We Can Do Hard Things
Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest
Tue, 13 May 2025
410. Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Way is Happiest Dr. Jamil Zaki–a Stanford psychologist and director of their Social Neuroscience Lab–discusses how worldviews like optimism, cynicism, and skepticism shape our lives, health, and relationships. -The three lies we tell ourselves about cynicism -Why we need to stop putting faith in people who don’t put faith in people -The quiz you need to know if you’re a cynic -Why hope could very well save your life Dr. Jamil Zaki is a professor of psychology at Stanford University and the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab. He trained at Columbia and Harvard, studying empathy and kindness in the human brain. He is interested in how we can learn to connect better. Dr. Zaki is the author of The War For Kindness and, most recently, Hope for Cynics. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: Who is Dr. Jamil Zaki and what inspired his work?
Some of us think, because we talked about this before, Glenn and Abby and me, that while cynicism feels unfortunate, like that's a bummer, it also feels like it's sadly more in line with reality. Just the way that things are and kind of a smarter way to live or how people who are smarter think. But you're about to find out a lot about that that is wrong.
So Dr. Jamil Zaki is a professor of psychology at Stanford University and the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab. He trained at Columbia and Harvard studying empathy and kindness in the human brain. He is interested in how we can learn to connect better. Dr. Zaki is the author of The War for Kindness and most recently, Hope for Cynics. Thank you for being here.
This is so exciting for us.
It's a total pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Oh my gosh. We're going to talk about so much today and I would love to start. I've listened to a lot of interviews that you've given and I was surprised because I didn't hear...
Anyone talk to you about a meal, which we're talking about all the ways to live and how your view of the world determines the actual world you live in and the kind of life you have and your happiness and your joy and all of that. And you're a scientist, so it's all data. And it's also about having a beautiful life.
And it really, to me, was so beautiful how you grounded all of this in Emil's story because he had such a profoundly beautiful life. Will you just tell us a little bit about him before we start our conversation on the science and what it means for us?
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...
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.
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Chapter 2: What is cynicism and why do people believe it makes them wiser?
People are honest chiefly through fear of getting caught.
No, false. Yeah, I think that's probably false.
Amanda?
Yes, false.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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Chapter 3: How does cynicism affect safety, relationships, and success?
And in fact, we adapt even to others' view of whether we are good or bad. So can you talk about like kind of how cynicism can become a self-fulfilling prophecy and the reverse that if we believe that people are bad and untrustworthy, that is what they become around us. Mm-hmm.
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.
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?
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.
You know how they say, I've always like said out loud, it takes less effort to be kind than it does to be mean. And so I'm thinking about it from like an energy perspective. Do you have any data or information around the energy difference between being a cynic and being an optimist or a hopeful skeptic?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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