this was a study led by Andreas Liebrand, a really great economist, they went to these villages and they gave the folks who worked there a bunch of social games to play. These were not with fellow fishermen, but with strangers. Games like, would you trust somebody with some money and see if they then want to share dividends with you? Or give in some money yourself.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
Would you like to share some of it with another person? And they found that when they start in their careers, lake fishermen and ocean fishermen were equally trusting and equally trustworthy as well. but over the course of their careers, they diverged. Being in a collaborative environment where people must count on one another to survive made people over time more trusting and more trustworthy.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
Being in a competitive zero-sum environment over time made people less trusting and less trustworthy. Now, one thing that always amazes me about this work is that people in both of these environments are right. If you're in a competitive environment, you don't trust and you're right to not trust. if you're in a collaborative environment, you do trust and you're right to trust.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
And this is from the point of view of economic games and I think much broadly construed as well. So one question then becomes, well, which of these environments do we want to be in, right? I think the costs in terms of wellbeing and relationships is quite obvious if you're in a competitive environment.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
And then the second question of course is, how do we put ourselves in the type of environment that we want, knowing that that environment will change who we are over the course of our lives?
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
Yeah, this is a great perspective. And a couple of things I want to be clear on. One, I am not here to judge or impugn cynics. I should confess that I myself struggle with cynicism and have for my entire life. Part of my journey to learn more about it and even to write this book was an attempt to understand myself and to see if it is possible to unlearn cynicism Because frankly, I wanted to.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
So you will get no judgment from me of people who feel like it's hard to trust. I think that another point that you're bringing out that I want to co-sign is that saying that Competition over the long term, zero-sum competition can erode our trust, isn't the same as saying that we should never compete. Competition is beautiful.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
I mean, the Olympics are going on right now, and it's amazing to see what people do when they are at odds trying to best one another. Incredible feats are accomplished when we focus on the great things that we can do, and oftentimes we are driven to greatness by people we respect who are trying to be greater than us.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
So absolutely competition can be part of a very healthy social structure and a very healthy life. I think that the broader question is whether we construe that competition at the level of a task, or at the level of the person. In fact, there's a lot of work in the science of conflict and conflict resolution that looks at the difference between task conflict and personal conflict.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
You can imagine in a workplace, two people have different ideas for what direction they wanna take a project in. Well, that's great if it leads to healthy debate and if that is mutually respectful.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
But the minute that that turns into blanket judgments about the other person, oh, the reason that they want this direction is because they're not so bright or because they don't have vision or because they're trying to gain favor. That's when we go from healthy skeptical conflict to into cynical and destructive conflict. And you see this with athletes as well. Athletes often are very good friends.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
And some of the people that they respect the most are the folks who they're battling in the case of contact sports and boxing, literally battling, but they can have immense and positive regard for one another outside of the ring in those contexts.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
So I think that there's a huge difference between competition that's oriented on tasks, which can help us be the best version of ourselves, and competition that bleeds into judgment, suspicion, and mistrust.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
And I appreciate you saying, yeah, I also try to avoid good, bad language or moral judgment. But I think that many of us have the goals of having strong relationships and of flourishing psychologically and of learning accurately about the world. And if those are your goals, I think it's fair to say that cynicism can block your way towards them. I love this.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
I've never thought about it in this way, but I love that perspective. And there is almost a philosophical certainty. Maybe it's not a happy philosophical certainty, but we love to, right? that determine what will happen. And the laws of physics are some of our most reliable, right? And really we all use theories to predict the world, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
I mean, we all have a theory of gravity that lives inside our head. We don't think objects with mass attract one another, but we know if we drop a bowling ball on our foot, we're gonna probably maybe not walk for the next week or at least, right? So we use theories to provide explanatory simplicity to a vast and overwhelmingly complex world.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
And absolutely, I think cynicism has a great function in simplifying. But of course, in simplifying, we lose a lot of the detail. We lose a lot of the wonder that maybe we experienced earlier in life. And, you know, I do want to... You're...
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
beautiful description of kids and their sort of sense of, I suppose, perennial surprise makes me think about another aspect of what we lose to cynicism, which is the ability to witness the beauty of human action and human kindness. My friend Dacher Keltner studies awe, this emotion of experiencing something vast and also experiencing ourselves as small and a part of that vastness.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
And he wrote a great book on awe. And in it, he talks about his research where he cataloged what are the experiences that most commonly produce awe in a large sample, a large representative sample of people. Now, I don't know about you, Andrew, but when I think about awe, my first go-to is Carl Sagan's pale blue dot.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
This image of a kind of nebula band, you know, sort of cluster, basically, stardust, really. And there's one dot in it with an arrow, and Carl Sagan says, that dot is Earth, and every king and tyrant and mother and father, every... a person who's ever fallen in love and every person who's ever had their heart broken, they're all on that tiny dot there.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
I go to that, I show that to my kids all the time. When I think of awe, I think of outer space. I think of groves of redwood trees. I think of drone footage of the Himalayas, right? But Dacre finds that if you ask people what they experience awe in response to, the number one category is what he calls moral beauty, right? everyday acts of kindness, giving, compassion, and connection.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
This is also related to what Dacher and John Haidt talk about in terms of moral elevation, witnessing positive actions that actually make us feel like we're capable of more. And moral beauty is everywhere. If you are open to it, it is the most common thing that will make you feel the vastness of our species.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
And to have a lawful physics-like prediction about the world that blinkers you from seeing that, that gives you tunnel vision and prevents you from experiencing moral beauty, seems like a tragic form of simplicity.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
Yeah, great questions. And there is some work on this, and a lot of it comes actually in the context of the workplace, right? So you can examine, I mean, these Brazilian fishing villages were after all workplaces, right, that led people to more or less cynicism. But other workplaces also have structures that make people more or less able to trust one another, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
One version of this is what's known as stack ranking. And, you know, this is where people, managers, are forced to pick the highest performing and lowest performing members of their team and, in essence, eliminate the people who are at the bottom 10% every six or 12 months.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
Stack ranking has thankfully mostly fallen out of favor in the corporate world, but it was very de rigueur in the late 20th and early 21st century, you know, up until 10 or so years ago. And it still exists in some places. And the idea, again, was if you want people to be creative, if you want them to do their best, tap into who they really are. And who are we really?
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
We are really a hyper individualistic, again, Darwinian species. Really, stack ranking is a social Darwinist approach to management. And the idea is, well, great, if you threaten people, if you make them want to defeat one another, they will be at their most creative when they are trying to do that, right? That it will bring out their best. The opposite is true.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
I mean, stack-ranked workplaces, of course, are miserable. The people in them are quite unhappy and more likely to leave their jobs. But some of the more interesting work pertains to what stack ranking does to creativity. Because it turns out that if your job is to just not be at the bottom of the pile... then the last thing you want to do is take a creative risk.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
You do not want to go out on a limb. You do not want to try something new if other people are going to go after you for doing that. And if you screw up or if it doesn't go well, you're eliminated from the group. So I think you're exactly right that these cynical environments are also highly conservative. I, of course, don't mean politically conservative.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
I mean conservative in terms of the types of choices that people make. And that's sort of, I think, at the level of individual creativity. But there's also a cost at the level of what we might call group creativity. A lot of our best ideas come not from our minds, but from the space between us, from dialogue or from group conversation.
Huberman Lab
How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
And it turns out that in stacked rank, zero-sum environments, people are less willing to share knowledge and perspective because doing so amounts to helping your enemy succeed, which is the same as helping yourself fail. So to the extent that creativity requires success, a sort of collaborative mindset, then cynicism is preventative of that.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
And there's actually some terrific work by Anita Woolley and colleagues that looks at group intelligence, collective intelligence. This is the idea that, of course, people have levels of intelligence that can be measured in various ways and have various forms of intelligence as well.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
But groups, when they get together, have a type of intelligence and especially creative problem-solving intelligence that goes above and beyond the sum of their parts, that can't be explained and actually in some cases is almost orthogonal. to the intelligence of the individuals in that group, right? Controlling for the intelligence of individuals, there's a group factor that still matters.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
And so Anita Woolley and others have looked at, well, what predicts that type of collective intelligence? And a couple of factors matter. One is people's ability to understand each other's emotions. So interpersonal sensitivity. But another is their willingness to, in essence, pass the mic, to share the conversation and to collaborate.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
And so again, succeeding, thriving, optimizing and being creative, both at the individual and at the group level, require environments where we feel free and where we feel safe and where we feel that contributing to somebody else can also contribute to ourselves.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
Well, the first thing that I would do is give you that classic questionnaire from Cook and Medley, which would just ask you about your theories of the world. What do you think people are like? Do you think that people are generally honest? do you think that they are generally trustworthy?
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
No, it's a series of 50 statements. And you're asked in a binary way, do you agree or disagree with each of these statements? Since then, Olga Stavrova and others have adapted Cook Medley and made it a shorter scale and turned the questions into continuous one to nine or one to seven answers.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
But generally speaking, these are discrete questions that numerically or quantitatively tap our general theories of people. If you were in my lab, I might also ask you to play some different economic games, the trust game being the number one that we might use here. So I can explain it. So the trust game involves two players, and one of them is an investor.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
They start out with some amount of money, let's just say $10. They can send as much of that money as they want to a trustee. The money is then tripled in value. So if the investor sends $10 in the hands of the trustee, it becomes $30. The trustee can then choose to give back whatever amount they want to the investor.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
So they can be exactly fair and give $15 back, in which case both people end up pretty much better off than they would have without an act of trust. The trustee can keep all $30 themselves, betraying the investor. Or the trustee can give more than 50% back. They can say, well, I started out with nothing. Why don't you take two-thirds back? And this is one terrific behavioral measure of trust.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
And it can be played in a couple of different ways. One is binary, where I would say, Andrew, you can send $10 to an internet stranger, or you can send nothing. And they can choose to send you back half, or they can choose to send you back nothing. Would you do it? Actually, I'm curious. Would you do that?
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
Yeah. Follow-up question. In that type of study, what percentage of trustees do you think make the trustworthy decision of sending back the money?
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
55%. Yeah. So your prediction there is quite aligned with most people's. There's a great study by Fetchenhauer and Dunning that found that people, when they're asked to forecast, they say, I bet 50% to 55% of people will send this money back, will make this binary trust decision. In fact, 80% of trustees make the pro-social and trustworthy decision.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
And again, what Fechenhauer and Dunning found is that when we have negative assumptions, we're less likely to send over the money and therefore less likely to learn that we were wrong, right? And so that's one of, it's another example of where cynical beliefs, I mean, you're interesting because you had the belief that's a 50% chance, but you still chose to trust, right?
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
So from a Bayesian perspective, when that person actually sent the money back, which they would have an 80% chance of doing, and if I were to ask you again, what percentage of people give back, you might update your perception. Absolutely. Right? But without any evidence, you can't update your perception. Right. And this is just one of many examples.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
It turns out that there's a lot of evidence that when asked to estimate how friendly, trustworthy, compassionate, or open-minded others are, people's estimates come in much lower than data suggest. And this to me is both the... Tragedy of cynical thinking, those heuristics that we're using, and a major opportunity for so many of us.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
It's a tragedy because we're coming up with these simple black and white physics-like predictions about the world, and they're often wrong. They're often unduly negative. An opportunity because to the extent that we can tap into a more scientific or curious mindset, to the extent that we can open ourselves to the data, pleasant surprises are everywhere.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
The social world is full of a lot more positive and helpful and kind people than we realize, right? The average person underestimates the average person. This is not to say that there aren't awful people who do awful things every day around the world. There, of course, are. But we take those extreme examples and over-rotate on them.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
We assume that the most toxic, awful examples that we see are representative when they're not. So we miss all these opportunities, but understanding that I hope opens people to gaining more of those opportunities, to using them and to finding out more accurate and more hopeful information about each other.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
It's a terrific question. It's hard to provide a very clear answer. And I don't want to get out over my skis with what is known and what's not known. Social media has been a tectonic shift in our lives. It has coincided with a rise in cynicism. But as you know, history is not an experiment.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
So you can't take two temporal trends that are coincident with one another and say that one caused the other. That said... My own intuition and a lot of the data suggests that in at least some ways, social media is a cynicism factory, right? I mean, so let's first stipulate how much time we're spending on there. I mean, the average person goes through 300 feet of social media feed a day.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
Is that right? Yeah. They've measured it in feet? Approximately the height of the Statue of Liberty. So we're doing one Statue of Liberty worth of scrolling a day, much of it doom scrolling, if you're anything like me, at least. And so then the question becomes, what are we seeing when we scroll for that long? Who are we seeing? And are they representative of what people are really like?
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
And the answer in a lot of ways is no. What we see on social media is not representative of the human population. So there's a lot of evidence. A lot of this comes from William Brady, now at Northwestern, and Molly Crockett, that When people tweet, for instance, I mean, a lot of this is done on the site formerly known as Twitter.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
When people tweet in outrage and when they tweet negatively and when they tweet about, in particular, immorality, moral outrage, that algorithmically those tweets are broadcast further. They're shared more. And this does a couple of things. One, it reinforces the people who are already tweeting in that way. So William Brady has this great work using a kind of reinforcement learning model.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
Reinforcement learning is where you do something, you're rewarded, and that reward makes you more likely to do that same thing again. And it turns out that... Brady found that when people tweet in outrage and then get egged on, and oftentimes I should say this is tribal in nature.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
It's somebody tweeting against somebody who's an outsider and then being rewarded by people who they consider to be part of their group, right? When that happens, that person is more likely in their future tweets to turn up the volume on that outrage and on that moral outrage in particular. So there's a sort of ratchet effect, right, on the people who are sharing.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
But a second question becomes, well, what about the people watching? What about the rest of us? Claire Robertson has a great paper on this where she documents that a vast majority, I mean, 90 plus percent of tweets are created by the 10% of the most active users. And this is in the political sphere.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
And these are probably not representative, these folks, not representative of the rest of us in terms of how extreme and maybe how bitter their opinions are. And so we, when we're scrolling that Statue of Liberty's worth of information, we think that we're seeing the world. We think that we're seeing our fellow citizens. We think that we're getting a picture of what people are like.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
In fact, we're pulling from the fringes. And what this leads to is a misconstrual of what the world is really like. This is, by the way, not just part of social media. It's also part of legacy media. Communication theorists talk about something called the mean world syndrome.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
Where the more time that you spend looking at the news, for instance, the more you think violent crime is up in your area, the more you think you're in danger of violent crime, even during years when violent crime is decreasing. enough to remember when Stranger Danger was this big, massive story.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
And every time you wanted cereal, the milk carton would have a picture of a kid who had been kidnapped by a stranger. And during that time, if you asked people how many kids are being kidnapped by strangers in the U.S., they would in many cases say 50,000 children are being kidnapped each year in the U.S., Can you imagine what the world would be? There would be SWAT teams on every corner.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
The real number in those years was closer to 100 kids per year. Now, let me be clear. Each one of those is an absolute tragedy. But there's a big difference here. And oftentimes when we tune into media, we end up with these enormously warped perceptions of, where we think that the world is much more dangerous than it really is. We think that people are much more extreme than they really are.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
And because stories of immorality go viral so much more often than stories of everyday goodness. I mean, I love Upworthy as well, but it's not winning right now in the social media wars. Not yet, not yet, not yet. And so this leaves us all absolutely exhausted and also feeling alone. People who feel like, wow, I actually don't feel that much outrage or I don't want to feel that much outrage.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
I actually don't want to hate everybody who's different from me, for instance. I'm just exhausted by all this. We feel like, well, I guess I'm the only one because everybody else seems really excited about this battle royale that we've put ourselves in. But in fact, most people are just like the exhausted majority, right?
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
We're paying so much attention to a tiny minority of what the journalist Amanda Ripley calls conflict entrepreneurs, people who stoke conflict on purpose, that we're confusing them with the average.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
The way that psychologists think of cynicism these days is as a theory, a theory about human beings. It's the idea that generally people at their core are selfish, greedy, and dishonest. Now, that's not to say that a cynical person will deny that somebody could act kindly, for instance, could donate to charity, could help a stranger, but they would say all of that
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
Well, we as a species, I think, are characterized by what we would call negativity bias, right? Negative events and threats loom larger in our minds. And that happens in a number of domains. Our decision-making is negatively biased in that we'd prefer to avoid a negative outcome than to pursue a positive outcome. That's the classic work of Kahneman and Tversky, for instance.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
the impressions that we form are often negatively skewed.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
So classic work in psychology going back to the 1950s shows that if you teach somebody about a new person who they've never met and you list three positive qualities that this person has and three negative qualities, people will very much judge the person on their worst qualities and also remember more about their negative qualities than about their positive qualities.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
And again, you can see why this would be part of who we are, because we need to protect one another. We also tend to, by the way, not just think in a negatively biased way, but speak and share in a negatively biased way. In my lab, we had a study where people witnessed other groups of four playing an economic game where they could be selfish or they could be positive.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
And we asked them, okay, we're going to ask you to share a piece of information about one of the people you were playing this game with for a future generation of participants. Who would you like to share about? And when somebody in a group acted in a selfish way, people shared information about them three times more often than when they acted in a generous way. So we gossip negatively.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
And again, that gossip is pro-social. The idea is if there's somebody out there harming my community, of course, I'm gonna shout about them from the rooftops because I wanna protect my friends. It's a very noble instinct in a way.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
But we further found that when we actually showed a new generation of participants the gossip that the first generation shared and we asked, hey, how generous and how selfish were people in that first generation? They vastly underestimated that group's generosity. Does that make sense?
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
In other words, in trying to protect our communities, we send highly biased information about who's in our community and give other people the wrong idea of who we are. And I see that unfolding on social media every day of my life. Every day that I'm on social media, I do try to take breaks. But when I'm on there, I see it. And to your question, what do we do here?
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
Why don't positive networks, positive information, why doesn't it proliferate more? I think it's because of these ingrained biases in our mind. And I understand that that can sound fatalistic. Because it's like, oh, maybe this is just who we are. But I don't think that we generally accept our instincts and biases as a life sentence, as destiny.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
A lot of us, well, human beings in general, have the instinct to trust and be kinder towards people who look like us. versus people who don't, for instance, who share our racial makeup. None of us, I think, or a few of us sit here and say, well, I have that bias in my mind, so I guess I'm always going to be racially biased. We try to counteract those instincts.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
All of that kind and friendly behavior is a thin veneer covering up who we really are, which is self-interested. Another way of putting this is, you know, there are these ancient philosophical questions about people. Are we good or bad, kind or cruel, caring or callous? And cynicism is answering all of those in the relatively bleak way that you might.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
We try to become aware of those biases. Depressed people have the bias to see themselves as worthless and to interpret new information they receive through that framework. Well, therapy is the attempt to say, I don't want to feel this way anymore. I want to fight the default settings in my mind. I want to try to explore curiosity, to explore something new.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
So to say that this toxic environment that we're in corresponds with some of our biases is... is to me not the same as saying we are destined to remain in that situation.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
This is a quasi-philosophical question, but from my perspective, absolutely. I mean, I think some of the threats that we learn about on social media are simply wrong. They're phantom threats. We're made to fear something that actually is not happening, made to fear a group of people who are not as dangerous as they're made out to be on social media.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
Of course, I think being informed about the world around us matters to staying safe. But again, I think we can also more broadly construe what safety is.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
If being on social media makes you avoidant of taking chances on people, if it makes you feel as though anybody who's different from you ideologically, for instance, is bloodthirsty and extreme, that's going to limit your life in very important ways. And you can talk about being safe in terms of safe from acute threats.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
But as we've talked about, living a diminished and disconnected life is its own form of danger over a longer time horizon. So really, there are a lot of ways in which in the attempt to stay safe right now, we introduce ourselves to long-term danger.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
Here's a far out example. I mean, I love this train of thought, so I'm gonna try to take it to a logical conclusion that would never actually occur in real life. But a great way to generate more accurate and hopeful skepticism, and by hopeful skepticism, I mean skepticism as we've described, a scientific mindset, a scientific perspective, and a curiosity, a hunger for information.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
And then the hopeful piece, I simply mean skepticism that begins with the understanding that our defaults are often too negative. So that I'm going to be open and I'm going to realize that my gut instinct is probably leading me towards the negative and can be challenged, that I don't have to listen to it all the time.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
So just as a working definition, I think that what I would want in a social media feed would be for it to have more data. If you could compel every person on earth to post to social media about what they're doing today, about what they're thinking, about what they want, about their values, right? If you could compel each, of course, that's dystopic in many ways, but just as a thought experiment.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
And then People's Feed was a representative sample of real people on the planet, real people and people who over time, as I scroll through my Statue of Liberty now, I see what people are really like. I see the people who are extreme and negative and toxic, but I also see a grandmother who's driving her grandkids to hockey practice. I see a nurse who's coming in to help an elderly patient.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
I see somebody who's made an unlikely connection with somebody who they disagree with. A veridical, accurate feed, I think, would drive hopeful skepticism. And that's, again, one of the things that has struck me most over the last few years of doing this research is that we stereotype hope and positivity, as you were saying earlier, as kind of dim, naive, a rose-colored pair of glasses, right?
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
But in fact, I think what the data show us is that we're all wearing a pair of soot-colored glasses all the time. And actually, the best way to make people more hopeful is to ask them to look more carefully, not to look away, but look towards. in a more accurate and open fashion. And there's one version of this that we've tried at Stanford in our own backyard.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
Thanks for bringing that up. Kurt Vonnegut, one of my favorite authors. And to me, that quote is enormously powerful because it expresses the idea of self-fulfilling prophecies. You know, there's this... subjective sense that people have, that our version of the world is the world, that we are passively taking in information, veridically, dispassionately. And in fact, that's not the case.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
So my lab and I, we've for years been surveying as many Stanford undergraduates as we can about their social health. So how connected are they? How mentally healthy are they? A couple of years ago, we asked thousands of undergraduates to describe both themselves and the average Stanford student on a number of dimensions. For instance, how empathic are you?
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
How empathic is the average Stanford student? How much do you like helping people who are struggling? What do you think the average Stanford student would respond to that? How much do you want to meet new people on campus? How do you think the average student would respond? And we discovered not one, but two Stanfords.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
The first was made up of real students who are enormously compassionate, who really want to meet new friends, who want to help their friends when they're struggling. The second Stanford existed in students' minds. Their imagination of the average undergraduate was much less friendly, much less compassionate, much pricklier and more judgmental than real students were.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
So again, we've got this discrepancy between what people perceive and social reality. We found that students who underestimated their peers were less willing to do things like strike up a conversation with a stranger or confide in a friend when they were struggling. And that left them more isolated and lonelier. This is the kind of vicious cycle of cynicism, right?
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
But more recently, my lab, led by a great postdoc, Ray Pei, tried an intervention. And the intervention was as simple as you can imagine. It was show students the real data. We put posters in a number of dorms, experimental dorms we called them, that simply said, hey, did you know 95% of students at Stanford would like to help their friends who are struggling?
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
85% want to make friends with new students. We also worked with Frosh 101, a one unit class that most first year students take and show them the data. We're just showing students to each other. And we found that when students learned this information, they were more willing to take social risks.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
And six months later, they were more likely to have a greater number of friends to be more socially integrated. So here again is a tragic and vicious cycle, But then there's a virtuous cycle that can replace it if we just show people better information.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
Again, I don't imagine that there'll ever be a social media feed where everybody has to post and you see an actually representative sample of the world. But if we could, I do think that that would generate a more hopeful perspective because the truth is more hopeful than what we're seeing.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
We each construct our own version of the world. And so, for instance, if you think about cynicism, right, are people kind or cruel? That's pretty much an unanswerable question at the level of science. It's a philosophical, some could argue even a theological question. But it turns out that the way you answer that
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
Wow. I love that question. I think that there is, I could imagine an opportunity for that. I think one One roadblock that I don't think is insurmountable, but that you would need to face in that really fascinating goal is that AI models are, of course, products of the data that we feed them.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
And so if, you know, basically AI models eat the Internet, right, swallow it and then give it back to us in some form, to the extent that the Internet is asymmetrically weighting is overweighting negative content and cynical content, then AIs that swallow that will reflect it as well.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
I think that, and I could imagine, and it's blowing my mind in real time to think about, but you could imagine retuning the way that AI takes information to account for negativity bias and to correct. This is what you're getting at, I think, right? To correct for that negativity bias and then produce an inference that is less biased, more accurate, and less cynical.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
and then give that as a kind of digest to people, right? So don't make me go through my social media feed, go through it for me, correct, right, de-bias it, and then give it to me in a more accurate way. That's an incredible idea.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
goes a long way in constructing and shaping the life that you live, the decisions that you make. So cynics, maybe it's not so much about who they pretend to be, but it's about who they pretend everybody else is. If you decide that other people are selfish, for instance, you'll be far less likely to trust them.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
It's a brilliant question and you're right. I mean, I think a lot of us are very tuned into the metal side of life and heavy metal is great, but life is not all metal. So how do we retune ourselves? I think about this a lot in part because over the last several years, I haven't just been studying cynicism. I've been trying to counteract it in myself and in others.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
So I've focused on practical everyday things that I can do. And I guess they come in a bunch of categories. I'm going to try to tick through them, but I really want to hear your thoughts. The first has to do with our mindsets and the ways that we approach our own thinking. So I like to engage in a practice that I call being skeptical of my cynicism.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
So that is in essence, taking tools from cognitive behavioral therapy and applying them to my cynical inferences. So again, my default mode, my factory settings are pretty suspicious. I want to lay my cards on the table. It's ironic given what I study, but there we are. So I often find myself in new situations, suspecting people, mistrusting people, wondering if they might take advantage of me.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
And what I do these days that I didn't do in the past is say, well, wait a minute, Zaki, where is this coming from? You're a scientist. Defend your inference. Defend your hypothesis. What evidence do you have to back it up? And very often, I find that the evidence is thin to nonexistent. So that challenge, that just unearthing of, wait a minute, are you sure?
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
No, you're not, can tap into a little bit of intellectual humility. A second thing that I try to do is apply what my lab and I call a reciprocity mindset. That is understanding that, yes, people vary in how trustworthy they are, but what you do also matters. Research finds that when you trust people, they're more likely to become trustworthy. because they want to reciprocate.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
And there's a lot of evidence that cynics, when they're put in situations with new people, even when they interact with their friends, romantic partners, and families, that they still have their guard up, that they're not able to make trusting and deep connections with other people. But guess what? When you treat other people in that way, a couple of things happen.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
You've honored them in this small way, and so they step up. It's known as earned trust in economics. And when you mistrust people, they become less trustworthy. So in my lab, we found that when you teach people this, when you teach people to own the influence that they have on others, they're more willing to be trusting.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
And when you're more trusting, then of course the other person reciprocates, which again, turns into this positive cycle. So I try, when I make a decision as to whether or not I'm gonna trust somebody, I think the default is to say, well, I'm taking on this risk. Is this a good choice for me? And I try to rotate that a little bit and say, what am I doing for the relationship here?
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
Is this act of trust maybe a gift to this other person? How can it positively influence who they become in the course of this interaction? And then a third thing on the sort of mindset side, and then we can get to some behaviors, is what I call social savoring. I do this a lot with my kids, actually. You know, savoring is a general term for appreciating good things while they happen.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
It's related to gratitude, but gratitude is more appreciating the things that have happened to us in the past that are good. Savoring is let's grab this moment right now and think about it. So my kids and I started savoring practices a couple of years ago. I call it classes. So, you know, I'll say today we're going to do an ice cream eating class or we're going to do a sunset watching class. Cool.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
Applications are coming in now. We're evaluating them on a rolling basis. I've already graduated college. So we'll just sit there and eat ice cream slowly, not so that it melts, but we'll say, what are you enjoying about this? Is it the texture? Is it the flavor? What do you want to remember about this moment? And I noticed more recently while working on this book that all of this was sensory.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
Sunsets, somersaults, ice cream, you name it. But it wasn't very social. And what they were hearing from me about other people was negatively skewed because gossip is negatively skewed, right? If somebody cut me off in traffic while I'm driving them to summer camp, they learn all about that person, right?
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
but they don't learn about the people who are politely following traffic laws all around us, right, which is 90 plus percent of drivers. And so I started a practice of social savoring where I try to share with my kids positive things that I notice about other people. You could call it positive gossip as well. And one thing that I noticed is that that habit of savoring for them
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
changed my mental processing, right? It actually changed what I noticed because of course, if you're trying to tell somebody about something, You look for examples that you can tell them about. So a habit of action, of speech in that case, became a habit of mine.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
So those three things, being skeptical of my cynicism, adopting a reciprocity mindset, and social savoring, those are three of the psychological pieces. And I can get to some actions, but yeah, I wonder what you think of these.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
One, you're not able to receive what most of us need from social connections. There's one really classic and very sad study where people were forced to give an extemporaneous speech about a subject they don't know much about, a very stressful experience that raised people's blood pressure.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
If you imagine the mindset shifts that I've talked about as thinking more like a scientist about the social world, then the second step to me is to act more like a scientist in the social world. The monk and author Pema Chodron, this great, great writer, is written beautifully about treating your life like an experiment. You know, in this moment, you could interrupt the defaults.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
You could interrupt the patterns and look around more carefully. And I try to do that. And I encourage other people to do that as well. You know, one form of this is what I call taking leaps of faith on other people, right? Collecting more social data requires risk. So I try to do that. I try to take more risks, become less risk averse in a social context.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
Now, this is not to say that I share my bank information with a prince who's going to wire me $14 million. You need to be calculated. You need to be smart and safe in the risks that you take. But I would argue that many of us are far too risk averse in the social world. And there are lots of ways that I try to do this and lots of ways that people can do this.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
One is to just be more open to the social world. I'm an introvert. Andrew, I think you've said you're an introvert as well. Is that true? I am. Yeah. And so as introverts, we tend to think that the social world is maybe tiring and we need to recharge on our own. It's completely valid. I experience that all the time.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
I think that sometimes my introversion morphs into something else where I underestimate the joy of social contact. You know, there's so many times that before a dinner party, I would pay an embarrassing amount of money for the other party to cancel on me. I don't want to be the person to cancel, but I would feel so relieved if they canceled.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
But then while I'm there and afterwards, I feel totally fulfilled by the experience. It's a little bit like running. Running is another thing that I love. But there are many times that before a run, I think, gosh, I really don't want to do this. And then afterwards, I'm so grateful to have done so. There's a bunch of research that finds that people in general are like this.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
If you ask them to forecast what it would be like to talk with a stranger, to open up about a problem that they're having with a friend, to express gratitude, to try to help somebody, even to have a disagreement on ideological grounds, people forecast that these conversations would be awful. awkward, cringe, painful, and in the case of disagreement, harmful even.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
Some of these folks had a cheerleader, not an actual cheerleader, but a friendly stranger who was with them while they prepared, saying, you've got this. I know you can do it. I'm in your corner. Other people had no support. As you know, one of the great things about social support is that it buffers us from stress.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
This is work from Nick Epley, Juliana Schroeder, and many others, by the way, on something known as under-sociality. And because we have these forecasts, we simply don't pursue the conversations. We don't go deeper. We stay on the surface. Nick, Juliana, and others then challenge people. They say, go and do this, have this conversation, then report back.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
And people's actual experiences are vastly more positive and more fulfilling than their forecasts. So I try to remember this in my own life. I try to realize when my forecasts are too risk averse and too negative and say, let me just jump in. Let me take this chance. If it goes badly, well, fine. And if it goes well, even better.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
The second piece here, though, is not just to take those risks, but to document their effects. I call this encounter counting. So in essence, gathering new data from the world is great, but if you forget those data, well, then the effects might be short-lived. I try to really remember when a social encounter is a mismatch with my expectations.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
I have a relative who, for instance, I disagree with politically quite a bit. And when I was working on this book, I said, let me take a chance. We've known each other for 30 years. We've never talked politics. Let me try. And so I invited her to have this conversation about an issue we really disagree on.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
And we did not agree by the end of the conversation, but it was an immensely deep and meaningful conversation. And I actually felt like I knew her better, even though we've been close for decades. And I could just say, well, that was nice, and then forget all about it and imagine that any future conversations on disagreement would be terrible.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
But I tried to write down in my journal, sort of, this is what happened. This is how it counteracted my expectations. Try to lock in that learning from the social world so that pleasant surprises hopefully aren't as surprising anymore.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
So most people, when they had this friendly person by their side, their blood pressure as they prepared for the speech went up only half as much as when they were alone. But cynical people had a spike in their blood pressure that was indistinguishable in magnitude whether or not a person was by their side or not. One way that I think about this is,
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
Absolutely. I think that it's in essence being skeptical about our beliefs. putting them through their paces, right? Kicking the tires on our own beliefs. And again, this reminds me of cognitive behavioral therapy, right? A person who's socially anxious might tell their therapist, I think all my friends secretly hate me. They might believe that to their core.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
It might affect every decision that they make. And the therapist might challenge them and say, well, what's the evidence that you have for that? Are there any instances in your entire life where that seemed to not be true? And to your point from Byron Katie, what would it mean if it weren't true?
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
So this is the bedrock of one of the most successful forms of therapy for depression and anxiety and phobia in the world. I do want to also, I guess, zoom in on something that you're sharing there about our core beliefs. Because I think that in addition to testing our core beliefs, one thing that I wish we would do more is share our core beliefs. Because I don't think we know.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
what each other's core beliefs are. And I think oftentimes we think that we are more alone in our core beliefs than we actually are. So this is true in our politics, for instance, like the amount of people from every part of the political spectrum who want more compromise, more peace, and less conflict is north of 80% in surveys that my lab has conducted. But people don't know that.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
And so the lack of evidence, the lack of data about what other people want is a hindrance to the goals that we actually all share. This is also true in workplaces. So in the course of my work, I've done sort of some different projects with school systems, hospital systems, businesses. And one of the things I love doing is starting with an anonymous survey of everybody in the community.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
And I ask, how much do you value empathy and collaboration? How much would you prefer a workplace or community defined by cooperation versus competition? And invariably, and I'm talking about some places where you might imagine people would be competitive, invariably a super majority of individuals in those communities want compassion, cooperation, and collaboration, right?
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
Social connection is a deep and necessary form of psychological nourishment. And living a cynical life, making the decision that most people can't be trusted, stops you from being able to metabolize those calories, leaves you malnourished in a social way. A second thing that happens when you choose to pretend that others are selfish, greedy and dishonest is that you bring out the worst in them.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
Much more than they want competition or isolation. So one of the things that I love to do when I speak for those groups is to say, hey, look, here's some data, look around you. Here you've got 90% of people in this organization who want more cooperation. So if you just take a look in your periphery, almost everybody around you wants that as well.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
I also survey these communities and say, what do you think the average person would respond to these questions? And invariably they're wrong. And so I say, you have underestimated each other and now I'm giving you permission to stop. And I think this is one of the other actions that we can take if we're in a leadership position anywhere. I think that looking for more data is great.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
If you're a leader, you can collect those data and you can show people to themselves. You can unveil. the core beliefs of your community. And oftentimes those core beliefs are incredibly beautiful and surprising to the people in those communities and give them what I would call not peer pressure, but peer permission to express who they've been all along.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
There is so much to say about this. I'm going to try to not give a lecture here, but like so many of the themes in this conversation, I think that the headline for me, when I look at the data on polarization, and I'm going to talk about perceived polarization as well, is twofold. One, it's tragic because we are underestimating one another.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
And two, there's a lot of opportunity here because the delta between the world that we think we're in and the one that we're actually in is great. And it's positive as well. So there's a bunch of work on political perceptions. This is work done by folks like Meena Chakara at Harvard, my colleague Rob Willer in sociology at Stanford, our colleague Rob Willer.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
And a lot of this focuses on what people think the average member of the other side is like. So if you're a Republican, what do you think the average Democrat believes? What do you think they're like? If you're a Democrat, what do you think the average Republican is like? And so I'll stop talking about Republicans and Democrats here because a lot of these data are bipartisan.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
The biases are pretty even across camps. And it turns out that in all cases, we are dead wrong about who's on the other side. We're even wrong demographically about who's on the other side. For instance, Democrats think that 25% of Republicans make more than $250,000 a year. The actual number is 2%. But the stereotype of Republicans that Democrats hold is that they're wealthy, I suppose.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
Republicans vastly overestimate the percentage of Democrats who are part of the LGBTQ community, for instance. Again, it's just a cultural stereotype. So we're wrong about even who's on the other side, but we're even more wrong about what they believe and what they want.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
So data suggests that there is perceived polarization, that is what we think the other side believes, is much greater than real polarization. I mean, first of all, we are divided. Let's stipulate that. And those divisions can be really dangerous and are in some cases existential. The division in our mind is much greater than the division that we actually have.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
There's a lot of research that finds that cynical people tend to do things like monitoring others, spying on them or threatening them to make sure that that other person doesn't betray them. But of course, other people can tell how we're treating them, and they reciprocate our kindness and retaliate against our unkindness.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
My late friend, Emile Bruneau, collected some data where he gathered Republicans and Democrats' views on immigration. He said, what would you want immigration to look like where zero is the borders are totally closed and 100 is they're totally open? And he plotted the distributions of what that looks like.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
He also asked people on either side, what do you think the other side would respond if asked that same question? And he plotted those distributions as well. Other side meaning which group? If you're a Democrat, what do you think Republicans would want? And if you're a Republican, what would Democrats want? And the distributions are totally different.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
The distributions of our actual preferences are like a hill with two peaks. So Republicans want more closed borders. Democrats want them more open. But they're not that far apart, first of all, the means. And there's a lot of overlap in the distributions. The distributions of our perceptions are two hills on opposite sides of a landscape.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
Republicans think that Democrats want totally open borders and Democrats think Republicans want totally closed borders. And this same pattern plays out for all sorts of issues where we think the other side is much more extreme. We think the average member of the other side is much more extreme than they really are. There's also work on meta-perceptions.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
What do you think the other side thinks about you? And it turns out that people on both sides imagine that their rivals hate them twice as much as their rivals really do. There's work on democratic norms that my grad student Louisa Santos collected, where we overestimate how anti-democratic the other side is by two times. And Rob has collected data on violence.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
How much do you think the other side would support violence to advance their aims? And here, the overestimates are 400%. So we think that the average person on the other side is four times as enthusiastic about violence as they really are. We have an image in our mind of the other as violent extremists who want to burn down the system.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
And again, we've talked about the warped media ecosystem that we're in, and that probably contributes here. But the fact is that those misperceptions are making all the problems that we fear worse. Because if you think that the other side is gearing up for war, what do you do? You have to defend yourself. And so we're caught in this almost cycle of escalation that really very few of us want.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
Now, I want to be really clear here that I'm not saying that we don't have actual disagreements. I'm also not saying that people across our political spectrum are all peaceable and all kind. There are absolutely extreme and violent people around our country that represent their political views in horrible and toxic ways. But that's not the average.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
And again, I want to get back to this point that the average person underestimates the average person. Not that we underestimate everybody, but that we're wrong about most people. And so again, to me, this is a tragedy and an opportunity.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
Rob and Mina and lots of other people find that when you ask people to actually pay attention to the data, when you show them, hey, actually, the other side fears violence just as much as you do.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
So cynical people end up bringing out the most selfish qualities of others, telling a story full of villains, and then ending up stuck living in that story.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
when you show them that actually the other side is terrified of losing our democracy, when you show them that the other side doesn't actually hate you, that mitigates, that pulls back all of these escalatory impulses. In essence, you can decrease the threat that people feel from the other side by showing them who the other side really is.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
I understand this is such a massive and toxic sort of environment that we're in. I'm not saying that hopeful skepticism will solve our divided political landscape, will solve our problems.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
But I do think it's worth noting how wrong we are and that being a little bit less wrong can at least open a door, maybe let our minds wander towards a place of greater compromise and peace, which is what most people actually want.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
I love that clarification. Yeah, absolutely. I think that The answer is yes. There is lots of evidence that we are actively avoiding having conversations, in part because of who we think the other side is. There is an amazing study that was conducted during Thanksgiving of 2016, which, as you may recall, was directly after a very polarizing election.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
And researchers used geotracking on people's cell phones to examine whether in order to go to Thanksgiving dinner, they crossed between a blue county into a red county or a red county into a blue county. In other words, are they going into, and I'm using air quotes here, quote unquote, enemy territory for Thanksgiving dinner.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
And they use that as a proxy of whether they're having dinner with people they disagree with. And it turns out that people who crossed county lines, who crossed into enemy territory, again, in quotes, this is perceived polarization, they had dinners that were 50 minutes shorter than people who were dining with folks who presumably they agreed with. So we're talking about... forsaking pie, Andrew.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
They're giving up pie in order to not talk with people they disagree with. And I think a lot of us are very skittish about these conversations. Because if you believe that the other side is a bunch of bloodthirsty marauders, why would you want to talk with them? Why have a beer with a fascist? That's just not a great plan.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
The truth, though, is that when we can collect better data, oftentimes we end up with better perceptions. And I mean better... in two ways, one more positive and two more accurate. Now, again, I want to say that there are real threats in our political environment. I'm not asking anybody to make themselves unsafe in any way.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
But in our lab, again, my wonderful graduate student, Louisa Santos, ran a study where we had about 160 people, these are folks from all over the country, who took part in Zoom conversations. We made sure that they really disagreed about gun control, immigration, and climate change. And they talked about those issues. We asked them to forecast what those conversations would be like.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
And we asked other folks to forecast what those conversations would be like. And the forecasts went from neutral to negative. Some people thought it won't make any difference. And other people thought it will be counterproductive. Some folks in our survey said, dialogue is dead. There's no point in any of these conversations. We then brought these folks together.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
Oh, and I should say, among the people who were cynical about these conversations and who forecasted that they would go poorly, was us, the research team. Louisa and I spent hours talking about what if people start to threaten each other or dox each other or look up each other's addresses.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
That great prefrontal system, maybe. Right.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
You know, Andrew, that we have institutional review boards that make sure that we're keeping human subjects safe. And the IRB wanted all sorts of safeguards in place because we all thought that these conversations might go really poorly. After the conversations occurred, we asked folks who had taken part of them to rate how positive they were on a 1 to 100 scale.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
And the most common, the modal response that people gave us was 100 out of 100. And it wasn't just that they liked the conversation. They were shocked by how much they liked the conversation. They also reported less negative emotion for the other side as a whole, not just for the person that they talked with.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
And they reported more intellectual humility, more openness to questioning their own views. So here are conversations that we as a culture are actively avoiding because of our priors. Our priors are wrong given the data, but we don't know that and we don't give ourselves chances to learn that we're wrong because we don't collect the data.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
And when we do collect the data, when we step in and take that leap of faith, take that social risk, we are shocked and humbled and feel more positive and maybe even feel a slightly greater sense of hope that there can be some way out of this toxic environment that we're all trapped in. Wow.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
Andrew, this has been an absolutely delightful conversation. And I will say my forecast of it was very high and it has exceeded that forecast. I also just want to take a moment to thank you for your work as a science communicator, as somebody who believes in not just trying to generate knowledge, but also to share knowledge.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
I think that it's absolutely one of the most important services that we can do as folks who have been trained and learned all this stuff to bring that information to as many people as we can. And I think it's just, it's an incredible mission and clearly has had such wonderful impact. So it's an honor to be part of that conversation and to be part of that effort.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
That's a great question. Classically defined cynicism would be hard to measure very early in life because you typically measure it through self-report. So people have to have relatively well-developed, elaborated stories that they can tell you about their version of the world.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
That said, one early experience and one early phenotype that's very strongly correlated with generalized mistrust and unwillingness to count on other people would be insecure attachment. early in life. So for instance, you might know, but just for listeners, insecure attachment is a way of describing how kids experience the social world.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
It's often tested using something known as the strange situation where a one-year-old is brought to a lab with their caregiver. mother, father, whoever is caring for them. They're in a novel environment and researchers are observing how much do they explore the space? How comfortable do they seem? Then after that, a stranger enters the room
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
A couple of minutes after that, their mother leaves the room or their caregiver leaves the room, which is, of course, incredibly strange and stressful for most one-year-olds. The caregiver then returns after a minute. And what researchers look at is a few things. One, how comfortable is the child exploring a space with their caregiver present?
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
Two, how comfortable are they when other people are around? Three, how do they react when their caregiver leaves? And four, how do they react at the reunion with their caregiver? And the majority of kids, approximately two-thirds of them, are securely attached, meaning that they are comfortable exploring a new space.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
They get really freaked out, of course, as you might when their caregiver leaves, but then they soothe quickly when their caregiver returns. The remaining third or so of kids are insecurely attached, meaning that they're skittish in new environments even when their parent or caregiver is there. They really freak out when their caregiver leaves, and they're not very soothed upon their return.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
Now, for a long time, attachment style was viewed in very emotional terms. And it is. It is an emotional reaction, first and foremost. But researchers more recently have started to think about, well, what are the cognitive schemas? What are the underpinnings, the ways that children think when they are securely or insecurely attached? And one brilliant study used looking time.
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How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset | Dr. Jamil Zaki
Looking time in kids is a metric of what surprises them. If something really surprising happens, they look for a very long time. And researchers found that insecurely attached kids, when they saw a video of a reunion of a caregiver and infant acting in a way that felt loving and stable, they looked longer, as though that was surprising.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
This is one of the most poignant and saddest studies that I've read. So here people were brought into the lab and asked to give a spontaneous speech about a topic that they didn't know very well, which would freak almost anybody out, right? And it did. And it raised people's blood pressure by about 20%. And so half of these folks had somebody in the room with them who is a sort of cheerleader.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
I mean, not literally, but who is saying, hey, you've got this. I know you can do it. Just a friendly and supportive stranger. And for most people, having that friendly person around. lowered their blood pressure significantly. So that's called stress buffering, right? I guess the saying is trouble shared is trouble halved, right?
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
That if you can be with somebody during a difficult time, it's just not as difficult unless you are cynical. So it turned out that cynics, again, when they had somebody supportive there, their blood pressure was just as high as when they were alone. So it's almost like if you are cynical and can't open up to people, you are alone even when you're with somebody else.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
I believe I believe as well. Yeah. So I think that it's a really powerful question. And, you know, in our culture, I think that because we've glamorized cynicism, there are some folks who maybe adopt it in order to seem smart. Right. So research finds that if you tell people, hey, I want you to look as competent as possible. they actually start to act more cynically.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
So they'll remove positive language from their emails. They'll write book reviews that are more negative because they think that being positive just doesn't seem quite as bright. But I would say... that actually the primary siren call of cynicism is not trying to look smart and rather trying to be safe in a world that doesn't feel safe.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
One big predictor of cynicism is what we could call insecure attachment, right? If early in your life, you just didn't feel safe in the context of your home and family, it's much more likely that you put up those walls. And again, I say this with zero judgment and just in the context interest of transparency and disclosure. That's my experience, right?
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
I had a pretty insecure, emotional upbringing. And I think that's where my cynicism comes from. It took me decades and many years of therapy to come to a place where I could trust people in my life. And that wasn't because I was trying to look smart in front of other people or impress them. It was because I was trying to gain control in a life where it sometimes didn't feel like I had it.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
Hi! How are you?
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
It's really interesting. So cynicism is less correlated with extroversion and introversion than with another personality dimension called agreeableness. So generally a cynic would probably be less extroverted than a non-cynic, but only a little, the relationship is weaker. What they definitely are not is agreeable.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
They're just not as, although they might be fun to hang out with, they're probably not going to react as positively to other people and be as warm towards other people. That's really the personality dimension that tracks it most strongly. Yeah.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
Absolutely. I want to separate between optimism and hope as well. I wrote a book about hope, came out during an election season. The election went away that a lot of people were not expecting or wanting. And I received about 5,000 emails telling me that I was a ridiculous and toxic person for encouraging hope in this moment. And to which I would say, hey, it's fair.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
Maybe read some of the writing before.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
They seemed really smart when they wrote. But at any rate, I totally understand the sentiment. And the same way that we've glamorized gloom, I think that we've actually stereotyped hope. as naive and privileged and even toxic, right? As though it's toxic positivity, you're ignoring real problem. I mean, look at all the tragedies happening simultaneously in the world.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
It's a total pleasure. Thanks for having me.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
We're living inside this crisis layer cake and you're telling me to be hopeful. It sounds ridiculous and even harmful. I think that folks who say that might be confusing hope with optimism. So optimism is the belief that the future will turn out well. And optimists tend to be pretty happy, but they can also be a little bit complacent, right?
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
So if you think a bright future is on its way, you can kind of just sit on your couch and wait for its arrival. Hope is different. Hope is the idea that the future could turn out well, or at least better than it is, but that we don't know, right? And in that deep uncertainty, our actions matter, right? Because it could turn out well or very poorly. And so we're Optimism can be complacent.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
Hope is a deeply action-oriented emotion, right? It guides us to fight for something better. And you see hope really at the core of, for instance, activist movements throughout history and around the world. So hope is not ignoring our problems. In fact, it's facing them head on and saying the status quo is unacceptable. But there are many people, maybe most people,
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
in the world who want something better, who want greater peace, equality, and sustainability. So I'm going to fight because I believe that that fight can produce something that most of us want. Yeah.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
My favorite quote on hope comes from, honestly, my favorite writer about hope, Rebecca Solnit, who says, hope is not a lottery ticket you clutch waiting for good luck. It's an ax you break down doors with in an emergency. Oh, she's so good.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
You nailed it. That's exactly right. So I think that cynics consider naive optimists, people who think everything is great, as the opposite of themselves. In fact, I think they have a lot in common. Both groups of people think they know the future. They think they know humanity and they don't have to do anything because of that. Right. So there's two things.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
One is certainty about how the future will turn out. And the other is complacency. As we've talked about, a naive optimist might be complacent because they think everything's going to be great. But a cynic also turns out to be pretty complacent. You can think of it as a dark complacency. Everything's going to be awful. So there's nothing really that I have to do. And you see this, right?
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
Hey, everybody. It's great to meet you all. It's so nice to meet you.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
I mean, I think we, again, have this stereotype that cynics would be super moral, that they'd be radicals who would push for change. But in fact, cynics vote less often. They take part in social movements less often. They even vote more when they do vote for strong man leaders who will protect them from the selfish folks who are all around.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
And I think that skeptics, by contrast, have the courage of uncertainty. And when I say, Amanda, that they think like scientists, that's sort of what I mean. You know, as a scientist, one of my favorite things is not knowing how an experiment will turn out. I find it delightful to live in uncertainty and then discover something, usually discover that I'm wrong at least two thirds of the time.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
But I think that one of the things that is hardest in, at least for me in life, is to accept uncertainty. I think it really takes a lot of courage and presence and humility to know what we don't know. When things turn out badly in the world, when there's some horrible event that occurs, it almost feels like a knee-jerk reaction to say, aha, I knew this would happen.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
This is the way that people are. This is all that we have to give. And that can give you a sense of control, again, in a world where you feel like you can't control anything. But that control comes at a cost. It comes at the cost of recognizing so much human beauty and continuing a struggle for progress and change.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
Yeah, it's a great question. Optimists certainly health-wise do better than cynics. In fact, if you just look at a correlation between optimism and a bunch of health outcomes, it's mostly positive. But there's a couple of caveats to that. One, optimism is less health positive if you are facing adversity, right?
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
So, so long as things are going well, optimism is- You're like, this wasn't what it was supposed to be.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
I was promised that I would have a jet pack by now. Where's my jet pack, right? So absolutely, optimism is a- Health positive experience, but can be a fragile one, if that makes sense. It can be shattered pretty easily. And second, optimists tend to strive less than hopeful people, for instance.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
So hope and optimism are both health positive, but hope, unlike optimism, I guess you could say it magnetizes us towards a future we want. through our actions.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
Yes. Hope is a gritty positivity. I love that, Amanda. That's perfectly said.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
Yeah, I mean, Emil believed this really fiercely. He really thought that we could connect with people who were different from us on any dimension. And, you know, he was really active person in social movements, and he would engage with people on social media who completely disagreed with him, but he would do so with extraordinary good faith, right?
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
I mean, he would talk with somebody where they had completely opposite perspectives, and he would ask a lot of questions, and it was almost like he was interviewing people. And I remember asking him, like, what why are you feeding the trolls, man? You know, like, why are you doing this? Do you think something's going to come of it?
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
And he said, well, you know, I think that we so often want to be right and being right feels like the same as being good, like being a good person and being wrong feels feels to us like a threat to who we are. But that's not what I really... I don't actually care as much about being right. I just want to live with integrity, right?
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
And for him, that meant seeking peace wherever he could find it, creating bridges wherever he could. And That just the way that he talked about that led me to do a bunch of research on, again, the difference between beliefs and values. And it turns out they're really quite different. So a belief is an opinion you have about the world.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
A value is what makes you who you are, the things that you care about most, what you want to give to the world. And it turns out that people who are strong in their values, who know what they want, for Emil, it was integrity and peace. For other people, it might be other things. It can be achievement, family, a sense of humor, whatever you want.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
Oh, gosh, I would love to. I'll try not to get emotional right off the bat. Please do. Emil was a friend of mine, but he was also one of my heroes. We both studied the neuroscience of empathy. And there's not like a million people who do that. So we gravitated towards each other pretty quickly. He, in particular...
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
But if you are grounded in those values, it turns out that you clutch your beliefs less firmly, right? You loosen your grip on your beliefs. If you know who you are, then it doesn't matter as much that you be right all the time. And that allows us to be more flexible and open-minded.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
That they're selfish, greedy, and dishonest.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
Oh, yeah. I mean, it's complicated. So there's very little data on cynicism and religion. The data that are out there are really mixed. Clergy people appear to be less cynical than non-clergy, but there's no strong relationship between the amount of faith... or religious practice that someone engages in and how cynical they are. But I completely resonate with your intuition.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
And I think that the reason that the data is so noisy is because different traditions tell us completely different things about what we are at our core. Absolutely. Original sin is one version of, yeah, you're all fundamentally broken. We are all broken. And salvation comes in another world, not in this one.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
But you think about other religious traditions, like in Hinduism, we all have the light of God inside us. My kids go to a Quaker school and they're taught all the time about the light that they have to carry and to give and that that is divine. And so I think that there are so many affirming spiritual traditions that really teach us about fundamental goodness.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
And just as many disaffirming traditions that teach us that we are broken to our core. And I would love to see more evidence about how those teachings affect our worldviews. But I really share your intuition that it could matter a lot.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
was really interested in how neuroscience could inform our understanding of violence and hatred and how we could reduce those. What happens in the brain when people hate one another and how can we use that information to create new paths to peace? He also was potentially the most positive person I have ever known in my life.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
And in fact, I think the way that you just described it is much closer to how I land as, I guess, a humanist, right? Which is that I don't think people, I mean, I'm fascinated in whether we believe we are good or bad, kind or cruel, callous or compassionate. But as a scientist, I will never answer that question. But what I do know is that if human beings are anything, we are adaptable.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
We mold ourselves to the circumstances of our culture, of our family, of our faith, of our communities. We become different versions of who we could have been over time. And that very much includes whether we treat other people well or poorly, whether we are open or closed minded.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
whether we are egalitarian or bigoted, you know, I mean, all of these things, I don't think people are born any of those things. I think we are shaped in large part into who we become. And I do think if you consider humanity that way, just like the future is unknown, human nature is unknown too, right? We don't know whether people are good or bad. That's so simplistic.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
In fact, we are complicated and we are creatures that learn more than anything else.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
Yeah. I mean, as we've been talking about, we're molded by our circumstances. And one thing that I think we don't realize as much as we should is that every time you interact with somebody, you are their circumstance. You are their situation, right? And so what you do will shape them.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
Yes, I know. I know all three of you. It's an honor to be talking with you, really. I'm a big fan of the show and of all of you. So thank you so much for having me on. It means a lot.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
And cynical people, for instance, are much more likely to spy on their romantic partners, to spy on their colleagues or micromanage them. to mistrust their friends and family members. And it turns out if you treat people that way, they can tell. You're probably not as sly as you think you are. And we are a really reciprocal species, right?
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
So if you treat people that way, they will treat you that way. And oftentimes what you see in research and in life is that cynics will treat people as though they are selfish and And then bring out those people's most selfish side. And then the cynic will say, aha, I knew it all along. Not realizing that they have created the very situation that they feared.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
Yeah, absolutely, right? So I think that you're pointing to the virtuous version, right? I mean, if cynicism creates these kind of toxic, self-fulfilling prophecies, right? You basically, you mistreat somebody, they mistreat you. You can think of that as energy dissipating from the relationship, right? Basically, the connection between you reducing to zero, sort of giving way to entropy.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
Well, guess what? The opposite happens when we treat other people in good faith, right? When we treat them as though They're the folks we hope they are instead of the people we fear they are. This is what is often known in social science as earned trust, right? So when you treat somebody as though they will step up, they're much more likely to step up.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
He just stubbornly saw the best in people and really believed that we could use science to do good. And, you know, I'm friends with a lot of people who study things like empathy and kindness. And I'll tell you that not all of us believe that everything will turn out okay at all. And sometimes talking with Emil, you kind of felt like, where does this guy get off being so optimistic?
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
And that's why I often encourage people to not just trust others in order to learn about them and build relationships, but to trust loudly. if you're going to put faith in somebody, tell them you're doing it. I know it can sound cringe and corny and all of that, but the data are very clear that we underestimate the power of our positive words.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
And Abby, to your point, that generates energy in so far as when we tell people, hey, I'm going to give you this responsibility or I'm going to invest my time in you or my energy in you because I believe in you. If you say that out loud, it makes it much more likely that this person is honored by the way that you're treating them. And then they become... Who you hope they'll be. Right.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
So it turns self-fulfilling prophecies into something really beautiful.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
I think that's so beautiful and compelling. And it reminds me of in psychology, we talk about the Pygmalion effect. So there's all these experiments where teachers are told that some of their students are gifted and then the rest are not. But in fact, and we wouldn't run these experiments today, by the way, these are done decades ago.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
But in fact, the students that the teacher learns are gifted, their aptitude is the same as all the other ones. But it turns out that teachers who think that they're working with a gifted student invest more in them. They say, I think you're going to thrive. I think you're going to crush this. I think you're going to succeed. And then guess what? Those students become more likely to succeed.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
And I think we see this in all parts of our lives. And It also speaks to the power that we all have to better each other, right? By expressing the way that you did, Abby, beautifully, our belief, our faith in other people. Now, I think you said something really critical though, which is you always believed it. Even if everybody else thought it was batshit crazy, it was true for you.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
You know, he had observed hatred on five different continents. He had traveled everywhere. to places around the world where people were in violent conflict with one another. And yet he was so bullish on our entire species. It seemed like maybe he was just naive or sheltered. But as I got to know him better, it was clear that the opposite was true.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
I don't think that this works if you're being insincere. I think it only works if you truly believe in people. So I would not suggest trusting loudly or expressing faith in people if it's false. But if you believe it, I think you should say it. You know, there's this saying, if you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything at all. But I think we need the opposite saying as well.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
If you do have something nice to say, just spit it out. Stop being so shy with our positive evaluations of other people.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
Yeah, Vaclav Havel was an amazing person. He was a playwright. friends with Kurt Vonnegut and Samuel Beckett and all these people. And he was also a dissident in Prague. And he was part of what was called the Prague Spring, which was this movement to democratize Czechoslovakia. And it failed. The country moved forward.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
And then immediately this sort of movement for greater egalitarianism was shut down by Soviet rule. And the country became much more despotic, really. And so Havel then was imprisoned and lived for years in jail. And he wrote about how cynicism was at the root
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
of this sort of authoritarian state, that the thing that helps regimes to control people is if they can convince people that nobody else wants change, right? So for instance, if you, and he wrote this beautiful essay called The Power of the Powerless, where he says, if you tell a butcher, if you force them on penalty of going to prison to hang a sign that
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
in support of communist rule, for instance, in Czechoslovakia, then what other people will think, their neighbors, is that, oh, this person is not going to support me. If I want to take part in a movement to make things better, this person is not on my side, right? Even though they're being forced to put the sign up, right?
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
So there's these authoritarian states and really, I think these movements to take power away from people thrive, right? by getting people to trust each other less.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
I think there's something really powerful, though, that people need to know, which is that, in fact, and Amanda, this gets to your point, the more that we're able to move past those representations, whether it's a sign in the window or what we see in the news, and actually get to know the people around us, the more we realize that those negative beliefs are wrong.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
When Emil was born, his mother developed severe schizophrenia. She was unable to raise him. She lived unhoused for many years. His childhood was enormously difficult. And yet, although she had gone through so much suffering, She was always kind to Emil. The way that he put it is that she walked through darkness but showed him only light.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
The more we realize that people actually do generally want what we want. that they want greater peace, for instance, that they want more egalitarianism. And this is one thing that just struck me over and over again when I was doing the research for this book is that cynicism really lives more on our screens, right?
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
When we're taking in cable news or social media, we are much more likely to mistrust people, to think that people are extreme and dangerous and violent and that we should really stay the hell away from them. When we are actually out in the world, with our communities, that cynicism naturally dissipates.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
So one of the crucial things that I learned is that in order to defeat cynicism, we don't need to ignore the truth. We actually need to get closer to the truth. We actually need to be more accurate and learn more deeply about what people are really like.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
Exactly. I mean, I know you all had Malcolm Gladwell on talking about tipping points and how epidemics, for instance, you reach this point and then all of a sudden everything moves really rapidly, right? It's bit by bit and then all at once. And that can be true of virtuous social movements as well. And that's exactly what happened.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
So about a decade after the Prague Spring, there was a second movement in Prague to sort of defeat and and remove the Soviet rule. And it started slowly. And then as you said, Amanda, people started realizing how many others supported this cause. And then all of a sudden things moved very quickly.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
And Vaclav Havel went from a jail cell to being the first democratically elected president of the country in a very short amount of time and ushered in this sort of golden age for that state. And I think that we see this now too. Like one of the issues that makes me most cynical about is climate change.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
You know, I just feel like, oh my God, everything else means nothing if we can't slow this destruction down. And I often feel really alone in this. And it turns out that a lot of people do. Research finds that Americans believe that only 40, 35% of fellow Americans want aggressive policy to protect the climate. The real number is
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
is closer, depending on the issue, to 65% or 80%, depending on which particular issue you're looking for. So it turns out that most of us don't realize that most of us want climate action. But if you want that, you're part of a super majority. And again, discovering faith in each other now goes hand in hand with cultivating hope for the future. and not a complacent hope.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
One where we could say, hey, most of us want this. Let's fight harder. Let's pressure governments more. Let's pressure industry more to make change because that's what the vast majority of the country and the world desires.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
Yeah, I love this question. And one of my favorite pieces of writing on this comes from the brilliant nun and author Pema Chodron. She writes that we can let go of our assumptions. We can let go of what we think we know and treat our lives a little bit more like an experiment. And so that would be my suggestion. There's a bunch of ways you can do that. The first is to fact check your cynicism.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
And when he was a teenager, he made the choice during middle school, actually, that he would take her way of living as a challenge, that whatever darkness he faced, he would do his best to spread light. And that's exactly what he did. Tragically, he was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2018 and he died in 2020. It was, you know, leaving behind a young family and obviously it was just awful.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
If you find yourself judging somebody you just met or mistrusting a whole group of people, ask yourself, what evidence do I have for this claim? If I had to defend this position, how would I do it? Oftentimes when I feel this, which is quite often, I realize, wait a minute, that's just kind of a vibe that I'm getting more than it's really based on any information.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
And so if you don't have data to support your claim, go out and collect some data. The best way to do that is to take little leaps of faith on people. I'm not saying to be reckless. I'm not saying to put everything on the line, but take little chances on people, give them an opportunity to show you who they are. And then the third thing I would say is to try out something I call positive gossip.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
Right? We tend to think negatively. We also tend to speak negatively. In my lab, we find that people gossip three times more about selfish actions than they do about generous ones. But we can balance that out. You know, I try with my kids... Each day, it's a sort of forage for one example of goodness that I witness and then tell them about it at dinner, which I know sounds corny.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
And they're nine and seven. I probably have about two years left before they completely disallow me from ever doing it again. But for now, this is my small way of trying to fight their cynicism. But it also changes... The way that I think.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
You know, when you know you're going to say something or talk about something later, it kind of pops up an antenna in your mind and you look for it in your everyday life. And I found that because I know that I want to share something positive with my kids each day, I start to notice more positivity. And it actually isn't that hard to find at all. So those are just some starting points.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
And I mean, again, I think that living a little bit more like a scientist can be really beautiful, not just because you learn more, but because if you're like most people, most people are better than you think. So when you pay more attention, pleasant surprises should be everywhere.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
Thank you all. This has been absolutely delightful. Thank you for having me. And yeah, I hope that this can be useful to folks.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
So needed right now.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
Thank you very much.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
But even then, he retained his hope. We talked a lot around the time of his diagnosis and he told me that you know, he of course was sad, but you also felt this ball of plasma, this sense of beauty in the world and in humanity that was living inside of him. And he wanted desperately to share with the time he had left.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
I can't wait.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
It was just inspiring the way that he was able to stay hopeful, even as his life was cut short. So yeah, I mean, meanwhile, here I am, you know, studying human goodness and feeling cynical all the time. And so after Emil died, I decided to see if I could spread his message just a little bit further.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
He told me in our last conversation that he understood his worldview was unconventional and that he was more positive in some ways and in some ways startlingly positive despite what he had gone through. And he said, I wish that if this philosophy was like a tube of toothpaste, I could squeeze it out and leave some behind after I'm gone.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
So I guess I've been trying since then to squeeze out some of that Emil toothpaste for the rest of the world.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
Yeah, absolutely. So cynicism is the theory that people in general are selfish, greedy, and dishonest. It is hugely on the rise. In 1972, about half of Americans believed most people can be trusted. And by 2018, that had fallen to a third of Americans. So it's a drop. as big as the stock market took during the financial collapse of 2008.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
So we're living through really a five decade long trust deficit and we have lost faith in each other, in our institutions. And to your point, Amanda, I think that a lot of this is because in our culture, we glamorize gloom. We view it as, I'd say three different things. We view it as smart, We view it as safe and we view it as moral.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
And we can break down all of those if you like, but we can just start with the first, right? We have this view that, hey, if you are not cynical, You must be naive. You just haven't had a chance to be disappointed enough yet. You just don't know what the world is really like.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
In lots of studies, people will present or be presented with a story of one person who's really cynical and doesn't trust anybody and another person who's really open and trusting. And they're asked, you know, which one of these two people do you think would do better on a variety of different tasks? And it turns out that 70% of people believe that cynics are smarter than non-cynics.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
And 85% of people believe that cynics are socially smarter, that they'd be able to tell who's lying and who's telling the truth. In other words, most of us put a lot of faith in people who don't have faith in people. It's just like a bit of a tongue twister. And most of us are wrong. It turns out that cynics do less well on cognitive tests and they're worse at spotting liars than non-cynics.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
So we view being cynical as a form of wisdom as When really, it's just people who have a bunch of assumptions about the world and just look to defend their assumptions as opposed to learning what people are really like.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
Well, I think all of us have at some point been betrayed or disappointed, right? And the last thing you want to experience if somebody's let you down is being let down again, which by the way, is completely reasonable and understandable.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
I think that a lot of us, and I'll just say myself included as someone who tends to be pretty cynical, a lot of us move from being disappointed, that is lowering our expectations of somebody who's let us down, to being pre-disappointed. The best way for me to not get let down again is to just assume I can't trust anybody. And that way I'll be safe. And it's true.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
If you don't trust anybody, you probably won't be betrayed. But you'll also miss out on love and friendship and collaboration and so many of the things that make life beautiful. So you can think of cynicism in this way as like a suit of armor that we put on to protect ourselves from a world of unkind people that ends up suffocating us instead.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
I'm so sorry to be giving this much bad news to the cynics out there. And again, nothing but compassion and resonance. If you feel cynical, I'm right there with you much of the time. But unfortunately, Amanda, they do not make more money. In fact, cynics earn less money over the course of their careers. And researchers have tried to figure out why that is.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
And it turns out that cynics compared to non-cynics want success and power just as much, but they have a different theory of how to get it. A cynical person will say, okay, if I want to advance in my workplace, if I want to build my business, the way to do it is to defeat everybody around me. Life is a zero-sum competition. So I have to step over or on my colleagues in order to succeed.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
And it turns out the data are clear. And as I'm sure you all know, real success, even at a bottom line level, but of course at a human level, requires working with people and building collaboration and coalition and partnership. And so if you immediately, in trying to succeed, write off all of those strategies, you'll actually fall flat more often than not.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
The bad news continues. The train rolls on. So it turns out that cynical people compared to non-cynics suffer enormously. And this gets back to this idea of safety, right? We think that it's safe. to cut off connection to people because at least we won't get hurt. But it turns out that we get hurt almost certainly just in very slow motion.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
One of the things that keeps us thriving is our connection to other people. It's like psychological nourishment. And if you are cynical, if you can't open up and be vulnerable to people, it's like you can't metabolize those calories. And so over time, cynical people suffer from more loneliness and depression, but also from more cellular aging and heart disease.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
And there's a lot of prospective studies with tens of thousands of people that find that folks who are low in trust and more cynical actually die younger than people who are able to connect more deeply, in part because it's those connections that don't just keep us healthy, but literally keep us alive.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
Well, they might not be as delightful at parties as other folks, but they might actually. So one of the most classic tests of cynicism is just a set of statements. And you're asked, do you think each one of these is true or false? So for instance, people don't like helping one another very much. False. False. Thank you, Abby. Yes, I agree. Or let's try another one.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
People are honest chiefly through fear of getting caught.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
Amanda?
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
Okay, well, we've got a non-cynical bunch here so far. So yes, statements like these probe, the more you agree with these statements, the more that you might present as a cynic. But Glennon, you ask a good question, not just what do cynics think, but how do they act, right? How do they present to other people? And there's a few different things that you might notice.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
One is that cynics are less willing to invest in other people in a variety of ways. So in experiments, they invest less money in other people in sort of economic partnerships, but they also are less willing to confide in their friends, for instance, to open up about their struggles.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
There's a famous study that was carried out around 9-11 that found that more cynical people turned less often to their friends for support
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
they were struggling after that tragedy and so in essence a cynic might be someone who's relatively closed off they might also be somebody who tends to appear as pretty judgmental right so they often if somebody acts in a kind way might say ah yeah they donated to charity that's great but they're probably looking for a tax break or maybe they're trying to look good in front of other people and this is where i think cynics can actually be really
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
if not positive, can be sometimes fun to be around. We all know that snarky person who sort of has that gimlet eye and is always sort of looking at the underbelly of what people are doing. And it can be funny and sometimes fun to be around that type of person. So there's a lot of ways. that cynics can present, but those are just a few ways of detecting them in your life.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
And again, most of us, I'm not trying to say that there are cynics and non-cynics as categories of people. We can all change and we all have cynical moments or cynical months or years even. Sure.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
Yeah. A hundred percent. Loads of contrarian shit. Absolutely. And it's almost like an allergy to human goodness. You know, it's almost like If I hear about a wonderful story about somebody helping somebody else, I just need to say something negative in response. It's almost as though stories of goodness make a cynic feel unsafe in their worldview, right? Disrupt their worldview.
We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
Because if you're going to go ahead and think that people are generally awful, you know you're missing out on a lot. You're missing out on the chance to really commune with the rest of our species. So you better be right. So a cynic can be pretty protective of that worldview. and threatened, honestly, by the presentation of do-gooders around them.