Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset

00:00:00.000 | - Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast,

00:00:02.280 | where we discuss science

00:00:03.680 | and science-based tools for everyday life.

00:00:05.880 | I'm Andrew Huberman,

00:00:10.240 | and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology

00:00:13.480 | at Stanford School of Medicine.

00:00:15.440 | My guest today is Dr. Jamil Zaki.

00:00:18.080 | Dr. Jamil Zaki is a professor of psychology

00:00:20.600 | at Stanford University.

00:00:22.120 | He is also the director

00:00:23.440 | of the Social Neuroscience Laboratory at Stanford.

00:00:26.360 | His laboratory focuses on key aspects of the human experience

00:00:29.500 | such as empathy and cynicism,

00:00:31.700 | which lie at the heart of our ability to learn

00:00:34.120 | and can be barriers to learning,

00:00:36.320 | such as the case with cynicism.

00:00:38.400 | Today, you'll learn the optimal mindsets to adopt

00:00:40.640 | when trying to understand how to learn conflict resolution

00:00:44.520 | and how to navigate relationships of all kinds

00:00:47.280 | and in all contexts,

00:00:48.780 | including personal relationships and in the workplace.

00:00:52.120 | What sets Dr. Zaki's work apart from others

00:00:54.520 | is that he's able to take laboratory research

00:00:56.840 | and apply that to real-world scenarios

00:00:58.920 | to direct optimal strategies

00:01:00.480 | for things like how to set personal boundaries,

00:01:03.080 | how to learn information in uncertain

00:01:05.360 | and sometimes even uncomfortable environments,

00:01:08.120 | and then how to bring that to bear

00:01:10.040 | in terms of your relationship to yourself,

00:01:12.080 | your relationship to others,

00:01:13.480 | and how to collaborate with others in more effective ways.

00:01:16.880 | I wanna be very clear that today's discussion,

00:01:18.940 | while focused on cynicism, trust, and empathy,

00:01:21.800 | is anything but squishy.

00:01:23.040 | In fact, it focuses on experimental data

00:01:25.820 | derived from real-world contexts.

00:01:28.040 | So it is both grounded in solid research

00:01:30.520 | and it is very practical,

00:01:32.240 | such that by the end of today's episode,

00:01:34.280 | you'll be armed with new knowledge

00:01:35.760 | about what cynicism is and is not,

00:01:38.380 | what empathy is and is not.

00:01:40.220 | This is very important because there's a lot of confusion

00:01:42.680 | about these words and what they mean.

00:01:45.040 | But I can assure you that by the end of today's discussion,

00:01:47.480 | you will have new frameworks and indeed new tools,

00:01:49.920 | protocols that you can use as strategies

00:01:52.800 | to better navigate situations and relationships of all kinds

00:01:56.480 | and indeed to learn better.

00:01:58.760 | I'd also like to mention that Dr. Zaki

00:02:00.600 | has authored a terrific new book entitled "Hope for Cynics,

00:02:04.480 | the Surprising Science of Human Goodness."

00:02:06.720 | And I've read this book and it is spectacular.

00:02:09.700 | There's a link to the book in the show note captions.

00:02:12.240 | Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast

00:02:15.120 | is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

00:02:17.900 | It is, however, part of my desire and effort

00:02:20.180 | to bring zero cost to consumer information

00:02:22.160 | about science and science-related tools

00:02:24.200 | to the general public.

00:02:25.560 | In keeping with that theme,

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00:06:56.280 | And now for my discussion with Dr. Jamil Zaki.

00:06:59.600 | Dr. Jamil Zaki, welcome.

00:07:02.080 | - Thanks so much for having me.

00:07:03.480 | - Delighted to have you here.

00:07:05.480 | And to learn from you,

00:07:07.120 | you have decided to tackle

00:07:09.520 | an enormous number of very interesting

00:07:12.840 | and challenging topics.

00:07:14.720 | Challenging because my read of it,

00:07:17.880 | not just your book,

00:07:18.760 | but of these fields in the science that you've done,

00:07:21.440 | is that people default to some complicated states

00:07:26.280 | and emotions sometimes that in some ways serve them well,

00:07:29.880 | in some ways serve them less well.

00:07:32.560 | So I'd like to talk about this at the level

00:07:34.080 | of the individual and interactions between pairs

00:07:38.120 | and larger groups and so on.

00:07:40.120 | But just to kick things off,

00:07:43.040 | what is cynicism?

00:07:45.320 | You know, I have my own ideas,

00:07:47.240 | but what is cynicism?

00:07:49.160 | What does it serve in terms of its role in the human mind?

00:07:53.640 | - The way that psychologists think of cynicism these days

00:07:57.400 | is as a theory, a theory about human beings.

00:08:01.440 | It's the idea that generally people at their core

00:08:05.680 | are selfish, greedy, and dishonest.

00:08:08.880 | Now, that's not to say that a cynical person

00:08:11.400 | will deny that somebody could act kindly, for instance,

00:08:14.880 | could donate to charity, could help a stranger,

00:08:17.720 | but they would say all of that,

00:08:20.240 | all of that kind and friendly behavior

00:08:22.720 | is a thin veneer covering up who we really are,

00:08:26.480 | which is self-interested.

00:08:29.120 | Another way of putting this is,

00:08:30.880 | you know, there are these ancient philosophical questions

00:08:33.000 | about people.

00:08:34.080 | Are we good or bad?

00:08:35.960 | Kind or cruel?

00:08:37.320 | Caring or callous?

00:08:39.080 | And cynicism is answering all of those

00:08:42.340 | in the relatively bleak way that you might.

00:08:45.140 | - I believe in your book, you quote Kurt Vonnegut,

00:08:50.160 | who says, "We are who we pretend to be,

00:08:53.400 | "so we need to be careful who we pretend to be."

00:08:56.760 | What do you think that quote means?

00:08:58.200 | How do you interpret that quote?

00:09:00.380 | - Thanks for bringing that up.

00:09:01.220 | Kurt Vonnegut, one of my favorite authors,

00:09:04.140 | and to me, that quote is enormously powerful

00:09:07.740 | because it expresses the idea of self-fulfilling prophecies.

00:09:12.420 | You know, there's this subjective sense that people have

00:09:17.460 | that our version of the world is the world,

00:09:20.060 | that we are passively taking in information,

00:09:22.900 | veridically, dispassionately,

00:09:26.380 | and in fact, that's not the case.

00:09:28.460 | We each construct our own version of the world.

00:09:32.340 | And so, for instance, if you think about cynicism, right?

00:09:36.180 | Are people kind or cruel?

00:09:37.420 | That's pretty much an unanswerable question

00:09:40.080 | at the level of science.

00:09:41.140 | It's a philosophical, some could argue,

00:09:43.380 | even a theological question.

00:09:45.380 | But it turns out that the way you answer that

00:09:47.700 | goes a long way in constructing and shaping

00:09:52.040 | the life that you live, the decisions that you make.

00:09:56.100 | So cynics, maybe it's not so much

00:09:58.140 | about who they pretend to be,

00:09:59.760 | but it's about who they pretend everybody else is, right?

00:10:03.580 | If you decide that other people are selfish, for instance,

00:10:07.700 | you'll be far less likely to trust them.

00:10:10.340 | And there's a lot of evidence that cynics,

00:10:12.620 | when they're put in situations with new people,

00:10:15.140 | even when they interact with their friends,

00:10:18.260 | romantic partners, and families,

00:10:20.780 | that they still have their guard up,

00:10:22.560 | that they're not able to make trusting

00:10:25.440 | and deep connections with other people.

00:10:27.780 | But guess what?

00:10:28.620 | When you treat other people in that way,

00:10:30.220 | a couple of things happen.

00:10:32.040 | One, you're not able to receive

00:10:34.800 | what most of us need from social connections.

00:10:38.120 | There's one really classic and very sad study

00:10:41.600 | where people were forced to give an extemporaneous speech

00:10:45.320 | about a subject they don't know much about,

00:10:47.020 | a very stressful experience

00:10:49.300 | that raised people's blood pressure.

00:10:52.320 | Some of these folks had a cheerleader,

00:10:54.760 | not an actual cheerleader, but a friendly stranger

00:10:58.440 | who was with them while they prepared,

00:10:59.880 | saying, "You've got this, I know you can do it.

00:11:02.140 | "I'm in your corner."

00:11:03.840 | Other people had no support.

00:11:06.180 | As you know, one of the great things about social support

00:11:09.280 | is that it buffers us from stress.

00:11:12.100 | So most people,

00:11:14.080 | when they had this friendly person by their side,

00:11:17.000 | their blood pressure, as they prepared for the speech,

00:11:19.520 | went up only half as much as when they were alone.

00:11:23.240 | But cynical people had a spike in their blood pressure

00:11:26.480 | that was indistinguishable in magnitude

00:11:29.720 | whether or not a person was by their side or not.

00:11:33.120 | One way that I think about this is,

00:11:35.440 | social connection is a deep and necessary form

00:11:39.120 | of psychological nourishment.

00:11:41.480 | And living a cynical life,

00:11:43.640 | making the decision that most people can't be trusted,

00:11:47.400 | stops you from being able to metabolize those calories,

00:11:51.480 | leaves you malnourished in a social way.

00:11:55.740 | A second thing that happens when you choose

00:11:59.160 | to pretend that others are selfish, greedy, and dishonest

00:12:03.700 | is that you bring out the worst in them.

00:12:06.920 | There's a lot of research that finds

00:12:08.880 | that cynical people tend to do things

00:12:11.220 | like monitoring others, spying on them,

00:12:13.980 | or threatening them to make sure

00:12:15.560 | that that other person doesn't betray them.

00:12:18.480 | But of course, other people can tell how we're treating them

00:12:22.200 | and they reciprocate our kindness

00:12:24.560 | and retaliate against our unkindness.

00:12:27.840 | So cynical people end up bringing out

00:12:30.600 | the most selfish qualities of others,

00:12:33.260 | telling a story full of villains

00:12:35.840 | and then ending up stuck living in that story.

00:12:38.640 | - How early in life does cynicism show up?

00:12:41.840 | I'm thinking about "Sesame Street" characters,

00:12:44.460 | which to me embody different neural circuits.

00:12:47.720 | You know, you've got Cookie Monster,

00:12:51.000 | some strong dopaminergic drive there.

00:12:53.960 | Knows what he wants, knows what he likes,

00:12:55.480 | and he's gonna get it.

00:12:56.360 | - That great prefrontal system, maybe.

00:12:58.280 | - Right, even if he has to eat the box

00:13:01.160 | in order to get to the cookie quicker.

00:13:03.780 | You have Elmo, who's all loving,

00:13:07.920 | and you have Oscar the Grouch.

00:13:09.440 | Somewhat cynical, but certainly grouchy.

00:13:13.520 | And then in, you know, essentially every fairy tale

00:13:18.520 | or every Christmas story or, you know,

00:13:23.220 | there seems to be sort of a skeptic

00:13:25.960 | or somebody that can't be brought on board

00:13:27.620 | the celebration that one would otherwise have.

00:13:31.340 | But even though kids are learning about cynicism

00:13:35.540 | and grouchiness and curmudgeons,

00:13:40.380 | I often think about those phenotypes in older folks

00:13:43.640 | because that's how they've been written

00:13:45.080 | into most of those stories.

00:13:47.000 | I guess Oscar the Grouch is,

00:13:48.840 | we don't know how old Oscar is.

00:13:50.520 | If one observes children,

00:13:53.560 | how early can you observe classically defined cynicism?

00:13:58.500 | - That's a great question.

00:14:01.080 | Classically defined cynicism would be hard

00:14:04.000 | to measure very early in life

00:14:05.400 | because you typically measure it through self-report.

00:14:07.800 | So people have to have relatively well-developed,

00:14:10.820 | elaborated stories that they can tell you

00:14:13.300 | about their version of the world.

00:14:16.060 | That said, one early experience and one early phenotype

00:14:20.640 | that's very strongly correlated with generalized mistrust

00:14:24.580 | and unwillingness to count on other people

00:14:27.660 | would be insecure attachment early in life.

00:14:30.980 | So for instance, you might know, but just for listeners,

00:14:35.440 | insecure attachment is a way of describing

00:14:38.680 | how kids experience the social world.

00:14:41.580 | It's often tested using something known

00:14:43.220 | as the strange situation where a one-year-old

00:14:45.980 | is brought to a lab with their caregiver,

00:14:49.560 | mother, father, whoever is caring for them.

00:14:52.860 | They're in a novel environment

00:14:54.480 | and researchers are observing

00:14:56.340 | how much do they explore the space?

00:14:57.740 | How comfortable do they seem?

00:14:59.780 | Then after that, a stranger enters the room.

00:15:03.580 | Couple minutes after that, their mother leaves the room

00:15:07.020 | or their caregiver leaves the room,

00:15:09.000 | which is of course incredibly strange

00:15:11.340 | and stressful for most one-year-olds.

00:15:13.340 | The caregiver then returns after a minute

00:15:16.560 | and what researchers look at is a few things.

00:15:19.420 | One, how comfortable is the child exploring a space

00:15:22.700 | with their caregiver present?

00:15:24.820 | Two, how comfortable are they when other people are around?

00:15:28.140 | Three, how do they react when their caregiver leaves?

00:15:31.060 | And four, how do they react at the reunion

00:15:34.020 | with their caregiver?

00:15:35.700 | And the majority of kids, approximately 2/3 of them,

00:15:38.580 | are securely attached, meaning that they are comfortable

00:15:42.380 | exploring a new space, they get really freaked out,

00:15:45.820 | of course, as you might when their caregiver leaves,

00:15:48.420 | but then they soothe quickly when their caregiver returns.

00:15:51.880 | The remaining 1/3 or so of kids are insecurely attached,

00:15:56.780 | meaning that they're skittish in new environments

00:15:59.180 | even when their parent or caregiver is there.

00:16:02.140 | They really freak out when their caregiver leaves

00:16:04.940 | and they're not very soothed upon their return.

00:16:08.500 | Now, for a long time, attachment style was viewed

00:16:11.260 | in very emotional terms and it is,

00:16:13.980 | it is an emotional reaction first and foremost,

00:16:17.000 | but researchers more recently have started to think about,

00:16:19.540 | well, what are the cognitive schemas?

00:16:22.780 | What are the underpinnings, the ways that children think

00:16:26.380 | when they are securely or insecurely attached?

00:16:28.860 | And one brilliant study used looking time.

00:16:31.880 | Looking time in kids is a metric of what surprises them.

00:16:36.820 | If something really surprising happens,

00:16:38.320 | they look for a very long time.

00:16:40.540 | And researchers found that insecurely attached kids,

00:16:43.420 | when they saw a video of a reunion,

00:16:47.700 | of a caregiver and infant acting in a way

00:16:52.100 | that felt loving and stable,

00:16:55.100 | they looked longer as though that was surprising.

00:16:58.300 | Kids who were securely attached didn't look very long

00:17:01.140 | at those stable interactions,

00:17:03.820 | but looked longer at interactions that were unstable.

00:17:06.940 | - Interesting.

00:17:07.780 | - It's almost as though there is a setup

00:17:09.960 | that kids develop very early.

00:17:11.780 | Can I count on people?

00:17:13.520 | Am I safe with people?

00:17:16.580 | And insecure attachment is a signal coming early in life,

00:17:19.780 | no, you're not safe with people,

00:17:21.380 | that I think, well, and the data show,

00:17:23.980 | elaborates later in life into mistrust

00:17:26.980 | in other relationships.

00:17:28.640 | - How different is cynicism from skepticism?

00:17:33.480 | I can think of some places where they might overlap,

00:17:38.060 | but cynicism seems to carry something

00:17:41.780 | of a lack of anticipation

00:17:44.340 | about any possibility of a positive future.

00:17:47.380 | Is that one way to think about it?

00:17:49.020 | - That's a very sharp way of thinking about it, actually.

00:17:51.700 | And I wish that people knew more

00:17:54.500 | about the discrepancy between these two ways

00:17:58.500 | of viewing the world.

00:17:59.500 | Cynicism and skepticism,

00:18:01.380 | people often use them interchangeably.

00:18:03.900 | In fact, they're quite different.

00:18:05.500 | And I would argue that one is much more useful

00:18:08.480 | for learning about the world

00:18:10.020 | and building relationships than the other.

00:18:12.500 | Again, cynicism is a theory that's kind of locked in,

00:18:16.840 | that no matter what people show you,

00:18:19.120 | their true colors are, again, untrustworthy

00:18:23.780 | and self-oriented.

00:18:25.420 | It's a hyper-Darwinian view, right,

00:18:27.420 | that ultimately people are red in tooth and claw.

00:18:30.380 | Skepticism is instead the, I guess, restlessness

00:18:36.380 | with our assumptions, a desire for new information.

00:18:42.040 | One way I often think about it is that cynics

00:18:44.980 | think a little bit like lawyers, right?

00:18:46.960 | They have a decision that they've already made about you

00:18:49.580 | and about everybody.

00:18:51.060 | And they're just waiting for evidence

00:18:52.900 | that supports their point.

00:18:54.620 | And when evidence comes in that doesn't support their point,

00:18:57.180 | they explain it away, right?

00:18:59.020 | And you see this, actually,

00:19:00.140 | that cynical people will offer more ulterior motives

00:19:03.920 | when they see an act of kindness, for instance.

00:19:06.580 | They'll explain it away.

00:19:08.380 | In that way, I think cynics actually are quite similar

00:19:11.940 | to the naive, trusting, gullible folks

00:19:14.800 | that they love to make fun of, right?

00:19:17.260 | Naivete, gullibility, is trusting people

00:19:20.620 | in a credulous, unthinking way.

00:19:23.420 | I would say cynicism is mistrusting people

00:19:26.300 | in a credulous and unthinking way.

00:19:29.340 | So if cynics then think like lawyers,

00:19:32.020 | sort of in the prosecution against humanity,

00:19:35.100 | skeptics think more like scientists.

00:19:38.180 | Skepticism, classically in philosophy,

00:19:40.980 | is the belief that you can never truly know anything.

00:19:44.760 | But as we think about it now,

00:19:46.520 | it's more the desire for evidence to underlie any claim

00:19:51.300 | that you believe.

00:19:53.020 | And the great thing about skepticism

00:19:55.020 | is it doesn't require an ounce of naivete.

00:19:58.300 | You can be absolutely sharp in deciding,

00:20:00.980 | I don't want to trust this person,

00:20:02.300 | or I do want to trust this person,

00:20:04.500 | but it allows you to update and learn from specific acts,

00:20:08.900 | specific instances, and specific people.

00:20:11.740 | - When I think about scientists,

00:20:13.340 | one of the first things I think about

00:20:14.820 | is not just their willingness,

00:20:17.000 | but their excitement to embrace complexity.

00:20:19.520 | - Yes.

00:20:20.360 | - Like, okay, these two groups disagree,

00:20:22.400 | or these two sets of data disagree,

00:20:25.340 | and it's the complexity of that interaction

00:20:28.480 | that excites them.

00:20:29.960 | Whereas when I think of cynics

00:20:32.900 | in the way that it's framed up in my mind,

00:20:34.780 | which I'm getting more educated now,

00:20:36.780 | but admittedly my understanding of cynicism

00:20:39.980 | is still rather superficial.

00:20:43.340 | You'll change that in the course of our discussion.

00:20:46.200 | But that cynics are not embracing

00:20:50.980 | the complexity of disagreement.

00:20:54.060 | They are moving away from the,

00:20:56.480 | certainly any notion of excitement by complexity.

00:20:59.860 | It seems like it's a heuristic,

00:21:01.640 | it's a way to simplify the world around you.

00:21:03.960 | - That's exactly right.

00:21:05.700 | Phil Tetlock has a great term for this

00:21:08.740 | called integrative complexity.

00:21:11.020 | To what extent can you hold different versions of the world,

00:21:14.580 | different arguments in mind?

00:21:16.340 | To what extent can you pick from each one

00:21:19.400 | what you believe based on the best evidence available?

00:21:22.620 | And integrative complexity is a great way

00:21:25.140 | to learn about the world and about the social world,

00:21:27.900 | whereas cynicism, as you rightly point out,

00:21:30.020 | is much more of a heuristic.

00:21:32.220 | It's a black and white form of thinking.

00:21:35.020 | And the really sad thing is that cynicism

00:21:39.140 | then puts us in a position where we can't learn very much.

00:21:43.840 | This is what, in learning theory,

00:21:45.220 | is called a wicked learning environment,

00:21:47.940 | where, and I don't wanna get too nerdy.

00:21:49.940 | Well, I guess I can get nerdy here.

00:21:51.180 | - You can get as nerdy as you want.

00:21:52.780 | This audience likes nerdy.

00:21:54.500 | - So let's think in Bayesian terms, right?

00:21:57.140 | So Bayesian statistics is where you have

00:22:00.060 | a set of beliefs about the world,

00:22:01.760 | you take new information in,

00:22:03.860 | and that new information allows you to update your priors

00:22:07.300 | into a posterior distribution, into a new set of beliefs.

00:22:11.460 | And that's great.

00:22:12.300 | That's a great way to learn about the world,

00:22:14.780 | to adapt to new information and new circumstances.

00:22:18.440 | A wicked learning environment is where your priors

00:22:21.620 | prevent you from gathering the information

00:22:24.020 | that you would need to confirm or disconfirm them.

00:22:26.920 | So think about mistrust, for instance, right?

00:22:30.720 | It's easy to understand why people mistrust.

00:22:33.540 | Some of us are insecurely attached,

00:22:35.380 | and we've been hurt in the past.

00:22:37.240 | We're trying to stay safe.

00:22:38.980 | We don't want to be betrayed.

00:22:40.560 | This is a completely natural response.

00:22:43.100 | It's a totally understandable response.

00:22:45.860 | But when we decide to mistrust,

00:22:49.460 | we never are able to learn whether the people

00:22:52.100 | who we are mistrusting would have been trustworthy or not.

00:22:56.380 | When we trust, we can learn

00:22:58.460 | whether we've been right or not, right?

00:22:59.940 | Somebody can betray us, and that hurts,

00:23:01.540 | and we remember it for years.

00:23:03.180 | Or more often than not, the data turn out to show us

00:23:07.220 | they can honor that trust.

00:23:08.580 | We can build a relationship.

00:23:10.340 | We can start a collaboration.

00:23:13.580 | We can live a full social life.

00:23:16.140 | And it turns out that the problem is

00:23:18.700 | that trusting people incorrectly, you do learn from,

00:23:22.460 | but mistrusting people incorrectly, you don't learn from,

00:23:26.140 | because the missed opportunities are invisible to us.

00:23:30.740 | - Wow, there's certainly a lot there

00:23:32.060 | that maps to many people's experience.

00:23:34.740 | So you pointed out that some degree of cynicism

00:23:37.920 | likely has roots in insecure attachment.

00:23:40.940 | That said, if one looks internationally,

00:23:45.620 | do we find cultures where it's very hard to find cynics,

00:23:50.500 | and there could be any number of reasons for this,

00:23:53.740 | or perhaps even more interestingly,

00:23:56.420 | do we find cultures where there really isn't even a word

00:23:59.660 | for cynicism?

00:24:01.100 | - Wow, I love that question.

00:24:03.580 | There is a lot of variance in,

00:24:06.060 | and the data on cynicism are much more local

00:24:09.340 | to the US typically.

00:24:10.540 | I mean, for better and for worse,

00:24:14.180 | a lot of research on this is done in an American context.

00:24:17.280 | But that said, there's a lot of data on generalized trust,

00:24:21.920 | which you could say is an inverse of cynicism, right?

00:24:24.280 | So for instance, there are national and international

00:24:27.020 | samples of major surveys which ask people

00:24:31.740 | whether they agree or disagree

00:24:33.420 | that most people can be trusted.

00:24:35.220 | And there's a lot of variance around the world.

00:24:38.260 | In general, the cultures that are most trusting

00:24:41.060 | have a couple of things in common.

00:24:43.020 | One, they are more economically equal

00:24:46.660 | than untrusting cultures.

00:24:48.600 | So there's a lot of great work from Kate Willett

00:24:52.660 | and Richard Wilkinson that,

00:24:56.260 | they have a book called "The Spirit Level"

00:24:57.740 | where they look at inequality across the world

00:25:00.180 | and relate it to public health outcomes,

00:25:01.820 | and one of them is trust.

00:25:03.540 | There's also variance in trust over time.

00:25:07.780 | So you can look at not just are there places or cultures

00:25:10.900 | that trust more than others,

00:25:12.100 | but when does a culture trust more or less?

00:25:16.060 | And in the US, that's sadly a story of decline.

00:25:19.740 | In 1972, about half of Americans believed

00:25:23.360 | that most people can be trusted.

00:25:25.340 | And by 2018, that had fallen to about a third of Americans.

00:25:29.460 | And that's a drop as big, just to put it in perspective,

00:25:33.200 | as the stock market took in the financial collapse of 2008.

00:25:36.780 | So there's a lot of variance here,

00:25:39.680 | both across space and time.

00:25:42.340 | And one of the, not the only,

00:25:44.900 | but one of the seeming characteristics of cultures

00:25:48.860 | that tracks that is how unequal they are.

00:25:52.180 | In part, because research suggests

00:25:54.760 | that when you are in a highly unequal society,

00:25:58.460 | economically, there's a sense of zero-sum competition

00:26:01.580 | that develops.

00:26:02.420 | There's a sense that, wait a minute,

00:26:03.760 | anything that another person gets, I lose.

00:26:07.100 | And if you have that inherent sense of zero-sum competition,

00:26:12.100 | then it's very difficult to form bonds.

00:26:15.300 | It's very difficult to trust other people

00:26:17.520 | because you might think, well, in order to survive,

00:26:20.220 | this person has to try to outrun me.

00:26:23.220 | They have to try to trip me.

00:26:24.260 | They have to try to make me fail for themselves to succeed.

00:26:28.220 | I'd like to take a quick break

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00:27:40.540 | - What is the relationship, if any,

00:27:42.560 | between cynicism and happiness or lack of happiness?

00:27:46.760 | When I think of somebody who's really cynical,

00:27:48.540 | I think of an Oscar the Grouch

00:27:50.300 | or a curmudgeon-like character.

00:27:53.160 | And as I ask this question,

00:27:54.380 | I'm thinking specifically about what you said earlier

00:27:56.620 | about how cynicism prevents us

00:27:58.960 | from certain forms of learning that are important

00:28:02.300 | and very valuable to us.

00:28:03.260 | Here's the reason why.

00:28:04.100 | I'll give just a little bit of context.

00:28:05.260 | I remember when I was a kid,

00:28:06.180 | my dad, who went to classic boarding schools,

00:28:10.260 | he grew up in South America,

00:28:11.500 | but he went to these boarding schools that were very strict.

00:28:15.900 | And he was taught, he told me,

00:28:18.140 | that to be cheerful and happy,

00:28:22.220 | people would accuse you of being kind of dumb.

00:28:26.280 | Whereas if you were cynical

00:28:27.860 | and you acted a little bored with everything,

00:28:30.180 | people thought that you were more discerning,

00:28:32.520 | but that he felt it was a terrible model

00:28:34.720 | for going through life because it veered into cynicism.

00:28:39.300 | My dad happens to be a scientist.

00:28:41.300 | He's, I think, a relatively happy person.

00:28:44.800 | Sorry, dad.

00:28:45.640 | A happy person, seems happy,

00:28:46.940 | but meaning he's a person who has happiness

00:28:49.940 | and he has other emotions too.

00:28:51.140 | I wouldn't say he's happy all the time,

00:28:52.540 | but he experiences joy and pleasure in daily,

00:28:55.680 | small things and big things in life.

00:28:57.380 | So clearly he rescued himself from the forces

00:29:00.620 | that were kind of pushing him down that path.

00:29:02.020 | But that's the anecdote.

00:29:03.660 | But I use that question more as a way to frame up

00:29:07.300 | the possible collaboration between cynicism

00:29:10.220 | and exuding boredom or a challenge

00:29:15.220 | in shifting somebody towards a happier affect.

00:29:20.060 | Because when I think about cynics,

00:29:21.340 | I think that they're kind of unhappy people.

00:29:23.820 | And when I think about people who are not very cynical,

00:29:25.460 | I think of them as kind of cheerful and curious.

00:29:27.980 | And there's some ebullience there.

00:29:29.920 | They might not be Tigger-like in their affect,

00:29:33.200 | but they kind of veer that direction.

00:29:36.020 | - Andrew, I love this trip down memory lane.

00:29:37.840 | I'm having all these childhood memories

00:29:39.760 | of Tigger and Sesame Street.

00:29:43.840 | There's so much in what you're saying.

00:29:45.340 | I want to try to pull on a couple of threads here,

00:29:47.460 | if that's okay.

00:29:48.600 | First, and this one is pretty straightforward,

00:29:51.560 | the effect of cynicism on well-being

00:29:53.860 | is just really documented and quite negative.

00:29:57.460 | So there are large prospective studies

00:30:00.860 | with tens of thousands of people,

00:30:04.100 | several of these studies,

00:30:05.460 | that measure cynicism and then measure life outcomes

00:30:08.740 | in the years and decades afterwards.

00:30:11.140 | And the news is pretty bleak for cynics, right?

00:30:14.100 | So absolutely, lower levels of happiness,

00:30:18.020 | flourishing satisfaction with life,

00:30:20.580 | greater incidence of depression, greater loneliness.

00:30:24.500 | But it's not just the neck up that cynicism affects.

00:30:29.140 | Cynics over the course of their lives

00:30:31.300 | also tend to have greater degrees of cellular inflammation,

00:30:35.420 | more incidence of heart disease,

00:30:37.720 | and they even have higher rates of all-cause mortality,

00:30:41.340 | so shorter lives than non-cynics.

00:30:43.660 | And again, this might sound like, wait a minute,

00:30:45.540 | you go from a philosophical theory

00:30:47.300 | to a shorter life.

00:30:49.500 | The answer is, yeah, you do, because,

00:30:51.940 | and again, these are correlational studies,

00:30:53.940 | so I don't wanna draw too many causal claims,

00:30:56.180 | but they're quite rigorous and control

00:30:58.100 | for a lot of other factors.

00:31:00.300 | But I would say that this is consistent

00:31:02.420 | with the idea that, really,

00:31:04.100 | one of the great protectors of our health

00:31:07.540 | is our sense of connection to other people.

00:31:09.940 | And if you are unable or unwilling

00:31:13.120 | to be vulnerable around others,

00:31:15.020 | to really touch in to that type of connection,

00:31:18.580 | it stands to reason that things like chronic stress

00:31:21.700 | and isolation would impact not just your mind,

00:31:25.280 | but all through your body and your organ systems.

00:31:28.760 | So again, the news here is not great,

00:31:31.420 | and I often think about one of the best encapsulations

00:31:34.820 | of a cynical view of life comes from Thomas Hobbes,

00:31:39.060 | the philosopher, who, in his book "Leviathan,"

00:31:42.020 | said we need a restrictive government.

00:31:44.980 | Because left to our own devices,

00:31:47.620 | human life is nasty, brutish, and short.

00:31:50.500 | And ironically, I think that might describe

00:31:52.700 | the lives of cynics themselves more than most people.

00:31:57.700 | So that's point one, right,

00:31:59.780 | is that there is this pretty stark negative correlation

00:32:03.740 | between cynicism and a lot of life outcomes

00:32:06.680 | that we might want for ourselves.

00:32:08.860 | But point two, I think,

00:32:10.540 | is related to what your dad also noticed,

00:32:13.460 | which is that if cynicism hurts us so much,

00:32:17.380 | why would we adopt it?

00:32:19.540 | If it was a pill, if there was a pill

00:32:21.460 | that as its side effects listed depression,

00:32:24.180 | loneliness, heart disease, and early death,

00:32:26.460 | it would be a poison, right?

00:32:27.820 | It would have a skull and crossbones on the bottle.

00:32:30.580 | But yet we're swallowing it.

00:32:32.080 | More of us are swallowing it

00:32:33.540 | than we did in years and decades past.

00:32:35.580 | Why?

00:32:36.880 | Well, one of the answers, I think,

00:32:39.460 | is because our culture glamorizes cynicism.

00:32:42.220 | It's because of the very stereotype

00:32:44.140 | that your father pointed out,

00:32:45.340 | which is that if you're happy-go-lucky,

00:32:47.340 | if you trust people, that kind of seems dull.

00:32:50.460 | It seems like maybe you're not that sharp.

00:32:52.160 | Maybe you don't understand the world.

00:32:54.580 | And there is that strong relationship in our stereotypes,

00:32:58.980 | in our models of the world.

00:33:01.020 | Susan Fisk and many other psychologists

00:33:03.080 | have studied warmth and competence, right?

00:33:06.260 | How friendly and caring does somebody seem?

00:33:10.260 | And how able do they seem to accomplish hard things?

00:33:13.900 | And it turns out that in many studies,

00:33:16.260 | people's perception is that these are inversely correlated.

00:33:19.160 | That if you're warm, maybe you're not that competent.

00:33:22.120 | And if you're competent, maybe you shouldn't be that warm.

00:33:24.380 | And in fact, if you tell people

00:33:26.520 | to act as competently as they can,

00:33:29.680 | they'll often respond by being a little bit less nice,

00:33:32.980 | a little bit less warm than they would be otherwise.

00:33:36.300 | There's also data that find that,

00:33:38.820 | you know, where people are presented in surveys

00:33:41.100 | with a cynic and a non-cynic.

00:33:43.420 | They're told about, here's one person,

00:33:45.900 | they really think that people are great overall,

00:33:48.940 | and they tend to be trusting.

00:33:50.420 | Here's another person who thinks that people

00:33:52.660 | are kind of out for themselves

00:33:53.900 | and really doesn't trust most folks.

00:33:56.420 | And then they'll ask those people,

00:33:58.060 | who should we pick for this difficult intellectual task?

00:34:02.180 | And 70% of respondents pick a cynical person

00:34:06.580 | over a non-cynic for difficult intellectual tasks.

00:34:09.780 | 85% of people think that cynics are socially wiser,

00:34:14.280 | that they'd be able, for instance, to detect who's lying

00:34:17.160 | and who's telling the truth.

00:34:18.900 | So most of us put a lot of faith in people

00:34:22.280 | who don't have a lot of faith in people, ironically.

00:34:25.580 | And even more ironically, we're wrong to do so.

00:34:28.860 | Olga Stavrova, this great psychologist who studies cynicism,

00:34:32.340 | has this paper called "The Cynical Genius Illusion,"

00:34:35.780 | where she documents all these biases,

00:34:38.760 | the way that we think cynics are bright and wise,

00:34:42.220 | and then uses national data, tens of thousands of people,

00:34:46.460 | to show that actually, cynics do less well

00:34:49.620 | on cognitive tests, on mathematical tests,

00:34:52.460 | that trust is related with things

00:34:54.740 | like intelligence and education,

00:34:57.100 | and that, in other work,

00:35:00.580 | this is not from Olga Stavrova, but from others,

00:35:03.380 | that actually, cynics do less well than non-cynics

00:35:06.580 | in detecting liars.

00:35:08.000 | Because if you have a blanket assumption about people,

00:35:11.840 | you're not actually attending to evidence in a sharp way.

00:35:15.380 | You're not actually taking in new information

00:35:17.660 | and making wise decisions.

00:35:20.060 | - In other words, cynics are not being scientific.

00:35:24.500 | Their hypothesis is cast,

00:35:27.300 | but they're not looking at the data equally, right?

00:35:30.120 | And we should remind people

00:35:31.300 | that a hypothesis is not a question.

00:35:33.700 | Every great experiment starts with a question,

00:35:35.900 | and then you generate a hypothesis,

00:35:37.500 | which is a theory or conclusion,

00:35:41.500 | essentially made up front,

00:35:43.580 | and then you go collect data,

00:35:45.660 | and you see if you prove or disprove the hypothesis.

00:35:49.340 | And you can never really prove a hypothesis.

00:35:51.020 | You can only support it or not support it

00:35:54.220 | with the data that you collect,

00:35:55.420 | depending on the precision of your tools.

00:35:56.980 | But that's very interesting,

00:36:00.200 | because I would think that if we view cynics as smarter,

00:36:05.200 | which clearly they're not as a group, right?

00:36:08.380 | You're saying cynics are not more intelligent, right?

00:36:11.020 | I believe that's covered in your book.

00:36:13.060 | And if one knows that,

00:36:16.560 | then why do we send cynics in kind of like razors

00:36:20.740 | to assess what the environment is like?

00:36:25.400 | Is that because we'd rather have others deployed

00:36:29.940 | for us to kind of like weed people out?

00:36:32.520 | Is it that we're willing to accept some false negatives?

00:36:35.660 | Meaning for those,

00:36:38.220 | I guess we're using a little bit

00:36:39.120 | of a semi-technical language here,

00:36:40.600 | false negatives would be,

00:36:42.140 | you're trying to assess a group of people

00:36:43.580 | that would be terrific employees.

00:36:45.880 | And you send in somebody, interview them,

00:36:48.360 | that's very cynical.

00:36:50.480 | So presumably in one's mind,

00:36:52.680 | that filter of cynicism is only going to allow in people

00:36:55.520 | that are really, really right for the job.

00:36:58.040 | And we're willing to accept that,

00:36:59.640 | you know, there are probably two or three candidates

00:37:02.060 | that would also be right for the job,

00:37:03.380 | but we're willing to let them go.

00:37:04.580 | Some false negatives,

00:37:06.560 | as opposed to having someone get through the filter

00:37:11.380 | who really can't do the job.

00:37:12.780 | Like we're willing to let certain opportunities go

00:37:15.100 | by being cynical or by deploying a cynic as the,

00:37:18.420 | you know, I'm imagining the person with the clipboard,

00:37:20.120 | you know, very rigid.

00:37:21.900 | - Yeah. - Like cynicism

00:37:22.740 | and rigidity seem to go together.

00:37:24.180 | So that's why I'm lumping

00:37:25.340 | these kinds of psychological phenotypes.

00:37:27.500 | - No, I think that's absolutely right.

00:37:29.180 | And so a couple of things, one, you know,

00:37:32.180 | you said that if we know that cynics aren't smarter

00:37:34.980 | than non-cynics, why are we deploying them?

00:37:36.900 | Well, let's be clear, we know this,

00:37:38.660 | meaning you and I know this and scientists know this,

00:37:41.660 | but the data show that most people don't know this,

00:37:44.580 | that we maintain the stereotype in our culture

00:37:47.860 | that being negative about people

00:37:50.300 | means that you've been around the block enough times,

00:37:52.780 | that it is a form of wisdom.

00:37:54.040 | So that's a stereotype that I think we need

00:37:56.220 | to dispel first of all.

00:37:58.100 | But I do think that to your point,

00:38:00.580 | when we deploy cynics out in the field, you know,

00:38:03.380 | when we say, I'm gonna be nice,

00:38:05.020 | but I want somebody who's really pretty negative,

00:38:07.820 | who's really pretty suspicious to protect me

00:38:10.540 | or to protect my community,

00:38:12.380 | I think that's a really, again, understandable instinct,

00:38:15.780 | almost from an evolutionary perspective.

00:38:18.460 | You know, we are built to pay lots of attention

00:38:21.780 | to threats in our environment and threats to our community.

00:38:25.300 | And in the early social world, you know,

00:38:27.740 | if you wind, I mean,

00:38:28.660 | just to do some back of the envelope evolutionary psychology,

00:38:32.100 | if you wind the clock back 100, 150,000 years,

00:38:36.700 | what's, you know,

00:38:37.780 | what is the greatest threat to early communities?

00:38:39.860 | It's people, right?

00:38:41.660 | It's people who would take advantage

00:38:44.060 | of our communal nature, right?

00:38:45.820 | The thing that allows human beings to thrive

00:38:48.620 | is that we collaborate.

00:38:51.000 | But that collaboration means that a free rider,

00:38:54.460 | somebody who chooses to not pitch in,

00:38:56.960 | but still take out from the common pool,

00:38:59.540 | anything that they want, can do exceptionally well.

00:39:02.660 | They can live a life of leisure on the backs

00:39:05.500 | of a community that's working hard.

00:39:07.100 | And if you select then for that type of person,

00:39:10.680 | if that type of person proliferates,

00:39:12.260 | then the community collapses.

00:39:14.420 | So it makes sense that we depend on cynics

00:39:18.180 | from that perspective, from a threat mitigation perspective,

00:39:22.100 | from a risk aversion perspective.

00:39:24.900 | But it doesn't make sense

00:39:26.680 | from the perspective of trying to optimize

00:39:28.600 | our actual social lives, right?

00:39:30.600 | And I think that oftentimes, you know,

00:39:33.120 | we are risk averse in general,

00:39:34.360 | meaning that we're more scared of negative outcomes

00:39:36.820 | than we are enticed by positive outcomes.

00:39:40.320 | But in the social world,

00:39:41.520 | that risk aversion is, I think,

00:39:44.520 | quite harmful in a lot of demonstrable ways.

00:39:46.860 | - Is cynicism domain specific?

00:39:50.900 | And there again, I'm using jargon,

00:39:53.000 | meaning if somebody is cynical in one environment,

00:39:57.180 | like cynical about the markets,

00:39:58.540 | like, well, things are up now,

00:39:59.900 | but, you know, have an election come,

00:40:03.040 | so things can go this way or that way, depending on,

00:40:04.780 | you know, do they tend to be cynical

00:40:07.060 | about other aspects of life, other domains?

00:40:10.140 | - So there's a little bit of data on this,

00:40:13.360 | and it suggests a couple of things.

00:40:15.380 | One, left to our own devices,

00:40:18.180 | our levels of cynicism tend to be pretty stable over time.

00:40:22.820 | And also decline in older adulthood,

00:40:25.640 | contra the stereotype of the curmudgeonly older person.

00:40:29.400 | But another is that cynicism

00:40:31.320 | does tend to be pretty domain general.

00:40:33.760 | So for instance, cynics, you know,

00:40:36.840 | and this makes sense if you look at questionnaires

00:40:39.160 | that assess cynicism, which are things like,

00:40:41.800 | people are honest chiefly through fear of getting caught,

00:40:45.380 | or most people really don't like helping each other.

00:40:48.360 | I mean, if you're answering those questions positively,

00:40:51.120 | you're just not a fan of,

00:40:52.260 | you're probably not great at parties,

00:40:53.980 | you're not a fan of people.

00:40:55.820 | And it turns out that people who answer the,

00:40:57.940 | this is an old scale developed by a couple of psychologists

00:41:01.340 | named Walter Cook and Donald Medley in the 1950s.

00:41:04.540 | If you answer the Cook-Medley hostility scale,

00:41:07.940 | if you answer these questions positively,

00:41:09.900 | you tend to be less trusting of strangers,

00:41:12.580 | but you also tend to, for instance,

00:41:14.560 | have less trust in your romantic partnerships,

00:41:17.940 | you have less trust in your friends,

00:41:20.220 | and you have less trust in your colleagues.

00:41:21.940 | So this is sort of an all-purpose view of the world,

00:41:25.380 | at least as Cook and Medley first thought about it.

00:41:30.180 | But I do wanna build on a great intuition you have,

00:41:32.420 | which is that different environments

00:41:35.200 | might bring out cynicism or tamp it down.

00:41:38.860 | And it turns out that that's also very true.

00:41:40.880 | As trait-like as cynicism can be,

00:41:43.480 | there's lots of evidence that the type of

00:41:46.140 | social environment we're in matters a lot.

00:41:48.940 | One of my favorite studies in this domain

00:41:52.420 | came from Southeastern Brazil.

00:41:55.760 | There are two fishing villages in Southeastern Brazil.

00:41:58.260 | They're separated by about 30, 40 miles.

00:42:00.900 | They're similar in socioeconomic status, religion, culture,

00:42:04.780 | but there's one big difference between them.

00:42:07.520 | One of the villages sits on the ocean,

00:42:09.980 | and in order to fish on the ocean,

00:42:11.840 | you need big boats, heavy equipment.

00:42:14.140 | You can't do it alone.

00:42:15.420 | You must work together.

00:42:17.660 | The other village is on a lake,

00:42:19.540 | where fishermen strike out on small boats alone,

00:42:23.060 | and they compete with one another.

00:42:25.520 | About 10 years ago, economists,

00:42:27.580 | this was a study led by Andreas Liebrand,

00:42:29.460 | a really great economist.

00:42:31.000 | They went to these villages,

00:42:32.780 | and they gave the folks who worked there

00:42:35.800 | a bunch of social games to play.

00:42:38.460 | These were not with fellow fishermen, but with strangers.

00:42:41.500 | Games like, would you trust somebody with some money

00:42:44.420 | and see if they then want to share dividends with you?

00:42:47.380 | Or give in some money yourself,

00:42:49.420 | would you like to share some of it with another person?

00:42:52.860 | And they found that when they start in their careers,

00:42:56.260 | lake fishermen and ocean fishermen were equally trusting

00:43:00.300 | and equally trustworthy as well.

00:43:03.380 | But over the course of their careers, they diverged.

00:43:06.580 | Being in a collaborative environment

00:43:08.820 | where people must count on one another to survive

00:43:12.340 | made people over time more trusting and more trustworthy.

00:43:17.020 | Being in a competitive zero-sum environment over time

00:43:20.660 | made people less trusting and less trustworthy.

00:43:23.900 | Now, one thing that always amazes me about this work

00:43:26.220 | is that people in both of these environments are right.

00:43:30.620 | If you're in a competitive environment,

00:43:32.700 | you don't trust and you're right to not trust.

00:43:35.940 | If you're in a collaborative environment,

00:43:37.700 | you do trust and you're right to trust.

00:43:40.220 | And this is from the point of view of economic games,

00:43:42.780 | and I think much broadly construed as well.

00:43:45.440 | So one question then becomes,

00:43:47.140 | well, which of these environments do we want to be in?

00:43:49.820 | I think the cost in terms of wellbeing and relationships

00:43:53.000 | is quite obvious if you're in a competitive environment.

00:43:55.100 | And then the second question of course is,

00:43:57.500 | how do we put ourselves in the type of environment

00:44:00.540 | that we want knowing that that environment will change

00:44:03.180 | who we are over the course of our lives?

00:44:05.980 | - So much of schooling in this country

00:44:08.820 | is based on at first cooperation,

00:44:11.500 | like we're all gonna sit around and listen to a story

00:44:13.540 | and then we're gonna work in small groups.

00:44:15.580 | But in my experience over time,

00:44:18.040 | it evolves into more independent learning and competition.

00:44:21.180 | They post the distribution of scores.

00:44:23.200 | That's largely the distribution of individual scores.

00:44:26.820 | There are exceptions to this, of course.

00:44:28.300 | Like I think I've never been to business school,

00:44:30.100 | but I think they form small groups and work on projects.

00:44:32.300 | It's true in computer science at the undergraduate level

00:44:35.340 | and so on.

00:44:36.180 | But to what extent do you think having a mixture

00:44:40.220 | of cooperative learning, still competition perhaps

00:44:44.500 | between groups, as well as individual learning

00:44:47.940 | and competition can foster kind of an erosion of cynicism?

00:44:52.940 | Because it sounds like being cynical is,

00:44:55.900 | I don't wanna be hard on the cynics here,

00:44:57.820 | but they're probably already hard on themselves

00:45:00.100 | and everybody else.

00:45:01.300 | We know they're hard on everybody else.

00:45:02.700 | But, oh, there was my presumption.

00:45:05.140 | Okay, I'm gonna stay open-minded.

00:45:06.820 | Maybe they're not, you'll tell me.

00:45:09.020 | That they are on average less intelligent

00:45:13.260 | is what I'm hearing.

00:45:14.300 | And that there's something really big to be gained

00:45:18.420 | from anybody who decides to embrace novel ideas,

00:45:21.980 | even if they decide to stick with their original decision

00:45:25.020 | about others or something.

00:45:27.220 | Provided they explore the data in an open-minded way,

00:45:30.700 | even transiently, it sounds like

00:45:32.260 | there's an opportunity there.

00:45:33.660 | You gave a long-term example of these two phishing scenarios.

00:45:38.300 | So the neuroplasticity takes years,

00:45:40.980 | but we know neuroplasticity can be pretty quick.

00:45:42.980 | I would imagine if you expose a cynic

00:45:44.820 | to a counterexample to their belief

00:45:48.260 | that it's not gonna erode all of their cynicism,

00:45:50.700 | but it might make a little dent

00:45:51.940 | in that neural circuit for cynicism.

00:45:54.340 | - Yeah, this is a great perspective.

00:45:56.460 | And a couple of things I wanna be clear on.

00:45:59.180 | One, I am not here to judge or impugn cynics.

00:46:03.300 | I should confess that I myself struggle with cynicism

00:46:07.020 | and have for my entire life.

00:46:08.980 | Part of my journey to learn more about it

00:46:12.180 | and even to write this book

00:46:13.580 | was an attempt to understand myself

00:46:15.940 | and to see if it is possible to unlearn cynicism

00:46:20.940 | because frankly, I wanted to.

00:46:22.940 | So you will get no judgment from me

00:46:25.580 | of people who feel like it's hard to trust.

00:46:28.220 | I think that another point that you're bringing out

00:46:33.260 | that I wanna cosign is that saying

00:46:35.860 | that competition over the longterm,

00:46:38.820 | zero-sum competition can erode our trust

00:46:41.060 | isn't the same as saying that we should never compete.

00:46:43.540 | Competition is beautiful.

00:46:44.860 | I mean, the Olympics are going on right now

00:46:47.660 | and it's amazing to see what people do

00:46:50.420 | when they are at odds trying to best one another.

00:46:53.820 | Incredible feats are accomplished

00:46:57.300 | when we focus on the great things that we can do.

00:47:00.540 | And oftentimes we are driven to greatness

00:47:03.340 | by people we respect who are trying to be greater than us.

00:47:07.300 | So absolutely competition can be part

00:47:09.860 | of a very healthy social structure and a very healthy life.

00:47:14.460 | I think that the broader question

00:47:16.840 | is whether we construe that competition

00:47:18.820 | at the level of a task or at the level of the person.

00:47:23.820 | In fact, there's a lot of work in the science of conflict

00:47:28.040 | and conflict resolution that looks at the difference

00:47:30.740 | between task conflict and personal conflict.

00:47:34.820 | You can imagine in a workplace,

00:47:36.780 | two people have different ideas

00:47:38.340 | for what direction they wanna take a project in.

00:47:41.780 | Well, that's great if it leads to healthy debate

00:47:45.460 | and if that is mutually respectful.

00:47:48.540 | But the minute that that turns into

00:47:50.780 | blanket judgments about the other person,

00:47:52.820 | oh, the reason that they want this direction

00:47:54.660 | is because they're not so bright

00:47:56.940 | or because they don't have vision

00:47:59.340 | or because they're trying to gain favor.

00:48:01.140 | That's when we go from healthy skeptical conflict

00:48:05.740 | into cynical and destructive conflict.

00:48:09.500 | And you see this with athletes as well.

00:48:11.860 | Athletes often are very good friends

00:48:14.540 | and some of the people that they respect the most

00:48:16.980 | are the folks who they're battling.

00:48:19.260 | In the case of contact sports and boxing,

00:48:23.540 | literally battling, but they can have immense

00:48:26.500 | and positive regard for one another

00:48:28.700 | outside of the ring in those contexts.

00:48:31.340 | So I think that there's a huge difference

00:48:33.480 | between competition that's oriented on tasks,

00:48:37.020 | which can help us be the best version of ourselves

00:48:39.780 | and competition that bleeds into judgment,

00:48:44.020 | suspicion and mistrust.

00:48:46.340 | - I'd like to take us back just briefly

00:48:48.620 | to these developmental stages.

00:48:51.020 | Maybe I'm bridging two things that don't belong together,

00:48:54.580 | but I'm thinking about the young brain,

00:48:56.840 | which of course is hyperplastic

00:48:58.980 | and comparing that to the older brain.

00:49:01.160 | But the young brain learns a number of things

00:49:04.820 | while it does a number of things.

00:49:05.960 | It handles heart rate, digestion, et cetera, unconsciously.

00:49:09.180 | And then in many ways, the neuroplasticity

00:49:12.300 | that occurs early in life

00:49:13.380 | is to establish these maps of prediction.

00:49:16.620 | If things fall down, not up in general,

00:49:20.140 | things fall down, not up and so on.

00:49:23.920 | So that mental real estate can be used

00:49:26.140 | for other things and learning new things.

00:49:28.040 | So I'm thinking about the sort of classic example

00:49:31.500 | of object permanence.

00:49:33.100 | You show a baby a block or a toy,

00:49:36.780 | and then you hide that toy.

00:49:38.940 | And they, at a certain age, a very young age,

00:49:41.260 | will look as if it's gone.

00:49:43.220 | And then you bring it back and then they're amazed.

00:49:45.340 | And then at some point along their developmental trajectory,

00:49:47.820 | they learn object permanence.

00:49:49.500 | They know that it's behind your back, okay?

00:49:51.900 | And then we hear that characters like Santa Claus are real,

00:49:56.040 | and then eventually we learn that they're not,

00:49:58.640 | and so on and so on.

00:49:59.700 | In many ways, we go from being completely non-cynical

00:50:06.000 | about the physical world to being,

00:50:09.580 | one could sort of view it as cynical

00:50:12.540 | about the physical world, right?

00:50:14.000 | Like I love to see magic.

00:50:16.900 | In fact, we had probably the world's best

00:50:19.700 | or among the very best magicians on this podcast,

00:50:23.500 | Ozzy Wind, he's a mentalist and magician.

00:50:25.820 | And to see him do magic,

00:50:27.580 | even as an adult who understands

00:50:29.500 | that the laws of physics apply,

00:50:31.180 | they seem to defy the laws of physics in real time.

00:50:35.180 | And it just blows your mind to the point where you like,

00:50:38.940 | that can't be, but you sort of want it to be.

00:50:41.220 | And at some point you just go, you know what?

00:50:42.820 | It's what we call magic.

00:50:45.020 | So it seems to me that cynics apply almost physics

00:50:49.780 | like rules to social interaction.

00:50:52.160 | Like that they talk in terms of like first principles

00:50:56.220 | of human interactions, right?

00:50:58.260 | They talk about this group always this,

00:51:00.980 | and that group always that, right?

00:51:02.700 | These like strict categories,

00:51:05.060 | thick black lines between categories,

00:51:07.860 | as opposed to any kind of blending of understanding

00:51:11.780 | or a blending of rules.

00:51:13.780 | And one can see how that would be a really useful heuristic,

00:51:16.180 | but as we're learning, it's not good in the sense

00:51:19.540 | that we don't want to judge,

00:51:20.360 | but it's not good if our goal is to learn more

00:51:22.900 | about the world or learn the most information

00:51:24.900 | about the world.

00:51:25.720 | Can we say that?

00:51:26.560 | - Yes, and I appreciate you saying, yeah.

00:51:29.020 | I also try to avoid good, bad language or moral judgment,

00:51:33.600 | but I think that many of us have the goals

00:51:35.780 | of having strong relationships

00:51:37.800 | and of flourishing psychologically

00:51:40.900 | and of learning accurately about the world.

00:51:43.220 | And if those are your goals,

00:51:44.460 | I think it's fair to say

00:51:45.900 | that cynicism can block your way towards them.

00:51:49.200 | I love this.

00:51:50.180 | I've never thought about it in this way,

00:51:51.940 | but I love that perspective.

00:51:53.540 | And there is almost a philosophical certainty.

00:51:58.360 | Maybe it's not a happy philosophical certainty,

00:52:01.540 | but we love to, right?

00:52:03.620 | Human beings love explanatory power.

00:52:06.580 | We love to be able to have laws

00:52:09.700 | that determine what will happen.

00:52:11.740 | And the laws of physics are some of our most reliable,

00:52:14.860 | right?

00:52:15.700 | And really we all use theories to predict the world, right?

00:52:19.220 | I mean, we all have a theory of gravity

00:52:20.980 | that lives inside our head.

00:52:22.140 | We don't think objects with mass attract one another,

00:52:24.880 | but we know if we drop a bowling ball on our foot,

00:52:27.460 | we're gonna probably maybe not walk

00:52:28.980 | for the next week or at least, right?

00:52:30.580 | So we use theories to provide explanatory simplicity

00:52:35.580 | to a vast and overwhelmingly complex world.

00:52:40.300 | And absolutely, I think cynicism has a great function

00:52:45.260 | in simplifying, but of course in simplifying,

00:52:48.660 | we lose a lot of the detail.

00:52:50.940 | We lose a lot of the wonder

00:52:53.300 | that maybe we experienced earlier in life.

00:52:56.900 | And I do wanna, your beautiful description of kids

00:53:01.820 | and their sort of sense of, I suppose, perennial surprise

00:53:07.180 | makes me think about another aspect

00:53:09.820 | of what we lose to cynicism,

00:53:12.120 | which is the ability to witness the beauty of human action

00:53:17.120 | and human kindness.

00:53:19.240 | My friend, Dacher Keltner, studies awe,

00:53:22.820 | this emotion of experiencing something vast

00:53:27.180 | and also experiencing ourselves as small

00:53:31.220 | and a part of that vastness.

00:53:33.540 | And he wrote a great book on awe.

00:53:36.420 | And in it, he talks about his research

00:53:38.420 | where he cataloged what are the experiences

00:53:42.500 | that most commonly produce awe in a large sample,

00:53:46.980 | large representative sample of people.

00:53:49.180 | Now, I don't know about you, Andrew,

00:53:50.940 | but when I think about awe,

00:53:52.500 | my first go-to is Carl Sagan's "Pale Blue Dot,"

00:53:57.420 | this image of a kind of nebula band

00:53:59.900 | or sort of cluster basically, stardust really.

00:54:04.900 | And there's one dot in it with an arrow,

00:54:06.540 | and Carl Sagan says, "That dot is Earth,

00:54:09.580 | "and every king and tyrant and mother and father,

00:54:13.700 | "every person who's ever fallen in love,

00:54:16.820 | "and every person who's ever had their heart broken,

00:54:18.480 | "they're all on that tiny dot there."

00:54:20.300 | I go to that, I show that to my kids all the time.

00:54:23.460 | When I think of awe, I think of outer space.

00:54:25.860 | I think of groves of redwood trees.

00:54:27.860 | I think of drone footage of the Himalayas, right?

00:54:31.140 | But Dacher finds that if you ask people

00:54:33.580 | what they experience awe in response to,

00:54:36.340 | the number one category is what he calls moral beauty,

00:54:40.900 | everyday acts of kindness, giving,

00:54:46.060 | compassion, and connection.

00:54:48.700 | This is also related to what Dacher and John Haidt

00:54:51.500 | talk about in terms of moral elevation,

00:54:53.700 | witnessing positive actions that actually make us feel

00:54:57.820 | like we're capable of more.

00:55:00.100 | And moral beauty is everywhere.

00:55:03.140 | If you are open to it, it is the most common thing

00:55:05.500 | that will make you feel the vastness of our species.

00:55:09.820 | And to have a lawful, physics-like prediction

00:55:14.320 | about the world that blinkers you from seeing that,

00:55:17.740 | that gives you tunnel vision and prevents you

00:55:21.180 | from experiencing moral beauty

00:55:23.620 | seems like a tragic form of simplicity.

00:55:26.220 | - I'd like to take a quick break

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00:56:38.580 | And while I've been doing it for years,

00:56:40.380 | I've always found it to be overly complicated and expensive.

00:56:43.300 | I've been so impressed by Function,

00:56:44.780 | both at the level of ease of use,

00:56:46.680 | that is getting the tests done,

00:56:48.220 | as well as how comprehensive and how actionable

00:56:51.100 | the tests are, that I recently joined their advisory board,

00:56:54.520 | and I'm thrilled that they're sponsoring the podcast.

00:56:56.760 | If you'd like to try Function,

00:56:58.080 | go to functionhealth.com/huberman.

00:57:01.380 | Function currently has a wait list of over 250,000 people,

00:57:04.980 | but they're offering early access to Huberman Lab listeners.

00:57:07.800 | Again, that's functionhealth.com/huberman

00:57:11.060 | to get early access to Function.

00:57:13.680 | - I love that your examples of both pale blue dot

00:57:17.060 | and everyday compassion bridge the two,

00:57:21.600 | what I think of as time domains that the,

00:57:24.780 | or I should say space-time domains

00:57:26.560 | that the brain can encompass.

00:57:28.780 | You know, this has long fascinated me about the human brain

00:57:31.720 | and presumably other animals' brains as well,

00:57:34.240 | which is that, you know, we can sharpen our aperture

00:57:39.120 | to, you know, something so, so small

00:57:41.860 | and pay attention to just like the immense beauty.

00:57:44.380 | And, you know, like I have a lot of ants

00:57:45.980 | in my yard right now,

00:57:46.860 | and lately I've been watching them interact

00:57:48.260 | 'cause they were driving me crazy.

00:57:49.740 | They were just like, you know,

00:57:50.760 | they're like everywhere this summer

00:57:52.300 | and they're climbing on me.

00:57:53.360 | And I thought, I'm just gonna like watch what they do.

00:57:55.080 | And clearly there's a structure there.

00:57:57.260 | I know Debra Gordon at Stanford

00:57:59.140 | has studied ant behavior in others.

00:58:00.900 | And it's like, there's a lot going on there,

00:58:02.540 | but then you look up from there and you're like,

00:58:03.700 | wow, there's a big yard.

00:58:04.780 | And then the sense of all for me is that

00:58:08.020 | interactions like that must be going on everywhere

00:58:11.740 | in this yard.

00:58:13.420 | And, you know, it frames up that the aperture

00:58:16.380 | of our cognition in space and in time, you know,

00:58:19.020 | covering small distances quickly or small distances slowly.

00:58:22.400 | And then we can zoom out literally

00:58:24.580 | and think about us on this ball in space, right?

00:58:29.580 | You know, and that ability I think is incredible.

00:58:33.460 | And that awe can be captured at these different extremes

00:58:36.820 | of space, time, cognition.

00:58:39.900 | Amazing.

00:58:41.100 | It seems to me that what you're saying

00:58:42.280 | is that cynicism and awe are also opposite ends

00:58:44.520 | of the continuum.

00:58:45.340 | And that's taking us in a direction slightly different

00:58:48.180 | than I was going to try and take us.

00:58:50.300 | But I love that we're talking about awe

00:58:52.300 | because to me it feels like it's a more extreme example

00:58:55.660 | of delight.

00:58:56.500 | And I'd like you to perhaps,

00:59:00.500 | if there's any examples of research on this, you know,

00:59:04.620 | touch on to what extent a sense of cynicism divorces us

00:59:08.460 | from delight and awe, or I guess their collaborator,

00:59:13.460 | which is creativity.

00:59:16.140 | To me, everything you're saying about cynicism

00:59:18.860 | makes it sound anti-creative because you're,

00:59:22.020 | by definition, you're eliminating possibility.

00:59:24.580 | And creativity, of course, is the unique original combination

00:59:28.660 | of existing things or the creation of new things

00:59:30.580 | altogether, creativity.

00:59:32.700 | So what, if anything, has been studied

00:59:34.780 | about the relationship between cynicism,

00:59:38.060 | I guess we call it open-mindedness,

00:59:40.460 | and creativity and/or awe?

00:59:43.140 | - Yeah, great questions.

00:59:44.700 | And there is some work on this,

00:59:48.140 | and a lot of it comes actually in the context

00:59:50.220 | of the workplace, right?

00:59:52.000 | So you can examine, I mean,

00:59:53.780 | these Brazilian fishing villages

00:59:55.660 | were, after all, workplaces, right?

00:59:57.740 | That led people to more or less cynicism.

01:00:01.020 | But other workplaces also have structures

01:00:03.960 | that make people more or less able to trust one another.

01:00:07.140 | One version of this is what's known as stack ranking.

01:00:09.900 | And, you know, this is where people,

01:00:12.780 | managers are forced to pick the highest-performing

01:00:16.460 | and lowest-performing members of their team

01:00:18.740 | and, in essence, eliminate the people

01:00:21.380 | who are at the bottom 10% every six or 12 months.

01:00:25.160 | Stack ranking has, thankfully,

01:00:26.900 | mostly fallen out of favor in the corporate world,

01:00:30.340 | but it was very de rigueur in the late 20th

01:00:34.860 | and early 21st century, you know,

01:00:36.900 | up until 10 or so years ago.

01:00:38.740 | And it still exists in some places.

01:00:41.100 | And the idea, again, was if you want people to be creative,

01:00:45.820 | if you want them to do their best,

01:00:48.260 | tap into who they really are.

01:00:50.100 | And who are we really?

01:00:51.420 | We are really a hyper-individualistic,

01:00:55.020 | again, Darwinian species.

01:00:57.100 | Really, stack ranking is a social Darwinist approach

01:01:00.860 | to management.

01:01:02.100 | And the idea is, well, great, if you threaten people,

01:01:05.180 | if you make them want to defeat one another,

01:01:07.820 | they will be at their most creative

01:01:09.700 | when they are trying to do that, right?

01:01:12.340 | That it will bring out their best.

01:01:14.660 | The opposite is true.

01:01:15.620 | I mean, stack-ranked workplaces, of course, are miserable.

01:01:19.400 | The people in them are quite unhappy

01:01:22.460 | and more likely to leave their jobs.

01:01:25.060 | But some of the more interesting work

01:01:26.700 | pertains to what stack ranking does to creativity.

01:01:29.680 | Because it turns out that if your job

01:01:33.940 | is to just not be at the bottom of the pile,

01:01:36.600 | then the last thing you want to do is take a creative risk.

01:01:42.140 | You do not want to go out on a limb.

01:01:43.940 | You do not want to try something new.

01:01:46.580 | If other people are going to go after you for doing that,

01:01:50.640 | and if you screw up, or if it doesn't go well,

01:01:54.400 | you're eliminated from the group, right?

01:01:57.120 | So I think you're exactly right

01:01:59.080 | that these cynical environments

01:02:01.040 | are also highly conservative.

01:02:02.880 | I, of course, don't mean politically conservative.

01:02:04.760 | I mean conservative in terms of the types of choices

01:02:08.080 | that people make.

01:02:09.480 | And that's sort of, I think,

01:02:10.440 | at the level of individual creativity.

01:02:13.560 | But there's also a cost at the level

01:02:15.620 | of what we might call group creativity, right?

01:02:19.120 | A lot of our best ideas come not from our minds,

01:02:23.440 | but from the space between us,

01:02:25.280 | from dialogue, or from group conversation.

01:02:29.320 | And it turns out that in stacked rank,

01:02:31.680 | zero-sum environments,

01:02:33.320 | people are less willing to share knowledge and perspective

01:02:36.840 | because doing so amounts to helping your enemy succeed,

01:02:40.840 | which is the same as helping yourself fail.

01:02:43.300 | So to the extent that creativity requires

01:02:46.680 | a sort of collaborative mindset,

01:02:49.000 | then cynicism is preventative of that.

01:02:53.840 | And there's actually some terrific work

01:02:55.960 | by Anita Woolley and colleagues

01:03:00.520 | that looks at group intelligence, collective intelligence.

01:03:04.060 | This is the idea that, of course,

01:03:06.200 | people have levels of intelligence

01:03:08.120 | that can be measured in various ways,

01:03:10.120 | and have various forms of intelligence as well.

01:03:12.720 | But groups, when they get together,

01:03:15.160 | have a type of intelligence,

01:03:17.340 | and especially creative problem-solving intelligence,

01:03:20.120 | that goes above and beyond the sum of their parts,

01:03:23.120 | that can't be explained,

01:03:24.800 | and actually in some cases is almost orthogonal

01:03:27.980 | to the intelligence of the individuals in that group, right?

01:03:31.340 | Controlling for the intelligence of individuals,

01:03:33.920 | there's a group factor that still matters.

01:03:36.400 | And so Anita Woolley and others have looked at,

01:03:38.640 | well, what predicts that type of collective intelligence?

01:03:43.080 | And a couple of factors matter.

01:03:45.520 | One is people's ability

01:03:49.000 | to understand each other's emotions,

01:03:51.440 | so interpersonal sensitivity.

01:03:53.480 | But another is their willingness to, in essence,

01:03:55.800 | pass the mic, to share the conversation, and to collaborate.

01:04:00.500 | And so again, succeeding, thriving,

01:04:03.560 | optimizing, and being creative,

01:04:06.180 | both at the individual and at the group level,

01:04:09.520 | require environments where we feel free,

01:04:12.280 | and where we feel safe,

01:04:14.240 | and where we feel that contributing to somebody else

01:04:17.160 | can also contribute to ourselves.

01:04:18.900 | - It's so interesting to think about

01:04:22.880 | all of this in the context of neuroplasticity.

01:04:25.320 | I feel like one of the holy grails of neuroscience

01:04:28.320 | is to finally understand,

01:04:29.880 | you know, what are the gates to neuroplasticity?

01:04:31.840 | We understand a lot about the cellular mechanisms.

01:04:33.760 | We know it's possible throughout the lifespan.

01:04:35.440 | We know that there's sure an involvement

01:04:38.160 | of different neuromodulators and so on,

01:04:40.560 | but at the level of kind of human behavior

01:04:44.760 | and emotional stance, not technical, not a technical term,

01:04:49.320 | but I'll use it, of say, being curious.

01:04:53.000 | Like to me, curiosity is an interest in the outcome

01:04:56.760 | with no specific emotional attachment to the outcome.

01:05:00.160 | But of course, we could say you're curious

01:05:02.280 | with the hope of getting a certain result, you know,

01:05:04.200 | so one could modify it.

01:05:05.320 | But there is something about that childlike mind,

01:05:10.000 | so-called beginner's mind,

01:05:11.200 | where you're open to different outcomes.

01:05:12.920 | And it seems like the examples that you're giving

01:05:15.160 | keep bringing me back to these developmental themes

01:05:17.680 | because if it's true that cynics, you know,

01:05:21.400 | exclude a lot of data that could be useful to them,

01:05:24.220 | it seems that the opportunities for neuroplasticity

01:05:28.800 | are reduced for cynics.

01:05:31.360 | To flip it on its head,

01:05:32.680 | to what extent are we all a little bit cynical?

01:05:38.440 | And how would we explore that?

01:05:40.060 | Like if I were in your laboratory

01:05:41.780 | and you had 10 minutes with me,

01:05:44.280 | what questions would you ask me

01:05:46.280 | to determine how cynical I might be

01:05:48.600 | or how not cynical I might be?

01:05:51.660 | - Well, the first thing that I would do

01:05:52.680 | is give you that classic questionnaire from Cook and Medley,

01:05:55.920 | which would just ask you about your theories of the world.

01:05:58.720 | What do you think people are like?

01:06:00.360 | Do you think that people are generally honest?

01:06:02.860 | Do you think that they are generally trustworthy?

01:06:05.160 | - So it loads the questions or it's open-ended

01:06:07.440 | where I would, would you say, what are people like?

01:06:09.720 | And then I would just kind of free associate about that?

01:06:11.600 | - No, it's a series of 50 statements.

01:06:14.240 | And you're asked in a binary way,

01:06:16.040 | do you agree or disagree with each of these statements?

01:06:18.840 | Since then, Olga Stavrova and others

01:06:20.760 | have adapted Cook-Medley and made it a shorter scale

01:06:23.960 | and turned the questions into continuous

01:06:26.240 | one to nine or one to seven answers.

01:06:29.440 | But generally speaking, these are discrete questions

01:06:33.120 | that numerically or quantitatively

01:06:36.000 | tap our general theories of people.

01:06:39.700 | If you were in my lab, I might also ask you

01:06:41.960 | to play some different economic games.

01:06:43.880 | You know, the trust game being the number one

01:06:46.840 | that we might use here.

01:06:47.980 | So I can explain it.

01:06:50.200 | So the trust game involves two players

01:06:52.640 | and one of them is an investor.

01:06:55.840 | They start out with some amounts of money,

01:06:57.840 | let's just say $10.

01:06:59.380 | They can send as much of that money

01:07:01.240 | as they want to a trustee.

01:07:03.440 | The money is then tripled in value.

01:07:06.240 | So if the investor sends $10,

01:07:09.240 | in the hands of the trustee, it becomes $30.

01:07:12.860 | The trustee can then choose to give back

01:07:15.240 | whatever amount they want to the investor.

01:07:17.960 | So they can be exactly fair and give 15 back,

01:07:21.720 | in which case both people end up pretty much better off

01:07:24.800 | than they would have without an active trust.

01:07:27.720 | The trustee can keep all $30 themselves,

01:07:31.020 | betraying the investor,

01:07:33.200 | or the trustee can give more than 50% back.

01:07:35.460 | They can say, well, I started out with nothing,

01:07:37.020 | why don't you take 2/3 back?

01:07:39.260 | And this is one terrific behavioral measure of trust

01:07:42.980 | and it can be played in a couple of different ways.

01:07:44.640 | One is binary, where I would say,

01:07:47.700 | Andrew, you can send $10 to an internet stranger

01:07:51.940 | or you can send nothing

01:07:53.420 | and they can choose to send you back half

01:07:55.340 | or they can choose to send you back nothing.

01:07:58.200 | Would you do it?

01:07:59.040 | Actually, I'm curious, would you do that?

01:08:01.480 | - Oh, I absolutely zip it over to them.

01:08:03.680 | Yeah, I'm curious.

01:08:04.520 | - Great.

01:08:05.340 | - And I'm willing to lose the money.

01:08:07.640 | So I suppose that factors in as well.

01:08:09.040 | - Yeah.

01:08:09.880 | Follow-up question.

01:08:10.700 | In that type of study, what percentage of trustees

01:08:14.120 | do you think make the trustworthy decision

01:08:16.200 | of sending back the money?

01:08:17.500 | - Gosh.

01:08:24.500 | (silence)

01:08:27.080 | 55%.

01:08:28.520 | - Yeah, so your prediction there

01:08:31.140 | is quite aligned with most people's.

01:08:33.780 | There's a great study by Fechenhauer and Dunning

01:08:39.500 | that found that people, when they're asked to forecast,

01:08:43.160 | they say, I bet 52, 55% of people will send this money back,

01:08:47.700 | will make this binary trust decision.

01:08:50.300 | In fact, 80% of trustees

01:08:52.660 | make the pro-social and trustworthy decision.

01:08:55.840 | And again, what Fechenhauer and Dunning found

01:08:58.160 | is that when we have negative assumptions,

01:09:02.260 | we're less likely to send over the money,

01:09:04.740 | and therefore less likely to learn that we were wrong.

01:09:07.440 | And so that's one of, it's another example

01:09:10.800 | of where cynical beliefs, I mean,

01:09:13.780 | you're interesting because you had the belief

01:09:15.460 | that it's a 50% chance, but you still chose to trust.

01:09:18.660 | So from a Bayesian perspective,

01:09:21.020 | when that person actually sent the money back,

01:09:23.300 | which they would have an 80% chance of doing,

01:09:25.580 | and if I were to ask you again,

01:09:27.140 | what percentage of people give back,

01:09:29.440 | you might update your perception.

01:09:31.780 | - Absolutely.

01:09:32.620 | - Right?

01:09:33.700 | But without any evidence, you can't update your perception.

01:09:36.940 | So, and this is just one of many examples.

01:09:39.220 | It turns out that there's a lot of evidence

01:09:41.600 | that when asked to estimate how friendly, trustworthy,

01:09:46.180 | compassionate, or open-minded others are,

01:09:49.100 | people's estimates come in much lower than data suggests.

01:09:52.620 | And this to me is both the tragedy of cynical thinking,

01:09:56.940 | those heuristics that we're using,

01:09:58.500 | and a major opportunity for so many of us, right?

01:10:01.780 | It's a tragedy because we're coming up

01:10:04.340 | with these simple black and white,

01:10:06.700 | physics-like predictions about the world,

01:10:09.500 | and they're often wrong.

01:10:11.060 | They're often unduly negative.

01:10:13.620 | An opportunity because to the extent

01:10:16.420 | that we can tap into a more scientific

01:10:18.940 | or curious mindset,

01:10:21.340 | to the extent that we can open ourselves to the data,

01:10:23.900 | pleasant surprises are everywhere.

01:10:26.780 | The social world is full of a lot more positive

01:10:30.860 | and helpful and kind people than we realize, right?

01:10:34.620 | The average person underestimates the average person.

01:10:38.660 | This is not to say that there aren't awful,

01:10:42.060 | people who do awful things every day around the world.

01:10:44.340 | There, of course, are.

01:10:45.980 | But we take those extreme examples and over-rotate on them.

01:10:50.060 | We assume that the most toxic, awful examples

01:10:53.900 | that we see are representative when they're not.

01:10:57.540 | So we miss all these opportunities,

01:10:58.980 | but understanding that, I hope,

01:11:01.500 | opens people to gaining more of those opportunities,

01:11:06.260 | to using them, and to finding out more accurate

01:11:09.620 | and more hopeful information about each other.

01:11:12.100 | - There does seem to be a salience

01:11:13.860 | about negative interactions or somebody stealing from us

01:11:18.660 | or doing something that we consider cruel

01:11:21.900 | to us or to others.

01:11:23.580 | Nowadays, with social media,

01:11:26.380 | we get a window into, gosh,

01:11:30.020 | probably billions of social interactions

01:11:32.980 | in the form of comments and clapbacks and retweets.

01:11:37.060 | And there certainly is benevolence on social media,

01:11:40.020 | but what if any data exists about how social media

01:11:45.020 | either feeds or impedes cynicism,

01:11:48.700 | or maybe it doesn't change it at all?

01:11:51.120 | And I should say that there's also the kind of,

01:11:54.760 | I have to be careful, I'm trying not to be cynical.

01:11:58.740 | I maintain the view that certain social media platforms

01:12:05.900 | encourage a bit more negativity than others.

01:12:10.400 | And certainly there are accounts,

01:12:11.980 | I'm trying to think of accounts on Instagram like Upworthy,

01:12:15.620 | which its whole basis is to promote positive stuff.

01:12:20.020 | I like that account very much.

01:12:21.580 | But certainly you can find the full array

01:12:25.980 | of emotions on social media.

01:12:27.980 | To what extent is just being on social media,

01:12:30.580 | regardless of platform, increasing or decreasing cynicism?

01:12:35.340 | It's a terrific question.

01:12:38.220 | It's hard to provide a very clear answer,

01:12:41.060 | and I don't want to get out over my skis

01:12:43.020 | with what is known and what's not known.

01:12:45.540 | Social media has been a tectonic shift in our lives.

01:12:49.540 | It has coincided with a rise in cynicism,

01:12:52.860 | but as you know, history's not an experiment.

01:12:55.300 | So you can't take two temporal trends

01:12:57.460 | that are coincident with one another

01:12:58.840 | and say that one caused the other.

01:13:01.020 | That said, my own intuition and a lot of the data

01:13:04.660 | suggest that in at least some ways,

01:13:07.260 | social media is a cynicism factory, right?

01:13:10.260 | I mean, so let's first stipulate

01:13:12.100 | how much time we're spending on there.

01:13:13.760 | I mean, the average person goes through

01:13:17.260 | 300 feet of social media feed a day.

01:13:21.140 | - Is that right? - Yeah.

01:13:22.020 | - They've measured it in feet?

01:13:23.140 | - Approximately the height of the Statue of Liberty, yeah.

01:13:25.660 | So we're doing one Statue of Liberty worth

01:13:28.380 | of scrolling a day, much of it doom scrolling,

01:13:31.460 | if you're anything like me, at least.

01:13:34.540 | And so then the question becomes,

01:13:37.260 | what are we seeing when we scroll for that long?

01:13:41.640 | Who are we seeing?

01:13:43.380 | And are they representative of what people are really like?

01:13:47.940 | And the answer in a lot of ways is no.

01:13:51.980 | That what we see on social media

01:13:53.300 | is not representative of the human population.

01:13:56.780 | So there's a lot of evidence.

01:13:59.220 | A lot of this comes from William Brady,

01:14:02.020 | now at Northwestern, and Molly Crockett,

01:14:04.560 | that when people tweet, for instance,

01:14:08.780 | I mean, a lot of this is done on the site

01:14:11.060 | formerly known as Twitter, when people tweet in outrage,

01:14:15.780 | and when they tweet negatively,

01:14:17.360 | and when they tweet about, in particular, immorality,

01:14:20.760 | right, moral outrage, that algorithmically,

01:14:24.260 | those tweets are broadcast further, they're shared more.

01:14:29.060 | And this does a couple of things.

01:14:30.380 | One, it reinforces the people

01:14:32.620 | who are already tweeting in that way.

01:14:34.780 | So William Brady has this great work

01:14:37.580 | using a kind of reinforcement learning model, right?

01:14:40.540 | Reinforcement learning is where you do something,

01:14:43.180 | you're rewarded, and that reward makes you more likely

01:14:45.720 | to do that same thing again.

01:14:47.580 | And it turns out that Brady found

01:14:51.500 | that when people tweet in outrage and then get egged on,

01:14:56.100 | and oftentimes I should say this is tribal in nature,

01:14:58.700 | it's somebody tweeting against somebody who's an outsider,

01:15:01.900 | and then being rewarded by people

01:15:03.580 | who they consider to be part of their group, right?

01:15:06.320 | When that happens, that person is more likely

01:15:08.900 | in their future tweets to turn up the volume

01:15:12.200 | on that outrage and on that moral outrage in particular.

01:15:15.440 | So there's a sort of ratchet effect, right,

01:15:18.540 | on the people who are sharing.

01:15:20.520 | But a second question becomes,

01:15:22.780 | well, what about the people watching?

01:15:24.700 | What about the rest of us?

01:15:26.780 | Claire Robertson has a great paper on this

01:15:28.840 | where she documents that a vast majority,

01:15:31.940 | I mean, 90 plus percent of tweets are created

01:15:35.500 | by the 10% of the most active users, right?

01:15:40.060 | And this is in the political sphere.

01:15:41.980 | And these are probably not representative, these folks,

01:15:45.540 | not representative of the rest of us in terms

01:15:47.500 | of how extreme and maybe how bitter their opinions are.

01:15:52.500 | And so we, when we're scrolling,

01:15:55.580 | that Statue of Liberty's worth of information,

01:15:58.340 | we think that we're seeing the world.

01:16:00.980 | We think that we're seeing our fellow citizens.

01:16:02.900 | We think that we're getting a picture

01:16:04.620 | of what people are like.

01:16:06.060 | In fact, we're pulling from the fringes.

01:16:08.460 | And what this leads to is a misconstrual

01:16:12.500 | of what the world is really like.

01:16:14.880 | This is, by the way, not just part of social media,

01:16:17.700 | it's also part of legacy media.

01:16:19.860 | Communication theorists talk about something called

01:16:22.940 | the mean world syndrome, right?

01:16:25.500 | Where the more time that you spend looking at the news,

01:16:28.260 | for instance, the more you think violent crime

01:16:31.380 | is up in your area,

01:16:33.020 | the more you think you're in danger of violent crime,

01:16:36.340 | even during years when violent crime is decreasing.

01:16:39.820 | I'm old enough to remember when "Stranger Danger"

01:16:43.260 | was this big, massive story.

01:16:45.340 | And every time you wanted cereal,

01:16:47.100 | the milk carton would have a picture

01:16:48.860 | of a kid who had been kidnapped by a stranger.

01:16:51.540 | And during that time, if you asked people

01:16:53.580 | how many kids are being kidnapped by strangers in the US,

01:16:57.460 | they would, in many cases, say 50,000 children

01:17:00.100 | are being kidnapped each year in the US.

01:17:02.100 | Can you imagine what the world would be?

01:17:05.580 | There would be SWAT teams on every corner.

01:17:08.020 | The real number in those years

01:17:09.640 | was closer to 100 kids per year.

01:17:12.260 | Now, let me be clear, each one of those

01:17:14.220 | is an absolute tragedy, but there's a big difference here.

01:17:17.940 | And oftentimes, when we tune into media,

01:17:21.140 | we end up with these enormously warped perceptions

01:17:24.620 | where we think that the world is much more dangerous

01:17:26.960 | than it really is.

01:17:27.960 | We think that people are much more extreme

01:17:30.380 | than they really are.

01:17:31.220 | And because stories of immorality go viral

01:17:34.820 | so much more often than stories of everyday goodness,

01:17:38.260 | I mean, I love "Upworthy" as well,

01:17:39.920 | but it's not winning right now in the social media wars.

01:17:44.780 | - Not yet.

01:17:45.620 | - Not yet, not yet.

01:17:47.060 | And so this leaves us all absolutely exhausted

01:17:51.060 | and also feeling alone.

01:17:52.740 | People who feel like, wow,

01:17:54.220 | I actually don't feel that much outrage

01:17:57.540 | or I don't want to feel that much outrage.

01:17:59.380 | I actually don't want to hate everybody

01:18:02.500 | who's different from me, for instance.

01:18:04.400 | I'm just exhausted by all this.

01:18:07.380 | We feel like, well, I guess I'm the only one

01:18:09.340 | because everybody else seems really excited

01:18:11.180 | about this battle royale that we've put ourselves in.

01:18:14.540 | But in fact, most people are just

01:18:17.500 | like the exhausted majority, right?

01:18:19.300 | We're paying so much attention to a tiny minority

01:18:22.980 | of what the journalist, Amanda Ripley,

01:18:25.820 | calls conflict entrepreneurs,

01:18:28.500 | people who stoke conflict on purpose

01:18:30.780 | that we're confusing them with the average.

01:18:32.980 | - Ooh, so much there.

01:18:36.140 | I have, I suppose, a mixed relationship to social media.

01:18:41.300 | I teach there and I learn there.

01:18:43.340 | And I also have to be very discerning

01:18:45.980 | in terms of how I interact with it.

01:18:47.460 | And you made this point

01:18:49.860 | that I've never heard anyone make before,

01:18:52.060 | which is that many people feel alone

01:18:54.500 | by virtue of the fact that they don't share

01:18:56.260 | in this warring nature that they see on social media.

01:19:00.900 | It's almost like sometimes I feel

01:19:03.260 | like I'm watching a combat sport

01:19:04.940 | that I don't feel quite cut out for.

01:19:07.880 | - Yeah.

01:19:08.720 | - And then when I'm away from it, I feel better.

01:19:12.860 | But I, like everybody else,

01:19:14.100 | sometimes we'll get sucked into the highly salient nature

01:19:18.420 | of a combat between groups on social media.

01:19:22.620 | It can be very alluring in the worst ways.

01:19:27.120 | This mean world syndrome, what's the inverse of that?

01:19:33.220 | The kind world syndrome, I suppose.

01:19:35.500 | But attempts at creating those sorts

01:19:37.880 | of social media platforms have been made.

01:19:41.020 | Things like Blue Sky, which has other aspects to it as well.

01:19:44.100 | But, and while it may be thriving,

01:19:46.380 | I don't know, I haven't checked recently.

01:19:50.500 | It seems like people aren't really interested

01:19:52.940 | in being on there as much as they are these other platforms.

01:19:55.460 | Clearly the numbers play out that way.

01:19:57.980 | Why do you think that is?

01:20:00.260 | - Well, we as a species, I think,

01:20:03.700 | are characterized by what we would call negativity bias.

01:20:08.180 | Right, negative events and threats loom larger in our minds.

01:20:12.420 | And that happens in a number of domains.

01:20:15.460 | Our decision making is negatively biased

01:20:19.500 | in that we'd prefer to avoid a negative outcome

01:20:22.260 | than to pursue a positive outcome.

01:20:23.700 | That's the classic work of Kahneman and Tversky,

01:20:26.060 | for instance.

01:20:27.380 | The impressions that we form are often negatively skewed.

01:20:31.460 | So classic work in psychology going back to the 1950s

01:20:35.380 | shows that if you teach somebody about a new person

01:20:39.220 | who they've never met and you list three positive qualities

01:20:42.060 | that this person has and three negative qualities,

01:20:45.060 | people will very much judge the person

01:20:48.500 | on their worst qualities.

01:20:50.220 | And also remember more about their negative qualities

01:20:53.420 | than about their positive qualities.

01:20:55.620 | And again, you can see why this would be part of who we are

01:20:59.740 | because we need to protect one another.

01:21:01.700 | We also tend to, by the way, not just think

01:21:04.300 | in a negatively biased way,

01:21:05.580 | but speak and share in a negatively biased way.

01:21:09.540 | In my lab, we had a study where people witnessed

01:21:12.780 | other groups of four playing an economic game

01:21:15.460 | where they could be selfish or they could be positive.

01:21:20.460 | And we asked them, okay, we're gonna ask you to share

01:21:24.380 | a piece of information about one of the people

01:21:26.100 | you were playing this game with

01:21:27.700 | for a future generation of participants.

01:21:31.500 | Who would you like to share about?

01:21:33.140 | And when somebody in a group acted in a selfish way,

01:21:36.500 | people shared information about them three times more often

01:21:41.660 | than when they acted in a generous way.

01:21:44.420 | So we gossip negatively.

01:21:46.780 | And again, that gossip is pro-social.

01:21:49.940 | The idea is if there's somebody out there

01:21:51.860 | harming my community, of course,

01:21:53.780 | I'm gonna shout about them from the rooftops

01:21:55.780 | because I wanna protect my friends.

01:21:57.860 | It's a very noble instinct in a way.

01:22:01.420 | But we further found that when we actually showed

01:22:03.740 | a new generation of participants

01:22:05.460 | the gossip that the first generation shared,

01:22:07.820 | and we asked, hey, how generous and how selfish

01:22:10.260 | were people in that first generation,

01:22:11.940 | they vastly underestimated that group's generosity.

01:22:15.580 | Does that make sense?

01:22:16.740 | In other words, in trying to protect our communities,

01:22:20.180 | we send highly biased information

01:22:23.420 | about who's in our community

01:22:24.860 | and give other people the wrong idea of who we are.

01:22:29.180 | And I see that unfolding on social media

01:22:32.260 | every day of my life.

01:22:33.260 | Every day that I'm on social media,

01:22:34.620 | I do try to take breaks.

01:22:36.460 | But when I'm on there, I see it.

01:22:38.340 | And to your question, what do we do here?

01:22:42.300 | Why don't positive networks, positive information,

01:22:45.420 | why doesn't it proliferate more?

01:22:48.460 | I think it's because of these ingrained biases in our mind.

01:22:52.060 | And I understand that that can sound fatalistic

01:22:54.900 | because it's like, oh, maybe this is just who we are.

01:22:57.740 | But I don't think that we generally accept our instincts

01:23:01.260 | and biases as a life sentence, as destiny.

01:23:06.260 | A lot of us, well, human beings in general,

01:23:09.780 | have the instinct to trust and be kinder

01:23:12.380 | towards people who look like us versus people who don't,

01:23:15.340 | for instance, who share our racial makeup.

01:23:17.860 | None of us, I think, or a few of us sit here and say,

01:23:20.860 | well, I have that bias in my mind,

01:23:22.500 | so I guess I'm always going to be racially biased.

01:23:26.580 | We try to counteract those instincts.

01:23:29.780 | We try to become aware of those biases.

01:23:33.060 | Depressed people have the bias

01:23:35.540 | to see themselves as worthless

01:23:37.180 | and to interpret new information they receive

01:23:39.620 | through that framework.

01:23:41.100 | Well, therapy is the attempt to say,

01:23:43.340 | I don't want to feel this way anymore.

01:23:45.180 | I want to fight the default settings in my mind.

01:23:48.820 | I want to try to explore curiosity,

01:23:51.380 | to explore something new.

01:23:53.460 | So to say that this toxic environment that we're in

01:23:56.620 | corresponds with some of our biases

01:23:59.060 | is, to me, not the same as saying

01:24:00.500 | we are destined to remain in that situation.

01:24:03.140 | - Do you think it's possible

01:24:04.580 | to be adequately informed about threats

01:24:07.980 | to be able to live one's life in the most adaptive way

01:24:13.260 | while not being on social media,

01:24:16.740 | none of the social media platforms?

01:24:18.540 | Can you have a great life that way,

01:24:22.580 | a safe life?

01:24:24.100 | - This is a quasi-philosophical question,

01:24:26.460 | but from my perspective, absolutely.

01:24:29.340 | I mean, I think some of the threats

01:24:30.820 | that we learn about on social media are simply wrong.

01:24:34.780 | They're phantom threats.

01:24:37.300 | We're made to fear something that actually is not happening,

01:24:42.260 | made to fear a group of people who are not as dangerous

01:24:47.140 | as they're made out to be on social media.

01:24:50.140 | Of course, I think being informed about the world around us

01:24:53.380 | matters to staying safe.

01:24:55.380 | But again, I think we can also more broadly

01:24:57.740 | construe what safety is.

01:25:00.100 | You know, if being on social media

01:25:01.940 | makes you avoidant of taking chances on people,

01:25:05.580 | if it makes you feel as though

01:25:07.020 | anybody who's different from you ideologically,

01:25:09.340 | for instance, is bloodthirsty and extreme,

01:25:13.180 | that's going to limit your life in very important ways.

01:25:17.500 | And you can talk about being safe

01:25:19.220 | in terms of safe from acute threats.

01:25:22.380 | But as we've talked about,

01:25:23.820 | living a diminished and disconnected life

01:25:26.460 | is its own form of danger over a longer time horizon.

01:25:30.340 | So really, you know, there are a lot of ways

01:25:33.580 | in which in the attempt to stay safe right now,

01:25:37.860 | we introduce ourselves to long-term danger.

01:25:40.300 | - I'm not anti-social media,

01:25:43.660 | but I have to circle back on this yet again.

01:25:48.460 | Former guest on this podcast,

01:25:49.860 | one of our most popular episodes

01:25:51.260 | is with a former Navy SEAL, David Goggins,

01:25:53.460 | who's known for many things,

01:25:56.460 | but chief among them is striving and pushing oneself.

01:26:01.460 | And David has said many times that nowadays

01:26:05.780 | it's easier than ever to be extraordinary

01:26:07.780 | because most people are basically spending time

01:26:09.580 | just consuming experiences on social media

01:26:13.220 | and doing a lot less, just literally doing a lot less,

01:26:17.300 | not just exercising and running as he does.

01:26:19.660 | Although, by the way, he's in school to become a paramedic.

01:26:22.140 | So he's essentially gone to medical school

01:26:24.260 | and is always doing a bunch of other things as well.

01:26:27.500 | So he's also an intellectual learner.

01:26:31.260 | Now, I don't know if I agree with him completely,

01:26:34.780 | but it's an interesting statement.

01:26:37.820 | You know, if social media is bringing out our cynicism,

01:26:43.040 | polarizing us, and perhaps taking away,

01:26:47.100 | I would probably agree with David,

01:26:49.280 | at least to some extent, taking away our time

01:26:54.080 | where we could be generative, writing, thinking,

01:26:58.600 | socializing, building in other ways

01:27:01.120 | that one builds their life,

01:27:04.280 | then I guess an important question is,

01:27:07.080 | do you think social media could be leveraged

01:27:09.360 | to decrease cynicism or, as you referred to it,

01:27:14.360 | to generate hopeful skepticism?

01:27:17.700 | Like this notion of hopeful skepticism

01:27:20.500 | as a replacement for cynicism

01:27:21.960 | is something that is really intriguing.

01:27:23.900 | Like, what would that look like?

01:27:24.960 | Like, if we were just gonna do the Gedanken experiment here,

01:27:28.160 | like, what would a feed on social media look like

01:27:30.760 | that fed hopeful skepticism as opposed to cynicism?

01:27:35.760 | - Here's a far out example.

01:27:37.720 | I mean, I love this train of thought,

01:27:39.600 | so I'm gonna try to take it to a logical conclusion

01:27:42.720 | that would never actually occur in real life,

01:27:45.080 | but a great way to generate more accurate

01:27:49.840 | and hopeful skepticism, and by hopeful skepticism,

01:27:52.400 | I mean skepticism as we've described,

01:27:54.780 | a scientific mindset, a scientific perspective,

01:27:57.640 | and a curiosity, a hunger for information.

01:28:00.960 | And in the hopeful piece, I simply mean skepticism

01:28:04.660 | that begins with the understanding

01:28:06.460 | that our defaults are often too negative,

01:28:09.640 | so that I'm going to be open and I'm going to realize

01:28:12.300 | that my gut instinct is probably leading me

01:28:16.460 | towards the negative and can be challenged,

01:28:18.440 | that I don't have to listen to it all the time.

01:28:20.480 | So just as a working definition,

01:28:22.780 | I think that what I would want in a social media feed

01:28:28.600 | would be for it to have more data.

01:28:31.040 | If you could compel every person on Earth

01:28:35.240 | to post to social media about what they're doing today,

01:28:39.020 | about what they're thinking, about what they want,

01:28:41.340 | about their values, right?

01:28:43.420 | If you could compel each, of course,

01:28:45.420 | that's dystopic in many ways,

01:28:46.620 | but just as a thought experiment.

01:28:48.560 | And then people's feed was a representative sample

01:28:52.820 | of real people on the planet, right?

01:28:55.720 | Real people, and people who over time, right,

01:29:00.520 | as I scroll through my Statue of Liberty now,

01:29:02.940 | I see what people are really like.

01:29:05.140 | I see the people who are extreme and negative and toxic,

01:29:08.340 | but I also see a grandmother

01:29:10.820 | who's driving her grandkid to hockey practice.

01:29:14.080 | I see a nurse who's coming in to help an elderly patient.

01:29:18.820 | I see somebody who's made an unlikely connection

01:29:22.380 | with somebody who they disagree with.

01:29:24.500 | A veridical, accurate feed,

01:29:28.540 | I think would drive hopeful skepticism.

01:29:30.460 | And that's, again, one of the things

01:29:32.340 | that has struck me most over the last few years

01:29:34.880 | of doing this research,

01:29:36.460 | is that we stereotype hope and positivity,

01:29:40.340 | as you were saying earlier,

01:29:42.100 | as kind of dim, naive, a rose-colored pair of glasses.

01:29:47.100 | But in fact, I think what the data show us

01:29:50.900 | is that we're all wearing a pair

01:29:52.900 | of soot-colored glasses all the time.

01:29:55.620 | And actually the best way to make people more hopeful

01:29:58.540 | is to ask them to look more carefully,

01:30:00.980 | not to look away, but look towards

01:30:04.240 | in a more accurate and open fashion.

01:30:06.840 | And there's one version of this

01:30:08.720 | that we've tried at Stanford, in our own backyard.

01:30:12.760 | So my lab and I, we've, for years,

01:30:15.120 | been surveying as many Stanford undergraduates as we can

01:30:19.360 | about their social health, right?

01:30:21.280 | So how connected are they?

01:30:23.280 | How mentally healthy are they?

01:30:24.840 | And a couple of years ago,

01:30:28.240 | we asked thousands of undergraduates to describe

01:30:32.040 | both themselves and the average Stanford student

01:30:34.840 | on a number of dimensions.

01:30:36.400 | For instance, how empathic are you?

01:30:37.960 | How empathic is the average Stanford student?

01:30:40.280 | How much do you like helping people who are struggling?

01:30:42.880 | What do you think the average Stanford student

01:30:44.320 | would respond to that?

01:30:45.480 | How much do you want to meet new people on campus?

01:30:47.640 | How do you think the average student would respond?

01:30:50.080 | And we discovered not one, but two Stanfords.

01:30:54.160 | The first was made up of real students

01:30:56.040 | who are enormously compassionate,

01:30:58.220 | who really want to meet new friends,

01:31:01.160 | who want to help their friends when they're struggling.

01:31:04.340 | The second Stanford existed in students' minds.

01:31:07.840 | Their imagination of the average undergraduate

01:31:10.980 | was much less friendly, much less compassionate,

01:31:14.320 | much pricklier and more judgmental than real students were.

01:31:18.800 | So again, we've got this discrepancy

01:31:20.920 | between what people perceive and social reality.

01:31:24.600 | We found that students who underestimated their peers

01:31:28.160 | were less willing to do things like

01:31:30.120 | strike up a conversation with a stranger

01:31:32.480 | or confide in a friend when they were struggling.

01:31:34.920 | And that left them more isolated and lonelier.

01:31:37.920 | This is the kind of vicious cycle of cynicism, right?

01:31:41.440 | But more recently, my lab led by a great postdoc, Ray Pei,

01:31:46.240 | tried an intervention.

01:31:48.120 | And the intervention was as simple as you can imagine.

01:31:50.600 | It was show students the real data.

01:31:53.640 | We put posters in a number of dorms,

01:31:56.080 | experimental dorms we called them,

01:31:58.160 | that simply said, hey, did you know,

01:32:00.400 | 95% of students at Stanford

01:32:04.020 | would like to help their friends who are struggling.

01:32:06.000 | 85% want to make friends with new students.

01:32:09.560 | We also worked with Frosh 101,

01:32:12.360 | a one-unit class that most first-year students take

01:32:15.640 | and show them the data.

01:32:17.520 | We're just showing students to each other.

01:32:20.440 | And we found that when students learned this information,

01:32:23.960 | they were more willing to take social risks.

01:32:26.800 | And six months later,

01:32:28.160 | they were more likely to have a greater number of friends,

01:32:30.880 | to be more socially integrated.

01:32:32.800 | So here again is a tragic and vicious cycle,

01:32:36.800 | but then there's a virtuous cycle that can replace it

01:32:39.460 | if we just show people better information.

01:32:42.320 | Again, I don't imagine that there'll ever be

01:32:44.440 | a social media feed where everybody has to post

01:32:47.520 | and you see an actually representative sample of the world.

01:32:50.040 | But if we could, I do think that that would generate

01:32:53.680 | a more hopeful perspective because the truth

01:32:57.040 | is more hopeful than what we're seeing.

01:32:59.040 | - Do you think there's a version of AI

01:33:02.080 | that is less cynical than people tend to be?

01:33:06.840 | The reason I ask this is I'm quite excited about

01:33:10.240 | and hopeful about AI.

01:33:11.920 | I'm not one of these, I don't know what you call them,

01:33:14.360 | but AI doomers. - Doomers, yeah.

01:33:17.300 | - And it's here, it's happening.

01:33:18.520 | It's happening in the background now.

01:33:19.800 | And I've started using AI in a number of different

01:33:23.100 | realms of life and I find it to be incredible.

01:33:25.820 | It seems to me to combine neural networks

01:33:29.240 | and Google search with PubMed and it's fascinating.

01:33:33.840 | It's not perfect, it's far from perfect,

01:33:36.080 | but that's also part of its beauty

01:33:37.700 | is that it mimics a human lack of perfectness well enough

01:33:42.320 | that it feels something kind of like

01:33:45.720 | brain-like, personality-like.

01:33:49.600 | You could imagine that given the enormous amount

01:33:53.440 | of cynicism that's out there,

01:33:56.040 | that some of the large language models that make up AI

01:33:59.720 | would be somewhat cynical, would put filters

01:34:04.560 | that were overly stringent on certain topics.

01:34:07.640 | You also wouldn't want AI that was not stringent enough,

01:34:11.960 | right, because we are already and soon to be using AI

01:34:16.720 | to bring us information extremely quickly

01:34:19.480 | and the last thing we want are errors in that information.

01:34:22.280 | So if we were to take what we know from humans

01:34:26.560 | and the data that you've collected

01:34:28.080 | and others have collected about ways to shift ourselves

01:34:31.240 | from cynicism to hopeful skepticism,

01:34:34.040 | do you think that's something that could be laced

01:34:36.560 | into these large language models?

01:34:38.460 | I'm not talking about at the technical level,

01:34:40.320 | that's certainly beyond my understanding,

01:34:43.280 | but could you build an AI version of yourself

01:34:46.160 | that could forage the internet for news

01:34:48.120 | and what's going on out there that is,

01:34:50.320 | you know, tune down the cynicism a little bit

01:34:54.380 | since it's difficult to be less cynical?

01:34:56.840 | In other words, could it do a better job

01:34:58.640 | of being you than you and then therefore make you better?

01:35:02.200 | - Wow, I love that question.

01:35:06.120 | I think that there is, I could imagine

01:35:09.880 | an opportunity for that.

01:35:11.520 | I think one roadblock that I don't think is insurmountable

01:35:16.080 | but that you would need to face

01:35:18.040 | in that really fascinating goal is that AI models

01:35:22.800 | are, of course, products of the data that we feed them.

01:35:25.960 | And so if, you know, basically AI models eat the internet,

01:35:29.960 | right, swallow it, and then give it back to us in some form,

01:35:33.080 | to the extent that the internet is asymmetrically waiting,

01:35:38.040 | right, is overweighting negative content and cynical content,

01:35:43.640 | then AIs that swallow that will reflect it as well.

01:35:48.200 | I think that, and I could imagine,

01:35:50.040 | and it's blowing my mind in real time to think about,

01:35:53.320 | but you could imagine retuning the way

01:35:58.280 | that AI takes information to account for negativity bias

01:36:01.900 | and to correct, I mean, this is what you're getting at,

01:36:04.560 | I think, right, to correct for that negativity bias

01:36:07.600 | and then produce an inference that is less biased,

01:36:12.840 | more accurate, and less cynical,

01:36:15.780 | and then give that as a kind of digest to people, right?

01:36:19.040 | So don't make me go through my social media feed.

01:36:23.080 | Go through it for me, correct, right, de-bias it,

01:36:27.520 | and then give it to me in a more accurate way.

01:36:32.000 | That's an incredible idea.

01:36:34.360 | - I mean, that's what I want.

01:36:36.280 | I was thinking about my Instagram feed

01:36:38.400 | and cynicism versus hopeful skepticism

01:36:41.880 | versus, I guess, awe, and I'll use the following examples.

01:36:46.140 | I subscribed to an Instagram account that I like very much,

01:36:51.400 | which essentially just gives me images

01:36:53.680 | of beautiful animals in their ultimate essence.

01:36:58.680 | It's an account by a guy named Joel Sartore

01:37:01.800 | who works for National Geographic,

01:37:03.240 | and he's created what's called the photo arc.

01:37:04.920 | He's trying to get images of all the world's animals

01:37:09.920 | that really capture their essence,

01:37:12.480 | and many of them are endangered

01:37:14.640 | and some very close to extinction.

01:37:16.600 | Others are more prolific right now.

01:37:21.400 | Nonetheless, I think of that account

01:37:22.940 | as all goodness, all benevolence.

01:37:25.680 | And then at the other extreme,

01:37:26.820 | I subscribe to an animal account called Nature is Metal.

01:37:29.840 | We've actually collaborated with Nature is Metal

01:37:33.560 | on a great white shark grabbing a tuna video

01:37:37.720 | that I didn't take, but someone I was with took,

01:37:41.360 | and we got their permission to post it.

01:37:43.400 | In any event, Nature is Metal

01:37:44.480 | is all about the harshness of nature.

01:37:46.320 | And then I think about the Planet Earth series

01:37:49.060 | hosted by David Attenborough and so forth,

01:37:51.480 | which sort of has a mixture of beautiful ducklings,

01:37:54.660 | but then also animals hunting each other

01:37:57.940 | and dying of old age or of starvation,

01:38:00.280 | and so the full array.

01:38:01.340 | So I think about that as an example of,

01:38:04.720 | if you look at Nature is Metal long enough,

01:38:07.960 | and it's a very cool account.

01:38:09.920 | I highly recommend people follow

01:38:11.160 | all three of these accounts.

01:38:12.760 | But if you look at it long enough,

01:38:13.800 | you get the impression like nature is hard.

01:38:16.960 | Life is hard out there.

01:38:18.800 | And it can be.

01:38:20.080 | You look at the Sartore account

01:38:23.240 | and you get the impression that animals are just beautiful.

01:38:25.940 | They're just being them, right?

01:38:27.820 | And he has a gift for capturing

01:38:31.800 | the essence of insects, reptiles, and mammals,

01:38:34.160 | and everything in between.

01:38:35.760 | So when I think about social media,

01:38:39.040 | or I even just think about our outlook

01:38:41.600 | onto the landscape of real life, non-virtual life,

01:38:46.520 | I feel like the human brain

01:38:48.400 | potentially can like all these things.

01:38:51.340 | But what you're describing in cynicism

01:38:53.200 | is the people that, for whatever reason,

01:38:56.240 | they're skewed toward this view that like life is hard,

01:38:59.880 | and therefore I need to protect myself

01:39:01.600 | and protect others at all times.

01:39:04.600 | In reality, how dynamic is cynicism?

01:39:07.280 | Earlier, you described how it can be domain-specific.

01:39:10.280 | But if somebody is pretty cynical,

01:39:14.460 | and they're older than 25,

01:39:18.200 | they're outside the sort of developmental plasticity range,

01:39:21.260 | what are the things that they can do on a daily basis

01:39:25.640 | to either tune down their cynicism

01:39:28.300 | or create room for this hopeful skepticism

01:39:31.160 | in a way that enriches them?

01:39:32.680 | Let's just start with them,

01:39:33.900 | because after all, they're cynics.

01:39:35.780 | Like we can't bait them

01:39:37.960 | with the good that they'll do for the world,

01:39:39.880 | but they'll do that too.

01:39:41.120 | What are some tools that we can all apply

01:39:44.760 | towards being less cynical?

01:39:47.160 | - It's a brilliant question, and you're right.

01:39:49.200 | I mean, I think a lot of us are very tuned

01:39:51.180 | into the metal side of life.

01:39:52.720 | And heavy metal is great, but life is not all metal.

01:39:57.120 | So how do we retune ourselves?

01:39:59.880 | I think about this a lot,

01:40:01.880 | in part because over the last several years,

01:40:04.700 | I haven't just been studying cynicism.

01:40:07.380 | I've been trying to counteract it in myself and in others.

01:40:11.260 | So I've focused on practical everyday things that I can do.

01:40:16.260 | And I guess they come in a bunch of categories.

01:40:19.380 | I'm gonna try to tick through them,

01:40:21.100 | but I really wanna hear your thoughts.

01:40:23.180 | The first has to do with our mindsets

01:40:25.220 | and the ways that we approach our own thinking.

01:40:29.140 | So I like to engage in a practice

01:40:32.220 | that I call being skeptical of my cynicism.

01:40:35.320 | So that is, in essence,

01:40:38.880 | taking tools from cognitive behavioral therapy

01:40:41.820 | and applying them to my cynical inferences.

01:40:44.780 | So again, my default mode,

01:40:46.500 | my factory settings are pretty suspicious.

01:40:48.800 | I wanna lay my cards on the table.

01:40:50.380 | It's ironic, given what I study, but there we are.

01:40:53.360 | So I often find myself in new situations,

01:40:56.620 | suspecting people, mistrusting people,

01:40:59.020 | wondering if they might take advantage of me.

01:41:01.700 | And what I do these days that I didn't do in the past

01:41:05.420 | is say, well, wait a minute, Zaki,

01:41:07.420 | where is this coming from?

01:41:09.620 | You're a scientist, defend your inference,

01:41:13.060 | defend your hypothesis, right?

01:41:16.260 | What evidence do you have to back it up?

01:41:17.660 | And very often,

01:41:18.940 | I find that the evidence is thin to non-existent, right?

01:41:22.520 | So that challenge, that just unearthing of,

01:41:25.660 | wait a minute, are you sure?

01:41:27.560 | No, you're not.

01:41:28.400 | And can tap into a little bit of intellectual humility.

01:41:32.300 | A second thing that I try to do

01:41:34.820 | is apply what my lab and I call a reciprocity mindset.

01:41:39.820 | That is understanding that yes,

01:41:43.460 | people vary in how trustworthy they are,

01:41:45.920 | but what you do also matters.

01:41:48.060 | Research finds that when you trust people,

01:41:52.100 | they're more likely to become trustworthy

01:41:54.680 | because they wanna reciprocate.

01:41:56.400 | You've honored them in this small way,

01:41:58.080 | and so they step up.

01:41:59.420 | It's known as earned trust in economics.

01:42:02.440 | And when you mistrust people, they become less trustworthy.

01:42:06.280 | So in my lab, we found that when you teach people this,

01:42:11.000 | when you teach people to own the influence

01:42:13.860 | that they have on others,

01:42:15.760 | they're more willing to be trusting.

01:42:17.940 | And when you're more trusting,

01:42:19.080 | then of course the other person reciprocates,

01:42:21.860 | which again, turns into this positive cycle.

01:42:24.020 | So I try, when I make a decision as to whether or not

01:42:27.220 | I'm gonna trust somebody,

01:42:28.820 | I think the default is to say,

01:42:30.060 | whoa, I'm taking on this risk.

01:42:31.960 | Is this a good choice for me?

01:42:33.540 | And I try to rotate that a little bit and say,

01:42:36.840 | what am I doing for the relationship here?

01:42:39.480 | Is this act of trust maybe a gift to this other person?

01:42:43.060 | How can it positively influence who they become

01:42:45.880 | in the course of this interaction?

01:42:48.260 | And then a third thing on the sort of mindset side,

01:42:51.000 | and then we can get to some behaviors,

01:42:53.320 | is what I call social savoring.

01:42:57.260 | I do this a lot with my kids, actually.

01:42:59.260 | Savoring is a general term for appreciating good things

01:43:03.660 | while they happen.

01:43:04.740 | It's related to gratitude,

01:43:06.080 | but gratitude is more appreciating the things

01:43:08.700 | that have happened to us in the past that are good.

01:43:11.080 | Savoring is, let's grab this moment right now

01:43:13.300 | and think about it.

01:43:15.040 | So my kids and I started savoring practices

01:43:19.340 | a couple of years ago.

01:43:20.420 | I call it classes.

01:43:21.540 | So I'll say, today we're gonna do an ice cream eating class,

01:43:25.100 | or we're gonna do a sunset watching class.

01:43:27.620 | - Cool, I wanna, are you adopting children?

01:43:29.460 | (laughing)

01:43:30.900 | - Applications are coming in now.

01:43:33.100 | We're evaluating them on a rolling basis.

01:43:35.340 | - I've already graduated college.

01:43:36.660 | (laughing)

01:43:38.700 | - But so we'll just sit there, you know,

01:43:40.980 | and eat ice cream slowly, you know, not so that it melts,

01:43:44.320 | but we'll say, you know, what are you enjoying about this?

01:43:46.660 | Is it the texture?

01:43:47.500 | Is it the flavor?

01:43:48.700 | What do you wanna remember about this moment?

01:43:51.060 | And I noticed more recently while working on this book

01:43:54.100 | that all of this was sensory.

01:43:56.900 | Sunsets, somersaults, ice cream, you name it.

01:44:00.300 | But it wasn't very social.

01:44:02.340 | And what they were hearing from me about other people

01:44:05.340 | was negatively skewed

01:44:06.780 | because gossip is negatively skewed, right?

01:44:09.120 | If somebody cut me off in traffic

01:44:10.820 | while I'm driving them to summer camp,

01:44:12.500 | they learn all about that person,

01:44:14.460 | but they don't learn about the people

01:44:16.220 | who are politely following traffic laws all around us,

01:44:19.400 | right, which is 90 plus percent of drivers.

01:44:22.860 | And so I started a practice of social savoring

01:44:25.580 | where I try to share with my kids

01:44:28.820 | positive things that I notice about other people.

01:44:31.220 | You could call it positive gossip as well.

01:44:33.820 | And one thing that I noticed

01:44:35.500 | is that that habit of savoring for them

01:44:39.500 | changed my mental processing, right?

01:44:43.580 | It actually changed what I noticed

01:44:45.740 | because of course,

01:44:46.580 | if you're trying to tell somebody about something,

01:44:49.700 | you look for examples that you can tell them about.

01:44:52.400 | So a habit of action of speech in that case

01:44:56.020 | became a habit of mine.

01:44:57.700 | So those three things,

01:45:00.020 | being skeptical of my cynicism,

01:45:02.260 | adopting a reciprocity mindset and social savoring,

01:45:04.940 | those are three of the psychological pieces.

01:45:08.560 | And I can get to some actions,

01:45:10.140 | but yeah, I wonder what you think of these.

01:45:12.740 | - Oh, I love those three.

01:45:13.900 | And I love the distinguishing features

01:45:17.860 | of savoring versus gratitude

01:45:19.580 | because there's so much data to support gratitude practices.

01:45:23.600 | And I don't think I've ever heard

01:45:26.000 | those two distinguished from one another,

01:45:27.820 | but clearly savoring things is going to be,

01:45:31.480 | is equally powerful towards our neurochemistry

01:45:34.500 | and our wellbeing.

01:45:35.340 | And I love that you include both sensory

01:45:38.640 | and interpersonal aspects to this.

01:45:40.640 | These are highly actionable

01:45:41.960 | and I'm sure people are as excited about them as I am

01:45:44.860 | because all this knowledge from the laboratory

01:45:48.500 | is indeed wonderful.

01:45:49.880 | But of course we always want to know what can we do

01:45:53.000 | now that you've made such a strong case

01:45:54.540 | for tuning down our cynicism a little bit

01:45:57.800 | in order to make ourselves smarter, better, happier

01:46:00.960 | and in touch with awe on a more regular basis.

01:46:05.020 | Would love to hear about some of the actions

01:46:06.560 | one can take as well.

01:46:07.800 | - Yeah, so if you imagine the mindset shifts

01:46:11.920 | that I've talked about as thinking more like a scientist

01:46:15.380 | about the social world,

01:46:17.060 | then the second step to me is to act more like a scientist

01:46:20.300 | in the social world.

01:46:22.280 | The monk and author, Pema Chodron,

01:46:24.500 | this great, great writer.

01:46:26.300 | - That's wonderful.

01:46:27.300 | - Has, is written beautifully

01:46:29.520 | about treating your life like an experiment.

01:46:32.200 | You know, in this moment, you could interrupt the defaults.

01:46:37.000 | You could interrupt the patterns

01:46:39.020 | and look around more carefully.

01:46:41.220 | And I try to do that.

01:46:42.740 | And I encourage other people to do that as well.

01:46:45.320 | You know, one form of this is what I call

01:46:47.860 | taking leaps of faith on other people, right?

01:46:50.340 | Collecting more social data requires risk.

01:46:53.560 | So I try to do that.

01:46:54.940 | I try to take more risks,

01:46:56.220 | become less risk averse in a social context.

01:46:58.820 | Now, this is not to say, you know,

01:47:01.020 | that I share my bank information with a prince

01:47:03.100 | who's gonna wire me $14 million, right?

01:47:05.980 | You need to be calculated.

01:47:07.220 | You need to be smart and safe in the risks that you take.

01:47:12.060 | But I would argue that many of us

01:47:13.980 | are far too risk averse in the social world.

01:47:17.100 | And there are lots of ways that I try to do this

01:47:19.960 | and lots of ways that people can do this.

01:47:22.420 | One is to just be more open to the social world.

01:47:26.360 | I'm an introvert.

01:47:27.420 | Andrew, I think you've said you're an introvert as well.

01:47:29.460 | Is that true?

01:47:30.300 | - I am.

01:47:31.140 | - Yeah, and so as introverts,

01:47:32.980 | we tend to think that the social world is maybe tiring

01:47:36.740 | and we need to recharge on our own.

01:47:38.940 | It's completely valid.

01:47:39.860 | I experience that all the time.

01:47:41.840 | I think that sometimes my introversion

01:47:44.040 | morphs into something else

01:47:45.820 | where I underestimate the joy of social contact.

01:47:49.620 | You know, there's so many times that before a dinner party,

01:47:52.820 | I would pay an embarrassing amount of money

01:47:55.800 | for the other party to cancel on me.

01:47:58.080 | I don't wanna be the person to cancel,

01:47:59.740 | but I would feel so relieved if they canceled.

01:48:02.460 | But then while I'm there and afterwards,

01:48:05.540 | I feel totally fulfilled by the experience.

01:48:08.260 | It's a little bit like running.

01:48:09.740 | Running is another thing that I love,

01:48:11.180 | but there are many times that before a run,

01:48:13.660 | I think, gosh, I really don't wanna do this.

01:48:16.320 | And then afterwards, I'm so grateful to have done so.

01:48:19.540 | There's a bunch of research that finds

01:48:21.180 | that people in general are like this.

01:48:23.900 | If you ask them to forecast what it would be like

01:48:26.340 | to talk with a stranger,

01:48:28.460 | to open up about a problem

01:48:30.580 | that they're having with a friend,

01:48:32.000 | to express gratitude, to try to help somebody,

01:48:35.120 | even to have a disagreement on ideological grounds,

01:48:38.980 | people forecast that these conversations would be awful,

01:48:43.180 | awkward, cringe, painful,

01:48:46.900 | and in the case of disagreement, harmful even.

01:48:50.780 | This is work from Nick Epley, Juliana Schroeder,

01:48:53.500 | and many others, by the way,

01:48:54.540 | on something known as under-sociality.

01:48:57.300 | And because we have these forecasts,

01:48:59.220 | we simply don't pursue the conversations.

01:49:02.060 | We don't go deeper.

01:49:03.300 | We stay on the surface.

01:49:05.660 | Nick, Juliana, and others then challenge people.

01:49:08.420 | They say, "Go and do this, have this conversation,

01:49:11.100 | "and then report back."

01:49:12.380 | And people's actual experiences are vastly more positive

01:49:16.340 | and more fulfilling than their forecasts.

01:49:19.200 | So I try to remember this in my own life.

01:49:21.620 | I try to realize when my forecasts are too risk-averse

01:49:25.500 | and too negative and say, "Let me just jump in.

01:49:28.380 | "Let me take this chance.

01:49:30.040 | "If it goes badly, well, fine.

01:49:32.060 | "And if it goes well, even better."

01:49:35.220 | The second piece here, though,

01:49:36.340 | is not just to take those risks,

01:49:38.400 | but to document their effects.

01:49:40.300 | I call this encounter counting.

01:49:44.500 | So in essence, gathering new data from the world is great,

01:49:48.660 | but if you forget those data,

01:49:50.600 | well, then the effects might be short-lived.

01:49:53.060 | I try to really remember when a social encounter

01:49:56.340 | is a mismatch with my expectations.

01:49:58.540 | I have a relative who, for instance,

01:50:01.720 | I disagree with politically quite a bit.

01:50:03.780 | And when I was working on this book, I said,

01:50:06.220 | "Let me take a chance.

01:50:07.340 | "We've known each other for 30 years.

01:50:09.800 | "We've never talked politics.

01:50:11.740 | "Let me try."

01:50:13.620 | And so I invited her to have this conversation

01:50:15.900 | about an issue we really disagree on.

01:50:17.460 | And we did not agree by the end of the conversation,

01:50:20.400 | but it was an immensely deep and meaningful conversation,

01:50:24.180 | and I actually felt like I knew her better,

01:50:26.620 | even though we've been close for decades.

01:50:29.340 | And I could just say, "Well, that was nice,"

01:50:31.540 | and then forget all about it

01:50:32.660 | and imagine that any future conversations

01:50:34.660 | on disagreement would be terrible.

01:50:36.560 | But I tried to write down in my journal

01:50:39.900 | sort of this is what happened,

01:50:41.420 | this is how it counteracted my expectations,

01:50:43.740 | try to lock in that learning from the social world

01:50:47.860 | so that pleasant surprises

01:50:49.660 | hopefully aren't as surprising anymore.

01:50:51.660 | - I love those practices.

01:50:55.120 | And thank you for reinforcing the process

01:50:58.300 | of reinforcing the experiences,

01:51:00.500 | because many times I'll be listening to an audio book

01:51:02.920 | or I'll think of something when I'm running

01:51:04.220 | and I'll put it into my voice memos or notes in my phone,

01:51:07.780 | and then I move them to this very notebook

01:51:09.700 | or another similar to it, and I'll go back and read it.

01:51:12.460 | But many things don't get passed through the filters

01:51:16.360 | that I forget because I didn't do that.

01:51:20.040 | And we know this is one of the best ways

01:51:21.460 | to solidify information is to think about experiences

01:51:24.180 | and information after being exposed to it.

01:51:27.020 | This is true studying, this is true clearly

01:51:29.220 | for emotional learning and our own personal evolution.

01:51:32.700 | - Which brings me to another example of somebody

01:51:36.300 | from the, I don't know what to call them,

01:51:37.500 | is it sort of philosophy, wellness, self-help space,

01:51:40.300 | you mentioned Pema Chodron, wonderful writer.

01:51:45.300 | There's someone else more or less in that space,

01:51:48.540 | Byron Katie, who a lot of her work

01:51:51.060 | is about challenging beliefs by simply asking questions

01:51:54.020 | about our core beliefs.

01:51:55.820 | This is something that I've started to explore a bit,

01:51:58.280 | like one could have the idea that good people always,

01:52:03.280 | I don't know, show up on time,

01:52:05.360 | and wouldn't we all love to be punctual?

01:52:07.400 | And as an academic, I confess,

01:52:09.940 | for me, everything starts 10 minutes after the hour,

01:52:11.900 | so we're consistently on time but late, right?

01:52:14.640 | So the non-academics.

01:52:16.240 | My friends from the military have a saying,

01:52:18.400 | which is five minutes early is on time, on time is late,

01:52:22.240 | and if you're late, you better bring lunch,

01:52:25.280 | so that kind of thing.

01:52:26.220 | In any event, the practice that she promotes,

01:52:30.740 | in essence, is to take a core belief

01:52:35.240 | and then just start challenging it

01:52:36.560 | from a number of different directions.

01:52:38.000 | Is that always true?

01:52:39.280 | Are there cases where that's not true?

01:52:40.640 | What would that look like, et cetera,

01:52:42.240 | as a way to really deconstruct one's own core beliefs,

01:52:44.880 | which is, I think, a bit of what you're talking about,

01:52:47.040 | and I feel like this could go in at least two directions.

01:52:50.800 | You can have a core belief

01:52:51.680 | that leads in the direction of cynicism,

01:52:53.740 | that you can deconstruct by just simply asking questions.

01:52:56.760 | Is that always true?

01:52:59.320 | Are there ever instances where that's not true?

01:53:01.640 | And what would it mean if that weren't true

01:53:04.120 | in a given instance, this sort of thing?

01:53:05.520 | And then on the other side,

01:53:07.000 | where we tend to err toward hopeful skepticism

01:53:10.360 | as opposed to cynicism, there too,

01:53:13.200 | I could imagine it would be useful

01:53:15.040 | to explore hopeful skepticism also as a scientist, right?

01:53:18.920 | Are there cases where hopeful skepticism,

01:53:20.680 | here, I'm gonna be cynical,

01:53:21.780 | can really get us into trouble, for instance?

01:53:24.900 | Anyway, obviously, I haven't run a study on this

01:53:28.420 | just because I came up with this example on the fly,

01:53:30.880 | but does what I just described fit more or less

01:53:33.180 | into the framework that you're describing?

01:53:34.660 | - Absolutely.

01:53:35.500 | I think that it's, in essence,

01:53:37.060 | being skeptical about our beliefs,

01:53:39.660 | putting them through their paces, right?

01:53:41.500 | Kicking the tires on our own beliefs.

01:53:43.660 | And again, this reminds me

01:53:45.100 | of cognitive behavioral therapy, right?

01:53:47.140 | A person who's socially anxious might tell their therapist,

01:53:51.060 | "I think all my friends secretly hate me."

01:53:54.040 | They might believe that to their core.

01:53:55.880 | It might affect every decision that they make.

01:53:58.120 | And the therapist might challenge them and say,

01:53:59.540 | "Well, wait, what's the evidence that you have for that?

01:54:02.540 | "Are there any instances in your entire life

01:54:04.700 | "where that seemed to not be true?"

01:54:06.660 | And to your point from Byron Katie,

01:54:08.540 | what would it mean if it weren't true?

01:54:10.720 | So this is the bedrock of one of the most successful

01:54:14.560 | forms of therapy for depression and anxiety

01:54:16.680 | and phobia in the world.

01:54:19.120 | You know, I do wanna also, I guess,

01:54:22.260 | zoom in on something that you're sharing there

01:54:24.260 | about our core beliefs.

01:54:26.080 | 'Cause I think that in addition to testing our core beliefs,

01:54:29.100 | one thing that I wish we would do more

01:54:31.000 | is share our core beliefs.

01:54:32.980 | Because I don't think we know

01:54:34.840 | what each other's core beliefs are.

01:54:36.560 | And I think oftentimes, we think that we are more alone

01:54:39.980 | in our core beliefs than we actually are.

01:54:42.940 | So this is true in our politics, for instance,

01:54:46.140 | like the amount of people on,

01:54:48.780 | from every part of the political spectrum

01:54:50.840 | who want more compromise, more peace, and less conflict

01:54:55.840 | is north of 80% in surveys that my lab has conducted.

01:55:00.420 | But people don't know that.

01:55:02.480 | And so the lack of evidence, the lack of data

01:55:05.340 | about what other people want is a hindrance

01:55:08.140 | to the goals that we actually all share.

01:55:11.220 | This is also true in workplaces.

01:55:13.980 | So in the course of my work,

01:55:16.340 | I've done sort of some different projects

01:55:19.740 | with school systems, hospital systems, businesses.

01:55:23.180 | And one of the things I love doing

01:55:24.940 | is starting with an anonymous survey

01:55:26.580 | of everybody in the community.

01:55:28.220 | And I ask, how much do you value empathy and collaboration?

01:55:33.000 | How much would you prefer a workplace or community

01:55:35.820 | defined by cooperation versus competition?

01:55:40.220 | And invariably, and I'm talking about some places

01:55:43.500 | where you might imagine people would be competitive,

01:55:45.760 | invariably, a super majority of individuals

01:55:49.260 | in those communities want compassion,

01:55:52.580 | cooperation, and collaboration, right?

01:55:56.720 | Much more than they want competition or isolation.

01:56:00.580 | So one of the things that I love to do

01:56:01.900 | when I speak for those groups is to say,

01:56:03.500 | hey, look, here's some data, look around you.

01:56:06.820 | Here you've got 90% of people in this organization

01:56:10.340 | who want more cooperation.

01:56:12.220 | So if you just take a look in your periphery,

01:56:15.420 | almost everybody around you wants that as well.

01:56:18.360 | I also survey these communities and say,

01:56:20.660 | what do you think the average person

01:56:22.220 | would respond to these questions?

01:56:23.320 | And invariably, they're wrong.

01:56:25.380 | And so I say, you have underestimated each other,

01:56:28.740 | and now I'm giving you permission to stop.

01:56:30.840 | And I think this is one of the other actions

01:56:34.380 | that we can take if we're in a leadership position anywhere.

01:56:38.180 | Right, I think that looking for more data is great.

01:56:41.220 | If you're a leader, you can collect those data

01:56:43.580 | and you can show people to themselves.

01:56:46.300 | You can unveil the core beliefs of your community.

01:56:50.540 | And oftentimes those core beliefs are incredibly beautiful

01:56:55.220 | and surprising to the people in those communities

01:56:59.220 | and give them what I would call not peer pressure,

01:57:02.200 | but peer permission to express who they've been all along.

01:57:06.500 | - I love that.

01:57:07.340 | And one of the things that we've done on this podcast

01:57:09.540 | is to always invite comments and questions,

01:57:12.980 | critique and so forth in the comment section on YouTube.

01:57:17.980 | And I always say, and I do read all the comments,

01:57:20.580 | and sometimes it takes me a while

01:57:21.860 | and I'm still sifting through them.

01:57:22.940 | But I think comment sections can be,

01:57:25.860 | yes, they can be toxic in certain environments,

01:57:27.860 | in certain contexts,

01:57:28.980 | but they can also be tremendously enriching,

01:57:32.340 | not just for the reader, but for the commenter.

01:57:36.140 | And to see what people's core beliefs are really about.

01:57:39.900 | Now, oftentimes comments are of a different form

01:57:43.180 | and that's okay, that's all right.

01:57:45.340 | But I think that because of the anonymity involved,

01:57:49.300 | I think I can see that now through the lens

01:57:51.660 | of what you're saying as a license

01:57:53.820 | for people to really share their core beliefs

01:57:55.460 | about something that can be really informative

01:57:58.300 | and really enriching.

01:57:59.660 | Although I much prefer, I confess,

01:58:01.780 | the model that you're presenting

01:58:04.220 | where people are doing this in real time face-to-face

01:58:06.860 | as opposed to just online.

01:58:08.180 | As long as we're talking about polarization

01:58:12.980 | and the wish for less polarization,

01:58:14.960 | what are the data saying about the current state of affairs?

01:58:19.500 | We're recording this, you know, about what,

01:58:21.940 | three months or so out from an election

01:58:23.700 | or 90 some days or so from an election,

01:58:27.220 | presidential election.

01:58:28.940 | So without getting into discussions

01:58:30.580 | about political camps per se,

01:58:33.620 | what do your data and understanding about cynicism

01:58:37.340 | and hopeful skepticism tell us about that whole process

01:58:42.340 | and how the two camps are presenting themselves?

01:58:47.620 | - There is so much to say about this.

01:58:49.060 | I'm gonna try to not give a lecture here,

01:58:51.820 | but like so many of the themes in this conversation,

01:58:56.820 | I think that the headline for me

01:58:59.780 | when I look at the data on polarization,

01:59:02.200 | and I'm gonna talk about perceived polarization as well,

01:59:05.420 | is twofold.

01:59:07.220 | One, it's tragic because we are underestimating one another.

01:59:12.220 | And two, there's a lot of opportunity here

01:59:15.180 | because the delta between the world that we think we're in

01:59:17.860 | and the one that we're actually in is great,

01:59:20.180 | and it's positive as well.

01:59:22.420 | So there's a bunch of work on political perceptions.

01:59:25.340 | This is work done by folks like Meena Chakra at Harvard,

01:59:29.340 | my colleague Rob Willer in sociology at Stanford,

01:59:32.200 | our colleague, Rob Willer.

01:59:33.640 | And a lot of this focuses on what people think

01:59:38.640 | the average member of the other side is like.

01:59:44.000 | So if you're a Republican,

01:59:45.400 | what do you think the average Democrat believes?

01:59:48.000 | What do you think they're like?

01:59:48.840 | If you're a Democrat,

01:59:49.800 | what do you think the average Republican is like?

01:59:52.440 | And so I'll stop talking about Republicans

01:59:54.480 | and Democrats here because a lot of these data

01:59:56.480 | are bipartisan, the biases are pretty even across camps.

02:00:01.120 | And it turns out that in all cases,

02:00:03.560 | we are dead wrong about who's on the other side.

02:00:06.960 | We're even wrong demographically

02:00:08.680 | about who's on the other side.

02:00:10.600 | For instance, Democrats think that 25% of Republicans

02:00:15.600 | make more than $250,000 a year.

02:00:18.560 | The actual number is 2%.

02:00:21.900 | But the stereotype of Republicans that Democrats hold

02:00:25.020 | is that they're wealthy, I suppose.

02:00:27.240 | Republicans vastly overestimate the percentage of Democrats

02:00:31.080 | who are part of the LGBTQ community, for instance.

02:00:34.040 | Again, it's just a cultural stereotype.

02:00:36.640 | So we're wrong about even who's on the other side,

02:00:40.480 | but we're even more wrong about what they believe

02:00:42.680 | and what they want.

02:00:44.120 | So data suggests that there is perceived polarization,

02:00:47.680 | that is what we think the other side believes,

02:00:50.880 | is much greater than real polarization.

02:00:53.520 | I mean, first of all, we are divided, let's stipulate that.

02:00:56.160 | And those divisions can be really dangerous

02:00:58.740 | and are in some cases existential.

02:01:02.580 | But the division in our mind is much greater

02:01:06.500 | than the division that we actually have.

02:01:08.820 | My late friend, Emil Bruno, collected some data

02:01:11.860 | where he gathered Republicans and Democrats' views

02:01:14.860 | on immigration.

02:01:15.820 | He said, what would you want immigration to look like

02:01:18.500 | where zero is the borders are totally closed

02:01:21.980 | and 100 is they're totally open?

02:01:24.000 | And he plotted the distributions of what that looks like.

02:01:27.580 | He also asked people on either side,

02:01:30.180 | what do you think the other side would respond

02:01:33.060 | if asked that same question?

02:01:34.940 | And he plotted those distributions as well.

02:01:36.860 | - Other side meaning which group?

02:01:38.400 | - If you're a Democrat,

02:01:39.240 | what do you think Republicans would want?

02:01:40.500 | And if you're a Republican, what would Democrats want?

02:01:43.580 | And the distributions are totally different.

02:01:46.180 | The distributions of our actual preferences

02:01:48.780 | are like a hill with two peaks, right?

02:01:51.180 | So Republicans want more closed borders,

02:01:53.820 | Democrats want them more open,

02:01:55.420 | but they're not that far apart, first of all, the means,

02:01:57.860 | and there's a lot of overlap in the distributions.

02:02:01.040 | The distributions of our perceptions are two hills

02:02:04.500 | on opposite sides of a landscape.

02:02:07.460 | Republicans think that Democrats want totally open borders

02:02:11.180 | and Democrats think Republicans want totally closed borders.

02:02:14.100 | And the same pattern plays out for all sorts of issues

02:02:18.340 | where we think the other side is much more extreme,

02:02:21.580 | we think the average member of the other side

02:02:23.740 | is much more extreme than they really are.

02:02:26.140 | There's also work on meta-perceptions.

02:02:28.260 | What do you think the other side thinks about you?

02:02:32.220 | And it turns out that people on both sides

02:02:34.580 | imagine that their rivals hate them

02:02:37.860 | twice as much as their rivals really do.

02:02:40.940 | There's work on democratic norms

02:02:42.460 | that my grad student Louisa Santos collected,

02:02:45.820 | where we overestimate how anti-democratic

02:02:48.300 | the other side is by two times.

02:02:51.160 | And Rob has collected data on violence.

02:02:53.780 | How much do you think the other side

02:02:55.100 | would support violence to advance their aims?

02:02:57.780 | And here, the overestimates are 400%.

02:03:01.260 | So we think that the average person on the other side

02:03:03.860 | is four times as enthusiastic about violence

02:03:07.700 | as they really are.

02:03:09.360 | We have an image in our mind of the other

02:03:13.100 | as violent extremists who want to burn down the system.

02:03:18.100 | And again, we've talked about the warped media ecosystem

02:03:21.500 | that we're in, and that probably contributes here.

02:03:23.780 | But the fact is that those misperceptions

02:03:26.580 | are making all the problems that we fear worse.

02:03:29.420 | Because if you think that the other side

02:03:31.060 | is gearing up for war, what do you do?

02:03:33.220 | You have to defend yourself.

02:03:35.460 | And so we're caught in this almost cycle of escalation

02:03:39.940 | that really very few of us want.

02:03:42.940 | Now, I want to be really clear here

02:03:44.700 | that I'm not saying that we don't have actual disagreements.

02:03:48.140 | I'm also not saying that people across

02:03:52.380 | our political spectrum are all peaceable and all kind.

02:03:55.860 | There are absolutely extreme and violent people

02:03:59.540 | around our country that represent their political views

02:04:02.500 | in horrible and toxic ways.

02:04:04.440 | But that's not the average.

02:04:06.580 | And again, I want to get back to this point

02:04:08.220 | that the average person underestimates the average person.

02:04:11.560 | Not that we underestimate everybody,

02:04:14.020 | but that we're wrong about most people.

02:04:16.740 | And so again, to me, this is a tragedy and an opportunity.

02:04:21.100 | Rob and Mina and lots of other people find

02:04:24.020 | that when you ask people to actually pay attention

02:04:27.520 | to the data, when you show them,

02:04:29.100 | "Hey, actually, the other side fears violence

02:04:32.540 | "just as much as you do."

02:04:34.460 | When you show them that actually the other side

02:04:36.260 | is terrified of losing our democracy.

02:04:38.900 | When you show them that the other side

02:04:40.140 | doesn't actually hate you, that mitigates,

02:04:43.140 | that pulls back all of these escalatory impulses.

02:04:46.760 | In essence, you can decrease the threat

02:04:49.180 | that people feel from the other side

02:04:51.020 | by showing them who the other side really is.

02:04:54.320 | I understand this is such a massive

02:04:56.300 | and toxic sort of environment that we're in.

02:04:59.080 | I'm not saying that hopeful skepticism

02:05:01.220 | will solve our divided political landscape,

02:05:06.220 | will solve our problems.

02:05:08.000 | But I do think it's worth noting how wrong we are

02:05:11.540 | and that being a little bit less wrong

02:05:13.900 | can at least open a door, maybe let our minds wander

02:05:17.700 | towards a place of greater compromise and peace,

02:05:20.580 | which is what most people actually want.

02:05:23.140 | - Wow.

02:05:25.360 | I say that for several reasons.

02:05:27.860 | First of all, I've never heard the landscape

02:05:31.340 | described that way.

02:05:32.700 | And I confess, I didn't know that the landscape

02:05:35.060 | was as toward the center as it turns out it is.

02:05:40.060 | I have also many theories about how media and social media

02:05:47.760 | and podcasts for that matter might be contributing

02:05:50.560 | to this perceived polarization as opposed to the reality.

02:05:55.560 | And there's certainly a lot to explore

02:05:58.560 | in terms of what we can each and all do

02:06:01.520 | to remedy our understanding of what's going on out there.

02:06:05.700 | As a consequence, I'll ask,

02:06:07.460 | can some of the same tools that you described

02:06:10.140 | to better interact with one's own children,

02:06:13.400 | with one's own self, with other individuals

02:06:16.460 | and in small groups be used to sort of defragment

02:06:21.460 | some of the cynicism circuitry that exists in us

02:06:25.260 | around this polarized, excuse me,

02:06:28.220 | perceived highly polarized political landscape?

02:06:32.160 | - I love that clarification.

02:06:33.560 | Yeah, absolutely.

02:06:34.660 | I think that the answer is yes.

02:06:38.760 | There is lots of evidence that we are actively avoiding

02:06:42.320 | having conversations in part because of who we think

02:06:45.760 | the other side is.

02:06:47.120 | There is an amazing study that was conducted

02:06:49.600 | during Thanksgiving of 2016, which as you may recall,

02:06:53.940 | was directly after a very polarizing election

02:06:58.940 | and researchers used geo-tracking on people's cell phones

02:07:04.060 | to examine whether in order to go to Thanksgiving dinner,

02:07:07.000 | they crossed between a blue county into a red county

02:07:12.000 | or a red county into a blue county.

02:07:14.560 | In other words, are they going into,

02:07:16.320 | and I'm using air quotes here, quote unquote,

02:07:18.520 | enemy territory for Thanksgiving dinner.

02:07:21.120 | And they used that as a proxy of whether

02:07:23.620 | they're having dinner with people they disagree with.

02:07:26.120 | And it turns out that people who crossed county lines,

02:07:29.440 | who crossed into enemy territory, again in quotes,

02:07:31.960 | this is perceived polarization,

02:07:33.560 | they had dinners that were 50 minutes shorter

02:07:37.680 | than people who were dining with folks

02:07:39.960 | who presumably they agreed with.

02:07:42.640 | So we're talking about forsaking pie, Andrew.

02:07:46.480 | They're giving up pie in order to not talk

02:07:49.400 | with people they disagree with.

02:07:50.800 | And I think a lot of us are very skittish

02:07:52.660 | about these conversations because if you believe

02:07:55.580 | that the other side is a bunch of bloodthirsty marauders,

02:07:59.920 | why would you want to talk with them?

02:08:02.240 | Why have a beer with a fascist?

02:08:04.400 | That's just not a great plan.

02:08:06.500 | The truth though is that when we can collect better data,

02:08:12.160 | oftentimes we end up with better perceptions.

02:08:16.440 | And I mean better in two ways,

02:08:18.960 | one more positive and two more accurate.

02:08:22.040 | Now again, I want to say that there are real threats

02:08:24.760 | in our political environment.

02:08:25.760 | I'm not asking anybody to make themselves unsafe in any way.

02:08:29.920 | But in our lab, again, my wonderful graduate student,

02:08:34.080 | Louisa Santos, ran a study where we had about 160 people,

02:08:37.720 | these are folks from all over the country,

02:08:39.840 | who took part in Zoom conversations.

02:08:43.280 | We made sure that they really disagreed

02:08:45.200 | about gun control, immigration, and climate change,

02:08:48.960 | and they talked about those issues.

02:08:51.640 | We asked them to forecast

02:08:53.440 | what those conversations would be like,

02:08:55.040 | and we asked other folks to forecast

02:08:57.220 | what those conversations would be like.

02:08:59.360 | And the forecasts went from neutral to negative.

02:09:02.100 | Some people thought it won't make any difference,

02:09:04.800 | and other people thought it will be counterproductive.

02:09:07.520 | Some folks in our survey said dialogue is dead,

02:09:10.240 | there's no point in any of these conversations.

02:09:13.140 | We then brought these folks together.

02:09:15.800 | Oh, and I should say, among the people who were cynical

02:09:18.800 | about these conversations and who forecasted

02:09:20.760 | that they would go poorly, was us, the research team.

02:09:24.440 | Louisa and I spent hours talking about,

02:09:26.520 | what if people start to threaten each other,

02:09:28.400 | or dox each other, or look up each other's addresses.

02:09:32.180 | You know, Andrew, that we have institutional review boards

02:09:34.800 | that make sure that we're keeping human subjects safe,

02:09:37.080 | and the IRB wanted all sorts of safeguards in place,

02:09:40.840 | because we all thought that these conversations

02:09:43.760 | might go really poorly.

02:09:46.120 | After the conversations occurred,

02:09:48.100 | we asked folks who had taken part of them

02:09:50.520 | to rate how positive they were on a one to 100 scale.

02:09:54.760 | And the most common, the modal response

02:09:57.760 | that people gave us was 100 out of 100.

02:10:00.620 | And it wasn't just that they liked the conversation,

02:10:04.360 | they were shocked by how much they liked the conversation.

02:10:07.600 | They also reported less negative emotion

02:10:11.120 | for the other side as a whole,

02:10:13.180 | not just for the person that they talked with,

02:10:15.520 | and they reported more intellectual humility,

02:10:18.640 | more openness to questioning their own views.

02:10:22.120 | So here are conversations that we as a culture

02:10:24.700 | are actively avoiding because of our priors.

02:10:28.640 | Our priors are wrong given the data,

02:10:30.420 | but we don't know that, and we don't give ourselves chances

02:10:33.440 | to learn that we're wrong, because we don't collect the data.

02:10:37.100 | And when we do collect the data,

02:10:38.400 | when we step in and take that leap of faith,

02:10:40.960 | take that social risk, we are shocked and humbled,

02:10:46.380 | and feel more positive, and maybe even feel

02:10:49.620 | a slightly greater sense of hope

02:10:51.740 | that there can be some way out of this toxic environment

02:10:55.300 | that we're all trapped in.

02:10:57.260 | - Well, Jamil, Dr. Zaki,

02:11:01.140 | thank you so much for sharing your incredible,

02:11:06.140 | like what can only be described as wisdom

02:11:08.860 | into this area of humanity, right?

02:11:12.980 | I mean, to be a cynic is one potential aspect

02:11:17.700 | of being human, but you've made very clear

02:11:21.140 | that we have control.

02:11:22.780 | There is plasticity over this aspect of ourselves.

02:11:25.460 | If we adopt the right mindsets, apply the right practices,

02:11:29.540 | and it's so clear based on everything you've shared today

02:11:33.820 | that humans are operating rationally,

02:11:38.580 | and yet irrationally at the same time.

02:11:40.500 | I'm certainly not the first to say that,

02:11:42.620 | but in the context of cynicism,

02:11:44.260 | and in the context of being happier individuals,

02:11:46.620 | and families, and couples, and groups,

02:11:49.500 | that to really take a hard look at how cynical we are,

02:11:53.900 | and to start to make even minor inroads into that

02:11:58.620 | through belief testing.

02:12:00.100 | You know, I wrote down as we were talking

02:12:01.940 | that what I really feel you're encouraging us to do,

02:12:04.940 | correct me if I'm wrong, is to do both internal

02:12:08.620 | and external reality testing in an effort

02:12:11.340 | to move us away toward internal and external polarization.

02:12:15.660 | And I can't think of any higher calling than that.

02:12:20.100 | And you're giving us the tools,

02:12:23.340 | and those tools are supported by data.

02:12:25.820 | These aren't just ideas, they are data-supported ideas.

02:12:29.500 | And I just want to thank you for your incredible generosity

02:12:33.100 | in coming here today to talk about those ideas.

02:12:35.500 | Your book is phenomenal.

02:12:36.940 | I already learned so much from it,

02:12:38.700 | and I highly encourage people to read it.

02:12:40.900 | And what you've shared with us today is phenomenal.

02:12:43.820 | And I do hope to have you back again

02:12:46.020 | to talk about another topic that you are expert in,

02:12:49.500 | which is empathy, but we'll have to all wait

02:12:52.860 | with bated breath for that, myself included.

02:12:55.380 | So once again, I just want to thank you for your time,

02:12:57.540 | the incredible work that you're doing,

02:12:59.620 | and the evolution that you're taking us on.

02:13:04.220 | So on behalf of myself and everyone listening and watching,

02:13:07.500 | thank you ever so much.

02:13:08.980 | Andrew, this has been an absolutely delightful conversation.

02:13:11.860 | And I will say my forecast of it was very high,

02:13:15.660 | and it has exceeded that forecast.

02:13:19.180 | I also just want to take a moment to thank you

02:13:21.740 | for your work as a science communicator.

02:13:24.220 | As somebody who believes in not just trying

02:13:28.700 | to generate knowledge, but also to share knowledge,

02:13:32.620 | I think that it's absolutely one

02:13:35.420 | of the most important services that we can do

02:13:37.700 | as folks who have been trained and learned all this stuff

02:13:41.060 | to bring that information to as many people as we can.

02:13:44.260 | And I think it's just, it's an incredible mission

02:13:47.020 | and clearly has had such wonderful impact.

02:13:49.220 | So it's an honor to be part of that conversation

02:13:52.100 | and to be part of that effort.

02:13:54.080 | - Oh, well, thank you.

02:13:54.920 | I'll take that in.

02:13:55.760 | And it's a labor of love and an honor and a privilege

02:13:59.280 | to sit here today with you.

02:14:00.860 | So thank you ever so much.

02:14:02.020 | And please do come back again.

02:14:03.520 | - I would love that.

02:14:04.980 | - Thank you for joining me for today's discussion

02:14:06.900 | with Dr. Jamil Zaki.

02:14:08.520 | To learn more about his work

02:14:09.740 | and to find a link to his new book, "Hope for Cynics,"

02:14:12.560 | please see the links in the show note captions.

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02:14:36.940 | If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast

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02:14:47.220 | For those of you that haven't heard,

02:14:48.380 | I have a new book coming out.

02:14:49.580 | It's my very first book.

02:14:51.180 | It's entitled "Protocols,

02:14:52.580 | an Operating Manual for the Human Body."

02:14:54.740 | This is a book that I've been working on

02:14:55.900 | for more than five years,

02:14:57.060 | and that's based on more than 30 years

02:14:59.380 | of research and experience.

02:15:00.940 | And it covers protocols for everything from sleep

02:15:04.000 | to exercise to stress control,

02:15:06.500 | protocols related to focus and motivation.

02:15:08.940 | And of course, I provide the scientific substantiation

02:15:12.300 | for the protocols that are included.

02:15:14.380 | The book is now available by presale at protocolsbook.com.

02:15:18.280 | There you can find links to various vendors.

02:15:20.660 | You can pick the one that you like best.

02:15:22.420 | Again, the book is called "Protocols,

02:15:24.180 | an Operating Manual for the Human Body."

02:15:27.020 | If you're not already following me on social media,

02:15:29.200 | I'm Huberman Lab on all social media platforms.

02:15:31.900 | So that's Instagram, X, formerly known as Twitter,

02:15:34.740 | Threads, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

02:15:36.380 | And on all those platforms,

02:15:38.060 | I cover science and science-related tools,

02:15:40.020 | some of which overlaps with the content

02:15:41.620 | of the Huberman Lab podcast,

02:15:42.920 | but much of which is distinct from the content

02:15:45.140 | on the Huberman Lab podcast.

02:15:46.440 | Again, that's Huberman Lab on all social media channels.

02:15:49.600 | If you haven't already subscribed

02:15:50.780 | to our Neural Network newsletter,

02:15:52.260 | our Neural Network newsletter

02:15:53.660 | is a zero-cost monthly newsletter that has protocols,

02:15:57.220 | which are one- to three-page PDFs

02:15:59.460 | that describe things like optimizing your sleep,

02:16:02.540 | how to optimize your dopamine, deliberate cold exposure.

02:16:05.300 | We have a foundational fitness protocol

02:16:07.220 | that describes resistance training,

02:16:08.820 | sets and reps, and all of that,

02:16:10.300 | as well as cardiovascular training

02:16:11.700 | that's supported by the scientific research.

02:16:13.860 | And we have protocols related

02:16:15.220 | to neuroplasticity and learning.

02:16:17.780 | Again, you can find all that at completely zero cost

02:16:19.980 | by going to hubermanlab.com,

02:16:21.660 | go to the menu tab in the right corner,

02:16:23.760 | scroll down to newsletter, you put in your email,

02:16:26.080 | and we do not share your email with anybody.

02:16:28.660 | Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion

02:16:31.060 | with Dr. Jamil Zaki.

02:16:32.700 | And last, but certainly not least,

02:16:34.840 | thank you for your interest in science.

02:16:36.980 | (upbeat music)

02:16:39.560 | (upbeat music)

Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset

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