Okay so let’s try a little thought experiment. You need a sidekick. Someone to help you navigate this very complex world. Your very survival depends, in fact, upon making the right choice.
You have two options. Who do you pick?
- That cynical genius smoking a cigarette subversively in the corner and rolling their eyes about how idiotic everyone is.
- That smiling, bouncy person who has so much positivity it sometimes makes you nauseous. (No I am not describing myself. Avid readers of the blog will know that I have written more than once about how I am indeed NOT that person.)
Did you pick A.? I think I might’ve picked A a few weeks ago, before I listened to this “Hidden Brain” podcast episode on my three hour drive back home from New Orleans. The episode, entitled “Fighting Despair” was one part of a series entitled “You, 2.0.” And there I learned something from Shankar Vedantam’s interview with psychologist Jamil Zaki (author of Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness) that, when I actually put it beside the real human experiences I’ve had in school settings and beyond, made a whole lot of sense.
Contrary to popular belief, cynicism is not protective. In fact, assuming the worst about the people around us is actually downright damaging. It destroys our ability to connect to people and it all-but-eviscerates our will/motivation to try to solution-find. After all, if everyone is hopeless, so is, well, everything. It’s no wonder that cynicism correlates closely with mental health issues.
We have carried this “cynical people are smarter than positive people” myth into all sorts of corners of human life. (For proof, see the lit review below that I stole from the podcast’s website.) Parents often see one of their chief roles as ensuring their children know the world and the strangers that populate are scary and just generally horrible. In this case, cynicism is seen as protective. But we are a school, so let’s get to the bottom of negative expectations about those around us impacts our profession. Shankar discusses one study from the 1950s in which Walter Cook and Donald Medley asked teachers to reveal their agreement with a series of 50 statements like “no one cares about what happens to you,” “most people dislike helping others,” or “most people are honest only if they know they will be caught if they aren’t.” Jamil goes on to explain the results:
Maybe unsurprisingly, they found that teachers who thought that people will just get away with whatever they can, and you can’t be too careful around them, weren’t great teachers, at least in terms of their relationships to their students. But what Cook and Medley found was that this did not stop in the classroom. The people who answered these questions positively, who believed these bleak things about human nature, turned out to be hostile in general. They called this cynical hostility. They wrote, “The hostile person is one who sees little confidence in his fellow man. He sees people as dishonest, unsocial, immoral, ugly, and mean, and believes they should be made to suffer for their sins.” Not a hit at parties, these people potentially.
Hundreds of studies since have utilized the “cynical hostility scale,” and the findings remain unchanged. Those who think the world is bleak “just suffer and create suffering all throughout their path in life.”
I was somewhat familiar with the teachers’- beliefs-about-students-matter body of work, but when Jamil started to dismantle the “cynical genius illusion” I audibly gasped out loud. The idea depends on a dual set of assumptions: (1) cynicism is a sign of intelligence (2) cynicism correlates with sharper social awareness and aptitude. Jamil quips: “So most people have faith in people who don’t have faith in people. It’s a little bit of a tongue twister, but it’s true, and most people are wrong.” He goes on to cite a good deal of research:
“The data are pretty clear here, that cynics perform less well on analytic and cognitive tests, and they’re worse lie detectors. So if you actually have cynics and non-cynics look at people sort of giving job interviews, half of the people told to lie, half told to tell the truth, more trusting people are better at spotting liars than cynics. And I think that’s partially because cynics have this general blanket theory that nobody can be trusted. And so they actually, in trying to argue, thinking like lawyers in the prosecution against humanity, stop actually listening, stop actually paying attention to the evidence.“
DID YOU READ THAT?! The more trusting people are BETTER at spotting liars than cynics?!!! Somebody call mythbusters because I have been deluded my entire life!’
This might be a good moment to say cynicism is different from healthy skepticism. We need critical lenses to view the world. When we say positive outlooks, we do not mean blind optimism, rose-colored-glasses, convincing ourselves everything is great and perfect and fluffy. But this I believe. We are a school that fosters independent, critical thinking. We are a school of SMARTIE MCSMART people: teachers, students, admin, parents, on and on. But our critical approaches have to also be tempered with “I’m going to believe the best in people around me and how can I live that out” in every big and small teaching decision (management procedures, fostering conversations, how I grade, etc.)
If this all is starting to sound a lot like our theme for the year “Can we Talk?” as well as all the work from the good people in the civil discourse committee, well that isn’t an accident. Resilience springs from the soil of charitable interpretation. Resilience is birthed in a kind of hope in, not just ourselves, but our communities. After all, why try and keep trying to make a change unless there are other actors in our networks that we believe will, at least peripherally, care and support us in our efforts?
Zaki has one last revelation worth sharing here and its about this very topic: communities. His research points to the fact that our increasingly transactional culture (“I will only do X if I get Y out of it) is also leading to despair.
“I think that one thing that worries me is the extent to which features of market living are entering into communal spaces. And I think that one reason for this is because we are counting more things like we used to count money, right? We count how much social approval we receive on different platforms like Facebook or Twitter or Instagram. We count how much we exercise and meditate. There are apps where you can compete with your friends for who’s taking more steps. And I think that that quantification can make us feel like we’re in a transactional space, even when we might not want to be.”
See, another hidden aspect of being cynical is being a counter-of-all-the-things, holding a laundry list in our minds of all of the ways things aren’t fair and how we have been wronged and carrying that into a host of contexts that perhaps do or don’t actually function well that way. Take me, for instance. I have been known to have a running count in my head of all the chores I have “done for the family” in a given week. If it doesn’t feel as though my husband has carried a proportional load, resentment begins to ferment in a dark corner of my soul. It’s all ludicrous, and I’ve noticed that Justin has far lower capacity for score-keeping. When he steps up to take the kid to yet another Saturday social engagement he doesn’t generally indicate he has been the one to do that the last four weeks in a row. “I know you hate driving; I don’t mind it,” he shrugs.
Maybe we should all stop keeping score. Maybe community means being strong when we can be strong and letting others carry the load when we are weaker. Maybe being a cynic isn’t some hidden signal for genius. Maybe positivity does not indicate vapidity. In fact, maybe those annoyingly bouncy people are the ones with the capacity to save us all in the end.
Interest Piqued? Check Out:
Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness by Jamil Zaki, 2024.
Parents Think – Incorrectly – That Teaching Their Children That the World is a Bad Place is Likely Best for Them, by Jeremy D.W. Clifton and Peter Meindl, The Journal of Positive Psychology, 2021.
Overly Shallow?: Miscalibrated Expectations Create a Barrier to Deeper Conversation, by Michael Kardas, Amit Kumar, and Nicholas Epley, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Attitudes and Social Cognition, 2021.
Cynical Beliefs About Human Nature and Income: Longitudinal and Cross-Cultural Analyses, by Olga Stavrova and Daniel Ehlebrach, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2016.
Addressing the Empathy Deficit: Beliefs About the Malleability of Empathy Predict Effortful Responses When Empathy is Challenging, by Karina Schumann, Jamil Zaki and Carol Dweck, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2014.
Declines in Trust in Others and Confidence in Institutions Among American Adults and Late Adolescents, 1972-2012, by Jean M. Twenge, W. Keith Campbel, and Nathan T. Carter, Psychological Science, 2014.
Community Vulnerability and Capacity in Post-Disaster Recovery: The Cases of Mano and Mikura Neighbourhoods in the Wake of the 1995 Kobe Earthquake, by Etsuko Yasui, University of British Columbia, 2007.
When Beliefs Yield to Evidence: Reducing Biased Evaluation by Affirming the Self, by Geoffrey L. Cohen, Joshua Aronson and Claude M. Steele, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2000.