WEBVTT - From the Vault: Cynicism, Part 4 0:00:06.280 --> 0:00:09.120 Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name 0:00:09.200 --> 0:00:11.319 is Robert Lamb. It is Saturday, so we have a 0:00:11.400 --> 0:00:13.440 vault episode for you. This is going to be part 0:00:13.520 --> 0:00:17.360 four of four in our Cynicism series. This one originally 0:00:17.360 --> 0:00:21.600 published four twenty four, twenty twenty five. Let's jump right in. 0:00:24.960 --> 0:00:28.720 Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio. 0:00:34.600 --> 0:00:36.640 Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My 0:00:36.800 --> 0:00:37.599 name is Robert. 0:00:37.440 --> 0:00:40.000 Lamb and I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with 0:00:40.080 --> 0:00:44.000 the fourth and final part in our series on cinicism. 0:00:44.080 --> 0:00:45.800 There has been a light at the end of the 0:00:45.800 --> 0:00:49.480 tunnel and we finally reached it. So in Part one, 0:00:49.720 --> 0:00:54.120 we defined cynicism as the tendency to believe that people 0:00:54.200 --> 0:00:59.680 are bad, selfish, and untrustworthy, and we distinguished this modern 0:00:59.680 --> 0:01:04.040 deion from other concepts like the cynic philosophy of ancient Greece, 0:01:04.080 --> 0:01:07.080 which is a whole different thing, and from similar but 0:01:07.200 --> 0:01:10.959 distinct concepts like pessimism. We also looked at research on 0:01:11.080 --> 0:01:14.279 the correlates of cynicism across a bunch of domains of life, 0:01:14.360 --> 0:01:17.560 from health to career and all kinds of things, and 0:01:17.680 --> 0:01:21.760 discovered that being highly cynical tends to have overwhelmingly negative 0:01:21.760 --> 0:01:26.360 effects on a person's life. In Part two, we focused 0:01:26.400 --> 0:01:30.840 primarily on the so called cynical genius illusion. The short 0:01:30.920 --> 0:01:35.000 version of this is that while people might not necessarily 0:01:35.440 --> 0:01:39.160 like highly cynical people for whatever reason, we tend to 0:01:39.280 --> 0:01:43.640 assume that they are smart and competent in cognitive domains, 0:01:43.760 --> 0:01:48.080 conforming to the Sherlock Holmes archetype. However, experiments showed that 0:01:48.160 --> 0:01:51.560 this is not actually the case. On average, highly cynical 0:01:51.600 --> 0:01:54.880 people are not smarter than everybody else, and if anything, 0:01:55.120 --> 0:01:58.080 the correlation usually goes the other way, And so we 0:01:58.120 --> 0:02:01.440 talked about possible reasons for this fact, and also talked 0:02:01.440 --> 0:02:04.720 about the question of what, if anything, is the actual 0:02:04.840 --> 0:02:08.760 benefit of generalized cynicism. It seems like one answer is 0:02:08.800 --> 0:02:11.920 that if you are not very skilled at telling the 0:02:12.040 --> 0:02:16.880 difference between a trustworthy situation and an untrustworthy one, generalized 0:02:16.919 --> 0:02:21.440 cynicism may protect you from catastrophic misplacements of trust, but 0:02:21.520 --> 0:02:24.520 again at great cost to your well being and at 0:02:24.520 --> 0:02:27.720 the price of many lost opportunities to benefit from trust 0:02:27.720 --> 0:02:30.839 and cooperation. In Part three, we talked about the role 0:02:30.919 --> 0:02:34.480 of cynicism in politics, including the idea that cynicism has 0:02:34.480 --> 0:02:37.200 been on the rise in many democracies around the world 0:02:37.360 --> 0:02:41.400 for a possible number of reasons, one influence maybe being 0:02:41.440 --> 0:02:44.960 the use of social media. We also talked about research 0:02:45.000 --> 0:02:48.639 on the phenomenon of political cynicism, in particular as distinct 0:02:48.680 --> 0:02:53.400 from just general social cynicism or from simple distrust or 0:02:53.440 --> 0:02:58.120 skepticism of politicians, and we got into some observed characteristics 0:02:58.160 --> 0:03:02.680 of how cynicism manifests in political participation. We also talked 0:03:02.680 --> 0:03:06.760 about how people may use a mask of cynical rhetoric 0:03:06.800 --> 0:03:11.000 about politics in order to influence how they're perceived by others, 0:03:11.240 --> 0:03:13.959 maybe to sort of cover up the fact that you 0:03:14.000 --> 0:03:16.080 maybe don't know a lot about what you're talking about, 0:03:16.600 --> 0:03:19.760 and we discuss the link between cynicism and a preference 0:03:19.840 --> 0:03:22.200 for conspiracy based explanations. 0:03:22.919 --> 0:03:25.760 Another thing we discussed that ties into this episode a 0:03:25.760 --> 0:03:29.920 little bit is the idea that escape from cynicism in 0:03:29.960 --> 0:03:32.959 the modern sense, one way to escape from it would 0:03:33.000 --> 0:03:35.920 be to push through to a point of true disenchantment 0:03:36.360 --> 0:03:40.600 and essentially become an ancient cynic, a capital C cynic 0:03:41.200 --> 0:03:45.320 in the philosophical sense. Now, we'll see how well that 0:03:45.400 --> 0:03:47.560 idea pans out with what we have to talk about today. 0:03:47.560 --> 0:03:51.320 But to be clear, we're not recommending this as a 0:03:51.360 --> 0:03:54.680 standard solution to any cynicism you're wrestling with in your life. 0:03:55.640 --> 0:04:01.560 It's more interesting from the standpoint of understanding what lowercase 0:04:01.560 --> 0:04:05.720 cynicism and capital C cynicism is. So I think it's 0:04:05.720 --> 0:04:09.680 an interesting take in that regard, but not necessarily something 0:04:09.720 --> 0:04:11.920 you want to try for yourself. Like, the answer is 0:04:11.960 --> 0:04:15.280 not to I think we can. We can state pretty 0:04:15.280 --> 0:04:18.080 clearly here, don't try to become more cynical about life 0:04:18.120 --> 0:04:21.640 in order to reach some point of equilibrium. 0:04:22.080 --> 0:04:24.719 Yeah, I think maybe I see what the author you 0:04:24.720 --> 0:04:27.200 were citing when you brought this up is getting at 0:04:27.200 --> 0:04:30.560 with the idea of a sort of total disenchantment leading 0:04:30.600 --> 0:04:34.160 to a freedom to once again embrace virtue. I mean 0:04:34.480 --> 0:04:37.800 that almost seems a kind of Buddhist in a way, like, 0:04:37.839 --> 0:04:40.839 you know, like losing your love for the things of 0:04:40.880 --> 0:04:44.120 the world, allowing you to find like different higher levels 0:04:44.120 --> 0:04:47.680 of appreciation. But I question to what extent that kind 0:04:47.720 --> 0:04:53.600 of enlightened disenchantment capital C cynicism can actually be reached 0:04:53.680 --> 0:04:59.160 just by increasing your lowercase C cynicism along the standard dimension, 0:04:59.240 --> 0:05:01.919 you know, like becoming even less and less trustful. I 0:05:01.960 --> 0:05:05.599 don't know if that eventually gets you to capital C cynicism. 0:05:05.800 --> 0:05:06.000 Yeah. 0:05:06.040 --> 0:05:08.640 I think its primary purpose is to help us understand 0:05:08.720 --> 0:05:12.240 the connections between ancient cynicism and modern cynicism, rather than 0:05:12.640 --> 0:05:17.000 give us an approach for fixing our own lives. 0:05:17.480 --> 0:05:20.960 Now, given everything that we've talked about so far, one 0:05:20.960 --> 0:05:22.839 of the things the main things we wanted to talk 0:05:22.839 --> 0:05:26.920 about today was the question of where cynicism comes from. 0:05:26.960 --> 0:05:30.719 What can we understand about its origins within a culture 0:05:30.800 --> 0:05:34.000 and within a person, how it grows and spreads, and 0:05:34.040 --> 0:05:36.680 thus how can it be counteracted. Is there anything we 0:05:36.760 --> 0:05:40.760 really know about how to stop the growth of cynicism. 0:05:41.440 --> 0:05:44.560 I think this is a field where we don't have 0:05:44.760 --> 0:05:49.000 really strong conclusions yet, but there are some good starting 0:05:49.040 --> 0:05:52.320 points based on research. And one paper that I came 0:05:52.360 --> 0:05:55.800 across that addresses this question pretty directly was published in 0:05:55.800 --> 0:05:59.320 twenty twenty three in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences 0:05:59.720 --> 0:06:03.000 by a pair of researchers from the Stanford Psychology Department 0:06:03.120 --> 0:06:07.520 named Eric Neuman and Jamil Zaki. And this paper is 0:06:07.560 --> 0:06:12.440 called Toward a Social Psychology of Cynicism. So the authors 0:06:12.520 --> 0:06:16.840 begin this paper by addressing what they called the cynicism paradox. 0:06:17.720 --> 0:06:22.200 Cynicism quote tracks numerous negative outcomes, and yet many people 0:06:22.240 --> 0:06:25.599 are cynical. And so this is really something we've already 0:06:25.640 --> 0:06:27.599 been talking about this series, but kind of with a 0:06:27.600 --> 0:06:31.120 different framing. We've been asking the question, if cynicism is 0:06:31.160 --> 0:06:35.600 clearly so bad for our lives, is there any compensating benefit? 0:06:36.160 --> 0:06:38.799 Because if it's harmful and lots of people are highly 0:06:38.839 --> 0:06:42.120 cynical anyway, shouldn't you think there's probably some kind of 0:06:42.200 --> 0:06:46.080 trade off that makes it worth the cost. We've already 0:06:46.080 --> 0:06:49.440 mentioned several specific ways or scenarios in which it might 0:06:49.560 --> 0:06:52.400 be adaptive, but then again, it might just be one 0:06:52.440 --> 0:06:55.520 of those things that is just plain bad for us 0:06:55.520 --> 0:06:59.080 but happens anyway, Like, for example, depression. You might be 0:06:59.120 --> 0:07:03.880 able to explain how depression grows out of biological mechanisms 0:07:03.880 --> 0:07:06.400 that are evolved in order to be adaptive for us, 0:07:06.400 --> 0:07:10.200 but you don't have to assume that depression itself has 0:07:10.360 --> 0:07:13.840 benefits overall. It's just like something's gone wrong and it's 0:07:13.880 --> 0:07:18.000 bad for us. It's possible cynicism is usually the same way. 0:07:19.080 --> 0:07:21.320 But the authors here sort of take the same idea 0:07:21.360 --> 0:07:24.720 and they frame it as this paradox, cynicism hurts the 0:07:24.760 --> 0:07:28.320 cynic and yet cynicism seems to spread and bloom a 0:07:28.360 --> 0:07:32.360 new year after year. And so the authors say, given 0:07:32.400 --> 0:07:37.160 the observation of the cynicism paradox, research within social psychology 0:07:37.440 --> 0:07:41.520 should focus on a couple of questions. Where cynicism comes from, 0:07:41.560 --> 0:07:44.800 and how it spreads, and how can it be countered, 0:07:45.000 --> 0:07:50.440 diminished or alleviated. So first the question what explains cynicism? 0:07:50.480 --> 0:07:53.560 Where does it come from? First they address the possibility, 0:07:53.760 --> 0:07:56.120 what if the cynic is right. We've talked about this 0:07:56.160 --> 0:07:59.400 from a number of angles. Maybe cynicism is just an 0:07:59.480 --> 0:08:03.200 accurate assessment based on observations of the world. In the 0:08:03.200 --> 0:08:06.240 words of the authors quote, perhaps it reflects a realistic 0:08:06.320 --> 0:08:10.560 perception of the suffering caused by human self interest. But 0:08:11.240 --> 0:08:15.200 we've already explored research casting serious doubt on this, for example, 0:08:15.240 --> 0:08:19.560 the various experiments showing that people tend to grossly overestimate 0:08:19.600 --> 0:08:24.160 the selfishness and treachery of strangers. Most people in most 0:08:24.200 --> 0:08:28.800 types of situations are actually pretty trustworthy. And the authors 0:08:28.840 --> 0:08:31.960 seem to agree with this conclusion, and so instead they 0:08:32.040 --> 0:08:36.480 identify three ways that they think cynicism arises it's not 0:08:36.559 --> 0:08:39.880 necessarily that it is an accurate model of the world. 0:08:40.160 --> 0:08:44.319 But instead quote we will argue that people often overestimate 0:08:44.440 --> 0:08:50.120 self interest, create it through their expectations, or overstate their 0:08:50.160 --> 0:08:54.480 own to not appear naive. Now, the authors here acknowledged that, 0:08:54.520 --> 0:08:58.800 of course cynicism can be and often is, responsive to 0:08:59.240 --> 0:09:03.320 observation of the real world. For example, this is an 0:09:03.360 --> 0:09:08.280 experimental finding. We become more cynical when we witness people 0:09:08.400 --> 0:09:11.480 behaving selfishly. If you do an experiment where you stage 0:09:11.520 --> 0:09:17.280 people catching somebody doing something selfish and untrustworthy, that actually 0:09:17.320 --> 0:09:20.280 makes us less likely to trust. So we've witnessed an 0:09:20.320 --> 0:09:23.400 example that trust, you know, did not turn out well, 0:09:23.440 --> 0:09:25.800 and it affects our baseline in a way, at least 0:09:25.840 --> 0:09:30.080 within the situation, we become less trusting. But jumping off 0:09:30.080 --> 0:09:32.960 of this, they say that we can easily, because of 0:09:33.120 --> 0:09:37.000 various psychological phenomena, biases, and so forth, become kind of 0:09:37.360 --> 0:09:42.080 trapped in an unrealistically cynical mindset that is not a 0:09:42.080 --> 0:09:45.040 good model of how the world usually works and brings 0:09:45.080 --> 0:09:48.120 with it all the harms we've talked about. And you know, 0:09:48.160 --> 0:09:49.840 you can think about this in a number of different 0:09:50.880 --> 0:09:56.719 psychological domains. Your initial tendency is based on an observation, 0:09:56.960 --> 0:09:59.560 like you do see a betrayal or an example of 0:09:59.559 --> 0:10:04.440 somebody acting selfishly, but then you form an inaccurate, totalizing 0:10:04.520 --> 0:10:07.559 worldview based on that one salient example. 0:10:08.080 --> 0:10:12.880 Yeah, there's this really insightful table that they cite here 0:10:13.320 --> 0:10:19.400 that I found very interesting with these different categories of cynicism, 0:10:19.760 --> 0:10:26.200 group cynicism, institutional cynicism, and general cynicism, and this kind 0:10:26.200 --> 0:10:31.839 of model for how things might intensify. So, like one 0:10:31.840 --> 0:10:34.480 example they include is a young colleague betrays an older 0:10:34.520 --> 0:10:38.880 one in a team project. What does the older colleague conclude? 0:10:39.400 --> 0:10:42.600 And so the initial cynicism is, well, young people are 0:10:42.640 --> 0:10:46.720 self interested, and then that's the group cynicism. Then the 0:10:46.760 --> 0:10:49.840 institutional cynicism is people in the workplace are self interested, 0:10:50.280 --> 0:10:53.440 and then the general cynicism is people are self interested. 0:10:54.960 --> 0:10:57.679 And so you can you can imagine like a blossoming 0:10:57.920 --> 0:11:02.679 of cynicism more or less along these routes, you know, 0:11:03.360 --> 0:11:07.319 from being highly specific to you know, a particular encounter, 0:11:07.960 --> 0:11:11.560 to being increasing generalities about the way the world works. 0:11:12.080 --> 0:11:14.320 That's an interesting point. Yeah, And in fact, though the 0:11:14.400 --> 0:11:18.760 cynicism may be inaccurate at every single stage in this progression. 0:11:18.880 --> 0:11:22.600 So like, let's say I observe Johnny doing something selfish 0:11:22.600 --> 0:11:25.760 in one instance, and I start by saying Johnny is 0:11:25.760 --> 0:11:29.480 an untrustworthy person. That may not actually be true about Johnny. 0:11:29.480 --> 0:11:31.520 Maybe I just caught him at his worst moment, but 0:11:31.600 --> 0:11:34.600 it might be true about Johnny. Then I abstract it 0:11:34.640 --> 0:11:37.160 to some group Johnny belongs to. For some reason, his 0:11:37.240 --> 0:11:40.200 membership in a particular group is meaningful to me, and 0:11:40.240 --> 0:11:42.640 so I see him as representative of that group and 0:11:42.679 --> 0:11:45.680 apply the untrustworthiness to the whole group. And then I 0:11:45.679 --> 0:11:48.800 could branch out even further to some institution in which 0:11:48.880 --> 0:11:52.280 Johnny exists, and then possibly to all of humankind. But 0:11:52.480 --> 0:11:55.960 at every single level, it's possible you are actually not 0:11:56.240 --> 0:11:59.960 drawing a good generalization from observing one instance of behavior. 0:12:00.760 --> 0:12:04.400 This made me think about cynicism on The Simpsons, particularly 0:12:04.400 --> 0:12:08.840 as it relates to Homer Simpson. There's a famous episode 0:12:09.400 --> 0:12:13.439 from the Golden Age of Simpson's episodes in which we 0:12:13.720 --> 0:12:17.120 kind of get an origin story for homer cynicism. It's 0:12:17.160 --> 0:12:20.160 the City of New York versus Homer, in which a 0:12:20.240 --> 0:12:24.520 young and optimistic Homer Simpson experiences a number of betrayals 0:12:24.559 --> 0:12:26.720 and hostilities upon visiting the Big Apple. 0:12:26.960 --> 0:12:29.920 We talked about this episode in our Weird House Cinema 0:12:30.000 --> 0:12:32.640 on the Face behind the Mask, because Peter Lourie has 0:12:32.679 --> 0:12:34.520 the exact same experience. 0:12:34.120 --> 0:12:38.080 Yes, the exact same experience, and in this episode we 0:12:38.200 --> 0:12:41.160 see how it leads to an extremely cynical view of 0:12:41.240 --> 0:12:45.720 New York and New Yorkers. But you could also argue 0:12:45.760 --> 0:12:49.360 that it perhaps underlines the general anger in cynicism that 0:12:49.880 --> 0:12:52.800 comes to define Homer, at least in these early classic 0:12:52.880 --> 0:12:53.800 seasons of the show. 0:12:54.200 --> 0:12:58.000 Yeah, though it is interesting how malleable Homer's character is, 0:12:58.080 --> 0:13:00.960 and yet he still feels like a cohesive character, like 0:13:01.080 --> 0:13:04.319 sometimes Homer is very, very trusting and other times he's 0:13:04.440 --> 0:13:05.120 very cynical. 0:13:05.400 --> 0:13:07.920 Yeah, he's changed a lot over the years. I mean 0:13:08.240 --> 0:13:12.280 not in a character development way, but just in the 0:13:12.320 --> 0:13:14.720 realities of the show being on television this long, with 0:13:15.200 --> 0:13:19.040 this many different writers over over the years, various commentators 0:13:19.080 --> 0:13:22.880 have discussed how in the early Simpsons, or certainly the 0:13:22.880 --> 0:13:25.840 golden age of the Simpsons, you have this mix of 0:13:25.880 --> 0:13:30.280 cynicism and heart that kind of balances everything out. But 0:13:30.600 --> 0:13:34.040 the cynicism and melancholy have been observed to be particularly 0:13:34.080 --> 0:13:37.400 strong during that first season, and then they move away 0:13:37.440 --> 0:13:40.520 from that, and then eventually they kind of move away 0:13:40.520 --> 0:13:43.640 from homer cynicism and anger in general and double down 0:13:43.679 --> 0:13:47.800 on his frankness and his stupidity, so he becomes you know, 0:13:48.760 --> 0:13:51.760 it's more about like the dumb jokes and the gullible 0:13:51.800 --> 0:13:54.520 Homer as we proceed. But if you if you look 0:13:54.559 --> 0:13:57.280 at the New York episode, and you look at some 0:13:57.320 --> 0:14:00.880 of these episodes from from the from like the nineteen nineties, 0:14:01.760 --> 0:14:06.040 you can easily fill out a chart watching how we 0:14:06.200 --> 0:14:10.320 have a situation where Homer encounters selfish people in New York, 0:14:10.800 --> 0:14:15.319 and then this fosters into a worldview that, well, all 0:14:15.360 --> 0:14:18.439 New Yorkers are selfish, and then maybe all people are 0:14:18.440 --> 0:14:21.560 selfish as well. You can imagine it being like the 0:14:21.640 --> 0:14:25.040 thing that blossoms out into Homer's general cynicism. 0:14:25.760 --> 0:14:28.640 Right, this is a great comparison. So, yeah, it begins 0:14:28.680 --> 0:14:32.600 as the observation of an individual action or behavior and 0:14:32.640 --> 0:14:35.920 then generalizing to the person who did that, then the 0:14:35.960 --> 0:14:38.960 group to whom that person belongs, and then to the 0:14:39.040 --> 0:14:42.040 society at large, and then to all of humankind. 0:14:42.320 --> 0:14:44.280 Yeah, and tell you you're the type of person who's 0:14:44.320 --> 0:14:46.840 like of course I'm going to steal roadside sugar because 0:14:46.920 --> 0:14:48.520 anyone else would do the same thing. 0:14:48.880 --> 0:14:59.960 Yes, so anyway. 0:15:00.080 --> 0:15:02.760 In this paper, the authors try to formulate a model 0:15:02.960 --> 0:15:07.160 of how cynicism can spread at three different levels of 0:15:07.240 --> 0:15:12.120 social interaction. So one is through interactions at the interpersonal 0:15:12.200 --> 0:15:16.680 level between two people, the next is at the intra 0:15:17.040 --> 0:15:21.040 group level within groups, and then finally at the intergroup 0:15:21.200 --> 0:15:27.240 level between groups. So regarding the interpersonal level of cynicism 0:15:27.400 --> 0:15:31.440 of formation, the authors raise the question what if at 0:15:31.480 --> 0:15:37.080 the interpersonal level, cynicism is a self fulfilling prophecy In 0:15:37.120 --> 0:15:40.520 other words, an initially false belief, or at least a 0:15:40.520 --> 0:15:43.960 belief not based on evidence, whether whether true or false, 0:15:44.960 --> 0:15:48.840 an initially false belief that influences the behavior of the 0:15:48.840 --> 0:15:52.120 believer in such a way that they make the world 0:15:52.280 --> 0:15:55.720 conform to the way they believe it is. And psychological 0:15:55.760 --> 0:15:58.600 research has identified a bunch of dynamics like this. Self 0:15:58.600 --> 0:16:01.400 fulfilling prophecies show up in all kinds of ways in 0:16:01.440 --> 0:16:05.240 our behavior. For example, some experiments have found that if 0:16:05.280 --> 0:16:08.920 you treat somebody in a way that indicates you have 0:16:09.080 --> 0:16:13.560 high expectations of their competence, it can actually make them 0:16:13.720 --> 0:16:18.000 more competent, And obviously there would be limits to effects 0:16:18.080 --> 0:16:19.920 like this. You know, you can't just, you know, like 0:16:19.960 --> 0:16:23.400 hand somebody who knows nothing about medicine a scalpel and 0:16:23.440 --> 0:16:25.280 say I believe in you, go do the surgery. You 0:16:25.280 --> 0:16:26.880 know they're probably not going to know what to do, 0:16:27.400 --> 0:16:32.320 but within certain limits of a plausible knowledge and behavior, 0:16:33.400 --> 0:16:36.440 you can imagine how having somebody else show confidence in 0:16:36.480 --> 0:16:39.960 you can make you more confident in yourself, maybe make 0:16:40.000 --> 0:16:43.520 you less nervous, increase your performance certain types of jobs, 0:16:44.080 --> 0:16:47.120 or maybe having somebody treat you as competent makes you 0:16:47.200 --> 0:16:50.440 more conscientious, more careful to do a good job so 0:16:50.480 --> 0:16:53.400 as not to disappoint them, and so forth, and so 0:16:53.520 --> 0:16:57.280 then the authors say, quote, just like expectations about competence 0:16:57.520 --> 0:17:03.120 cynical expectations of moral character and become self fulfilling. So 0:17:03.360 --> 0:17:07.919 examples of this remember the trust based investing game that 0:17:07.960 --> 0:17:10.600 we talked about in previous episodes in the series, where 0:17:11.000 --> 0:17:13.520 I am given some money and then I have the 0:17:13.560 --> 0:17:16.680 option to either keep the money or hand it over 0:17:16.720 --> 0:17:20.159 to a stranger, at which point the money gets quadrupled. 0:17:20.240 --> 0:17:23.120 So maybe I initially get five dollars if I hand 0:17:23.160 --> 0:17:26.000 it to the stranger, it becomes twenty dollars, and then 0:17:26.040 --> 0:17:28.639 the stranger has the option to either keep all of 0:17:28.680 --> 0:17:31.840 the money for themselves or split the money and give 0:17:31.880 --> 0:17:34.119 me back ten dollars, so we both get ten and 0:17:34.160 --> 0:17:37.439 I double my initial investment. This was one of the 0:17:37.480 --> 0:17:42.080 experiments that found strangers almost always honor the investors trust 0:17:42.160 --> 0:17:45.560 and give half the money back, but people greatly underestimated 0:17:45.600 --> 0:17:49.720 how often that would happen. We overestimate the selfishness and 0:17:49.760 --> 0:17:54.080 treachery of strangers anyway. The authors mentioned that in trust 0:17:54.160 --> 0:17:57.480 based games of this sort, maybe not exactly this game, 0:17:57.520 --> 0:18:01.000 but something like it, if one player treats the other 0:18:01.160 --> 0:18:06.720 with cynicism, the other player actually becomes measurably less trustworthy 0:18:06.840 --> 0:18:09.320 in how they play the game. In other words, if 0:18:09.359 --> 0:18:12.760 you treat me like you expect me to be selfish, 0:18:13.200 --> 0:18:16.800 I actually become more selfish than I would have been otherwise. 0:18:17.480 --> 0:18:20.960 And this dynamic has been found in laboratory experiments, of course, 0:18:21.000 --> 0:18:23.800 but also found in the wild in real life scenarios. 0:18:24.080 --> 0:18:29.400 For example, studies of workplaces that find when management treats 0:18:29.480 --> 0:18:32.879 workers with suspicion like they expect them to break the 0:18:33.000 --> 0:18:35.679 rules and they're trying to you know, make sure to 0:18:35.760 --> 0:18:37.960 really crack down and make sure you don't break the rules. 0:18:38.240 --> 0:18:41.280 It actually makes workers more likely to break the rules. 0:18:41.520 --> 0:18:41.960 Quote. 0:18:42.080 --> 0:18:47.240 When cynical supervisors expect low compliance and titan supervision, they 0:18:47.320 --> 0:18:52.000 actually lower compliance. This, of course might not be the 0:18:52.040 --> 0:18:54.640 case in every workplace all the time, but it has 0:18:54.680 --> 0:18:57.399 been observed and it intuitively makes sense to me. You know, 0:18:57.440 --> 0:19:00.720 when a person is treated with trust, they may feel 0:19:00.760 --> 0:19:04.400 incentivized to rise to meet that trust, And when they're 0:19:04.440 --> 0:19:08.320 treated with cynical suspicion, the mind rebels and says, no, 0:19:08.440 --> 0:19:08.960 go to hell. 0:19:10.359 --> 0:19:12.080 Yeah, Like, if you actually put a sign up no 0:19:12.160 --> 0:19:15.760 stealing pins or no you know, printing out of dungeons 0:19:15.800 --> 0:19:18.679 and dragon supplements on the on the work printer, you know, 0:19:18.840 --> 0:19:21.480 we're gonna we're gonna be like, well why not, Why 0:19:21.480 --> 0:19:25.800 shouldn't I have pins? Why shouldn't I have color printouts 0:19:25.840 --> 0:19:27.439 of my dn D manuals come on? 0:19:27.920 --> 0:19:29.719 Or just more generally, I mean, I think a lot 0:19:29.760 --> 0:19:32.280 of people will know the feeling of it does not 0:19:32.560 --> 0:19:35.560 inspire you to be the best kind of worker. If 0:19:35.560 --> 0:19:39.240 you have the boss constantly looking over your shoulder, that 0:19:39.359 --> 0:19:41.560 just kind of makes you you feel like, well, okay, 0:19:41.640 --> 0:19:43.200 well why do I give a damn about this? 0:19:43.960 --> 0:19:46.639 You know, I wasn't gonna mention too much about diagenies 0:19:46.680 --> 0:19:48.919 in this episode because I don't want to confuse things 0:19:49.400 --> 0:19:52.040 too much. But there are there are some stories of 0:19:52.080 --> 0:19:56.600 diagenies where people expect him to act like a dog 0:19:56.760 --> 0:19:59.760 in the street, and then they would like throw food 0:19:59.800 --> 0:20:02.360 to defeed him like a dog, but then he kind 0:20:02.359 --> 0:20:05.199 of ups the ante and and outdogs them by then 0:20:05.280 --> 0:20:09.840 peeing on them like a dog, which we could maybe 0:20:09.880 --> 0:20:12.600 apply to this scenario. It's like, like, yeah, if you 0:20:12.640 --> 0:20:14.440 think I'm a dog, watch how much of a dog 0:20:14.480 --> 0:20:14.879 I can be? 0:20:15.400 --> 0:20:19.320 Okay, Another self fulfilling prophecy dynamic at the interpersonal level. 0:20:19.359 --> 0:20:24.120 This one's actually even simpler, person to person respect quote. 0:20:24.200 --> 0:20:28.040 More generally, cynics assume the worst in others and accordingly 0:20:28.200 --> 0:20:31.680 treat them with less respect. A recent paper uses lab 0:20:31.720 --> 0:20:35.159 experiments and daily diary methods to show that cynics often 0:20:35.280 --> 0:20:40.640 disrespect others. Since people dislike being disrespected, they often return 0:20:40.720 --> 0:20:44.159 the disrespect. That's pretty straightforward. That makes sense to me. 0:20:45.240 --> 0:20:50.520 So these self fulfilling prophecy dynamics both trap the cynic 0:20:50.720 --> 0:20:54.000 in their cynical worldview by making those around them less 0:20:54.040 --> 0:20:58.320 trustworthy and more unpleasant, thus increasing evidence for the cynic's 0:20:58.400 --> 0:21:01.280 view of humankind. It's like, if you're acting, if you're 0:21:01.320 --> 0:21:06.280 already cynical, you make your environment better evidence for a 0:21:06.359 --> 0:21:11.040 cynical worldview. And then also they spread cynicism like an 0:21:11.040 --> 0:21:15.280 infectious disease, causing those who have dealings with the cynic 0:21:15.520 --> 0:21:19.080 to themselves become more cynical. All right, So that's the 0:21:19.160 --> 0:21:22.040 interpersonal level. But the next level of analysis is the 0:21:22.119 --> 0:21:25.840 intra group level within groups, and here the authors bring 0:21:25.920 --> 0:21:28.679 up an idea that I thought was really interesting. That 0:21:28.800 --> 0:21:34.800 is the idea of pluralistic ignorance. Pluralistic ignorance is a 0:21:35.080 --> 0:21:40.919 group psychology effect that emerges when people mistakenly believe that 0:21:41.080 --> 0:21:46.120 everybody else thinks differently than they do. A classic illustration 0:21:46.240 --> 0:21:49.440 of pluralistic ignorance is the story The Emperor's New Clothes. 0:21:49.880 --> 0:21:52.440 Yeah, most people are probably familiar with the Hans Christian 0:21:52.480 --> 0:21:55.520 Anderson telling of this from eighteen thirty seven, though I'm 0:21:55.520 --> 0:21:58.639 to understand this was based in part on older tales, 0:21:58.680 --> 0:22:01.280 and you can also connect it to related stories in 0:22:01.359 --> 0:22:02.160 various cultures. 0:22:02.359 --> 0:22:06.320 Yeah, but the simplified version is some con artists go 0:22:06.400 --> 0:22:08.880 to the Emperor, and they say, we've got some beautiful 0:22:08.920 --> 0:22:12.439 new garments for you, in fact, a magical outfit that 0:22:12.840 --> 0:22:15.520 can only be seen by people who are intelligent. It's 0:22:15.520 --> 0:22:19.360 invisible to the dim witted, and the con artists provide 0:22:19.359 --> 0:22:22.960 the emperor in fact with no clothes at all. But nobody, 0:22:23.000 --> 0:22:26.080 including the Emperor, wants to admit that they can't see 0:22:26.080 --> 0:22:29.240 the clothes and thus be thought a fool, so everybody 0:22:29.280 --> 0:22:32.480 pretends the king has clothes on while he's actually just 0:22:32.520 --> 0:22:35.959 walking around naked, and nobody is able to speak up 0:22:35.960 --> 0:22:39.840 about this until finally a child points out the nudity, 0:22:39.920 --> 0:22:43.879 and finally everybody realizes they've been tricked. This story illustrates 0:22:43.920 --> 0:22:49.480 pluralistic ignorance because actually everybody privately thinks the Emperor is naked, 0:22:49.800 --> 0:22:52.680 but they are afraid to say so because they think 0:22:52.760 --> 0:22:55.360 they're the only one and nobody else is saying it. 0:22:57.040 --> 0:23:00.520 This story does slightly complicate it by adding the detail 0:23:00.680 --> 0:23:03.880 that they're afraid of being thought unintelligent, and that's not 0:23:03.920 --> 0:23:08.040 necessarily part of pluralistic ignorance, but it is pluralistic ignorance 0:23:08.080 --> 0:23:11.600 because everybody in the story just goes along pretending to 0:23:11.640 --> 0:23:15.760 believe something that none of them actually privately believes. 0:23:16.600 --> 0:23:19.200 There's a great treatment of this on the television series 0:23:19.240 --> 0:23:23.840 Arrested Development with the film project The Ocean Walker, where 0:23:24.000 --> 0:23:27.440 all the studio people surrounding it just continue to talk 0:23:27.440 --> 0:23:29.679 about how great it was, but no one actually understood it. 0:23:29.720 --> 0:23:33.520 But nobody wanted to be seen as the dummy who 0:23:33.560 --> 0:23:35.600 doesn't get this amazing project. 0:23:36.080 --> 0:23:38.439 Great example, and you can think of examples like this 0:23:38.760 --> 0:23:41.320 all throughout you know, it happens all the time. So 0:23:41.440 --> 0:23:43.879 how could this actually be a factor in the propagation 0:23:44.000 --> 0:23:48.800 of cynicism the author's right quote. A group can succumb 0:23:48.880 --> 0:23:53.159 to the norm of self interest, which specifies that people 0:23:53.359 --> 0:23:57.919 are and should be self interested. Members in such groups 0:23:58.000 --> 0:24:02.160 present themselves as more elf interested then they really are. 0:24:02.960 --> 0:24:06.159 So what if most people in a group actually just 0:24:06.320 --> 0:24:09.720 want to be trustworthy and cooperative, but there is a 0:24:10.040 --> 0:24:12.760 let's say, a prominent voice within the group saying it's 0:24:12.800 --> 0:24:15.240 a dog eat dog world. Everybody's just looking out for 0:24:15.320 --> 0:24:19.439 number one. The speaker could manage to convince the group 0:24:19.680 --> 0:24:22.520 that everyone else in the group thinks this way too, 0:24:23.400 --> 0:24:26.120 and the person who is not very selfish and would 0:24:26.200 --> 0:24:30.480 prefer mutual trust and cooperation, that person feels like they 0:24:30.560 --> 0:24:33.480