A daring escape from cynicism: Scientist explains why “hopeful skeptics” are outsmarting doomers

I don’t think I’ve ever been so blunt with an author as I was when I spoke with Stanford neuroscientist and professor Jamil Zaki about his new book, “Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness.” This thing is more than good — it might as well be required reading for anyone who wants to stay sane in a fractured and frightening world, without sticking their own head in the sand or denying the often harsh data about the state of the world.

Over the course of a couple of weeks, I’d pushed back my reading of the advance copy while tumbling through a wild spiral of pressing environmental news coverage, renewed political debates on immigration in the face of climate change, and some rather grim trend-reporting around vaccine disbelief. All told, it was more than enough for me to begrudge a book titled like a 2008 Barack Obama campaign poster.    

But one Sunday morning at a coffee shop, I set my grudge aside, and plopped down with the 260-page paperback for a skim. When I looked up, the staff were closing up and I’d devoured every page. Start to finish, I was in the grip of what one might describe as a secular “come to Jesus moment” — a “come to data moment” for my inner cynical scientist.

Zaki’s book, I later told him in an interview, is critical reading in a world where cynicism seems like the only justifiable psychological protection one has against climate despair and chaos. Zaki’s discovery here about how human hope and skeptical curiosity can change our daily and collective outcomes in the world isn’t some over-burdened academic reach about miracle drugs or trendy new life-coach talking points.

Rather, its premises and praxis are rooted in an adept, interdisciplinary command of so many others’ work. Woven in Zaki’s affable and deeply considered writing, latter day research into how optimism and hopeful skepticism build out creative problem-solving and intelligence seems to come to life for the first time. Hopefulness, it seems, can indeed be a choice leading to measurably improved outcomes — and here we are offered a clear continuum of logical, clinically studied and peer-reviewed proof.

What probably struck me the most is this issue of how cynicism blinds us to problem-solving is a cross-partisan problem of leaning too hard into a sort of defensive posture of cynicism in the face of feeling hopeless. Do you want to speak to any of the political context of this?

Increasingly, you see people adopting a need for chaos. And again, I think that it's one of these interesting things that actually binds people on both the left and the right who are just basically fed up with how things are going. And have decided that — rather than sort of quietly hoping for things to improve — we need to just start over. And that's an impulse that is not always wrong. I mean, certainly there have been many revolutions that have pushed us more towards democracy and egalitarianism in history. But it's also true that people who are high in need for chaos, for instance, are much more likely to believe and share conspiracy theories than those who are not.

So I think that the impulse to change things is great. The impulse to give up on everything and destroy it, maybe you could argue, is less productive, especially when it's driving people in all sorts of different directions that are all just moving them away from the ability to make progress together.

You’ve pointed to a Woodrow Wilson speech in the book to show us how we’ve been here before — in an age of political and social cynicism. Wilson’s excerpt is about the cynicism of his age, and how communities and governments rebuild trust in each other. Your book is suggesting that we’re not just that amid a Gilded Age nihilistic revival, but that social-emotional approaches to our thinking have historical patterns as well.

I really want to acknowledge that if people feel cynical it's a completely natural reaction to a world full of inequality, injustice, corruption and existential threats. That's part of why I wanted to open the book with it, and the book is actually permeated with my own cynicism. I'm not here as some sage on the stage trying to tell you, “Here's how it really is, and you've gotten it all wrong.”

I'm in this place with the reader and I think that there are so many reasons to feel like things must change. But cynicism is what happens when we take those real problems and extrapolate from them into a full-scale theory of what people are like. That is highly destructive to ourselves, to each other, to our communities, and to the goals that we have of overcoming collective problems.

One of the reasons I opened that section of the book with that Woodrow Wilson quote, and the idea of the Gilded Age and all the problems that we have, was when I started working on the book, I thought: “We’re stuck. We're losing faith in each other in our institutions all the time so steadily. Is there any victorious story? Is there any triumph that has ever occurred? Where a group of people, a community and nation has gone the other way, gaining trust instead of losing it, gaining unity instead of losing it?”

And I found out through my research, yeah, it's right here. It happened.

In Wilson’s case and in the case of today, that community and government trust means solving the biggest problems the U.S. faces in a way that may mean overhauling institutions. The institutional reorganization requires transparency, which is also required to re-establish this trust. These are big, broad moves. And it seems you’re saying that the time and conditions are right for them.

Yes, and a super majority of Americans agree on things they don't know they agree on. Like, we all hate Citizens United, the majority of us don't like gerrymandering, most of us want greater access to pre-K education. You know, there's just there's a bunch of things that most of us support, like if you pulled out policies from the Green New Deal and give them to voters as individual bullet points. There's so much agreement on what we want. And really, cynicism is very useful for people who don't want us to achieve those collective goals.

Cynicism is what convinces us that it's not just that these things are messed up and we collectively want to fix them — but rather that everything is messed up. and you can't trust anybody. A nation full of people who don't trust each other is much easier to control than a nation of people who are willing and able to band together to stand up for their common beliefs that supersede even things like partisan identity.

You’re arguing in the book here that, instead of facing the world with hardened cynicism, it’s more scientifically helpful to approach it with hopeful skepticism. It seems to me that the necessary skepticism required to dismantle cynicism and rebuild institutions is that same very skepticism that can actually build hope when we apply it toward political activism. By failing to use skepticism against our own political cynicism, we're not equipping ourselves to use it defensively when we’re offered false hope politically. Is that the experience that your research is shown for you?

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Of course, I feel the exhaustion of being told just to vote over and over again, for the same politicians who don't really seem to be moving to — when I'm expected to move towards them and they're never expected to move towards me. It's an exhausting process and it can leave you feeling disenfranchised and alienated from the whole political process. And I know that's how millions of people feel.

You look at the progressive movement [under Wilson] that I think brought us out of national cynicism and into a very hopeful period. What that had to do with is a lot of upward pressure, right? In no way do I think that we should be that, [or] we should put all our faith in politicians. Instead, I think it's about discovering the collective power of citizens to take up social movements. And not to “conspiracize” our way out right into this bubble-wrapped version of reality where we’re all alienated from one another and we trust nothing, but to find the things that we agree on, and then generate upward pressure.

You know, that's why I love the story in that section of the book about the voters — people, voters, not politicians — and the movement to de-gerrymander Michigan. This is a movement created by a 26-year-old person working in a recycling plant who just thought “This is bullshit. There must be a way for us to do this together.”

So I think that social movements can turn cynicism into skepticism and, in the right moments, actually exert that pressure that can maybe, instead of trusting politicians, force their hand to come with us, even if it's incremental.

The data you’ve laid out talking about the superior cognitive performance and emotional wellness that can be found in groups testing low for traits of cynicism connects to emerging research on similar improvements for people who volunteer for environmental causes. It’s like, I know I'm not stopping the Exxon-Valdez damage by planting a tree, but when my feet are in the dirt, and when the experience of restoration is embodied in this way, there's something going on in this monkey brain of mine in connection with its environment. What is the research telling us about the physicality of developing this pro-social behavior and challenging our cynicism?

So what we would say in the clinical psychology world is that you're describing a locus of control, right? There's a problem. Where is the agent who can do something about that problem? If that agent is me, is there something, some action that I can take, small or large, that will at least contribute?

It talks about the physicality of stress, for instance, right there. The response that we have to threats is supposed to be a response that creates movement — as when you say “fight or flight.” You're supposed to move. Your body is telling you there's a problem and you must take action. And if all you do is just scroll, although that is technically movement of your thumb, it's not enough. And that’s what causes a response. Stress is supposed to be an acute response to a tiger or a flood. A stress response is supposed to last only as long as it takes for you to take the action you need.

This resonates so much with what you're saying and I'd love to see the work that you're pointing to as well in environmental activism, but it makes perfect sense because once you start to take action, then a couple of things happen. You feel efficacious that stress can dissipate. I'm not saying that the threat goes away, where you become complacent, but at least the stress dissipates. And that gives you energy to continue.

I think sometimes people feel as though it's their moral duty to feel really sh**** all the time, but actually feeling really sh**** makes it less likely that you'll do anything that helps. I think that's one thing: taking action allows that stress to abate. A second thing is that taking action helps you find community in common purpose and common cause with others. And that is enormously powerful at the level of our brain and body. We are social creatures after all. That's why I think it's also really important to delineate between cynicism and skepticism, also between hope and optimism.

So you’re not the “this is fine” meme with the dog sitting at a kitchen table in a burning house?

I'm not. [Laughter] I don't think this is fine. But I think that hope is the emotion and the experience of believing that even though things are not at all fine, and they might never be fine, we have some say in that. Optimism is the belief that things will be fine and it can lead to complacency, and cynicism can lead to complacency as well. That's another harsh horseshoe theory actually: if you think things are going to be great, there's no need to do anything, and if you think things are going to be awful, there's also no need to do anything.

Hope sits in the middle of those, and it's the experience that will propel us to do things which then will improve our health and also our efficacy. I'm not playing it up for the pages when I say I struggle a lot with all of these issues. I think that because I do a lot of public speaking and teaching and writing, there's the sense that “oh, this is a person who knows themselves or trusts themselves.”

That couldn't be further from the truth. You know, I'm a really anxious and neurotic person and I've had a lot of trouble in my life feeling safe and feeling like I can trust people for reasons that I lay out in the book as well.

It's also related to what people from Zen and other Buddhist traditions would say, which is that our minds extrapolate so much when we have a negative experience — and as primates who are oriented towards threat and protecting ourselves from threat. We take that information and run and we tell ourselves stories about our lives, about the world, about humanity, that destroy us from the inside out. I think that a lot of both spiritual and clinical traditions are an attempt to just get us to pause — not stop necessarily, but at least pause — and be a little bit more aware of the fact that our minds are often doing this to us. And I think that one of the main messages, from science and from spirituality, is you don't have to listen to that voice all the time. There are other voices inside you as well.

There are notes here about community building that evoke some ideas behind religious traditions about seeing to one’s neighbor. Immigration work comes to mind. Forgive me if it's painting you to be a bit traditional, but it feels like the book is telling me to go volunteer, get out, get offline, interact with people and then decide what you believe politically. There's an element of physicality to this book that can be hard to get across in words.

In many cases, people don't know what other Americans think about immigration. I have a graph in the book showing what Democrats and Republicans actually feel about how restrictive or open our borders should be. And there's an immense amount of overlap across parties. But then if you ask each party what the other one thinks? They think that the other side is extraordinarily extreme, right? Democrats think that Republicans all want to build a wall and bring immigration to zero. And Republicans think that Democrats want to just throw open the borders and allow all of them.

So there's huge misperceptions and I think those are fuel poured on the fire by politicians and, frankly, by right-wing journalists as well. Things like the idea that undocumented immigrants commit more crimes proportionally than U.S. citizens — something that a lot of people believe, and which is the exact opposite of the truth. Or that immigrants will take people's jobs — when it turns out that actually if we were to decrease immigration, farming economies, for instance, would collapse. These are errors that I don't blame people for because they think they're receiving information from sources that they trust. But those thoughts, those beliefs, then turn into visceral fear.

One of the things that is so interesting to me is that cynicism is an attitude we have towards humanity, but not generally an attitude we have towards specific humans. And I try to point out that even though surveys exist showing that Americans’ trust of each other has fallen, Americans’ trust of their own neighborhood and their own community has remained steady. Likewise, we think that crime is getting worse every year, but we don't think the crime in our neighborhood is getting worse. It’s this abstracted sense in which our biases are most likely to take over.

I think that if you want to overcome cynicism and get a little bit more realistic, one thing that you can do is reenter the real world to volunteer in community with people, and just have conversations even. I realize that “touch grass” is not always the deepest message, but I think it's an important one in this particular case.

We tell these narratives about how judgmental everybody is and how poorly all these conversations will go, but the minute that we actually move our feet out of our bedrooms and into the world, we realize how much warmer and friendlier and and more trustworthy people are than we thought.

Cynicism is growing. Cynicism is on our screens, and hopeful skepticism is out there in the world with each other.