Speaker 1: Hey, Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. It's Saturday
Speaker 1: Vault episode Cynicism, Part two, Originally published four seventeen, twenty
Speaker 1: twenty five. This is part two of four Let's dive
Speaker 1: right in.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3: And I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with part
Speaker 3: two in our series on cynicism, the tendency to believe
Speaker 3: other people are selfish, untrustworthy, and immoral. In Part one,
Speaker 3: we talked about what cynicism means and its modern usage,
Speaker 3: and we contrasted that with similar but distinct concepts like pessimism,
Speaker 3: and also with cynic philosophy, the latter being a school
Speaker 3: of fullilosophy born in ancient Greece that emphasized moral integrity,
Speaker 3: self sufficiency, and virtue, and achieved in part by shedding
Speaker 3: pretensions like ignoring the pressure to conform and living in
Speaker 3: accordance with our nature. The word cynic comes from the
Speaker 3: Greek word for dog, and so a cynic philosopher in
Speaker 3: the ancient sense might say that we can all learn
Speaker 3: something from watching the honest way that a dog lives
Speaker 3: according to its nature. This, of course, is quite different
Speaker 3: from what we mean by cynicism today in common language,
Speaker 3: which is a disposition of low social trust, the tendency
Speaker 3: to believe, as we put it last time, that people
Speaker 3: are bad, people are selfish, and morals are fake.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, ancient philosophic cynics be like a dog. Modern
Speaker 1: cynics dog eat dog.
Speaker 3: Yes. Now. Last time we also talked a bit about
Speaker 3: cynicism in literature, with my observation that really, like the
Speaker 3: most cynical writing I could find anywhere was all in
Speaker 3: the Bible, which I'm not sure exactly what to make
Speaker 3: of that, but that is kind of surprising and counterintuitive perhaps,
Speaker 3: But it's like, especially in the books of the prophets
Speaker 3: in the Hebrew Bible, like Micah and Jeremiah, full of
Speaker 3: just very eloquent, devastating condemnations of human nature. The heart
Speaker 3: is deceitful above all things. There is none that doeth good, No,
Speaker 3: not one, that sort of thing. We also discussed medical, psychological,
Speaker 3: and sociological research on the correlates of cynicism, with the
Speaker 3: overwhelming conclusion being that holding cynical beliefs about human nature
Speaker 3: and low trust in others is quite harmful to us
Speaker 3: in many different ways. It appears to be bad for
Speaker 3: our health, mental and physical health. It is correlated with
Speaker 3: all kinds of undesirable outcomes, including early death. We didn't
Speaker 3: really get into this research last time, but you probably
Speaker 3: won't be surprised to learn it is a sociated with
Speaker 3: low quality social relationships. And despite the archetype of the ruthless,
Speaker 3: cynical striver and achiever, it also tends on average to
Speaker 3: make it harder for us to reach even our material
Speaker 3: goals like making money and attaining positions of leadership, at
Speaker 3: least in part because cynical people waste a lot of
Speaker 3: time and resources trying to avoid being made a sucker
Speaker 3: and miss out on opportunities to cooperate with others for
Speaker 3: mutual benefit. So I think it's safe to say that
Speaker 3: believing everyone is just in it for themselves and cannot
Speaker 3: be trusted is in so many ways bad, bad, bad
Speaker 3: for us. It's bad for our lives. But of course,
Speaker 3: the somewhat heartwarming implied inverse of all this is the
Speaker 3: evidence that it really does us good to cooperate and
Speaker 3: trust people.
Speaker 1: Definite silver lining there to all all of this research
Speaker 1: we've been doing here now.
Speaker 3: In the last episode, we also raised a number of
Speaker 3: questions that we weren't able to answer yet, and we'll
Speaker 3: come back to them throughout the series. I think we'll
Speaker 3: look at at least one study today that sheds some
Speaker 3: light on this. But these were questions like do more
Speaker 3: cynical or less cynical people actually have a better predictive
Speaker 3: model of the world, Like whose model of how other
Speaker 3: people behave is more accurate? And in any given situation,
Speaker 3: how can we know if we're being too trusting, too cynical,
Speaker 3: or if we're striking just the most reasonable balance. And also,
Speaker 3: given that it comes with so many clear downsides, what
Speaker 3: if anything, is the benefit of cynicism.
Speaker 1: Well, I'm not sure this will actually help us answer
Speaker 1: any of these questions, but then maybe it'll give us
Speaker 1: just a little more elbow room to work with the concept.
Speaker 1: Reading through Anscar Allen's cynicism book m I T that
Speaker 1: I reverenced in the last episode, and he covers several
Speaker 1: subsets of modern cynicism, and here are a few that
Speaker 1: I thought might help us out. So one category is
Speaker 1: insider cynics. So the cynicism of contemporary professionals who believe
Speaker 1: that people are ultimately selfish, and these individuals do their
Speaker 1: best to survive in their organizations by dealing with their
Speaker 1: colleagues on those terms. So we might think of it
Speaker 1: as a you know, I'm not here to make friends approach,
Speaker 1: but you know, only to work or specifically to work,
Speaker 1: with the idea being that maybe outside of that work
Speaker 1: environment they are less cynical.
Speaker 3: Ah okay, well, I would certainly have questions about how
Speaker 3: skilled people are actually are at like turning cynicism on
Speaker 3: and off when switching between contexts. But you can certainly
Speaker 3: see how that would be useful, maybe because you know,
Speaker 3: it's quite reasonable to understand that, like certain professional environments
Speaker 3: require a lot less trust, require you to be more
Speaker 3: doubting of people. Maybe if you are, I don't know,
Speaker 3: investigating murders or something like that, like you really need
Speaker 3: to not just trust people.
Speaker 1: There are so many movies about murder detectives being able
Speaker 1: to neatly separate their work life from their home life.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but so hopefully if you were in a job
Speaker 3: like that, or if you're in just in kind of
Speaker 3: a cutthrow business environment where everybody, you know, everybody's trying
Speaker 3: to edge other people out in deals. You would hope
Speaker 3: to be able to turn that off when you come
Speaker 3: out of that and get into your relationships in life.
Speaker 3: I guess it's questionable to what extent people can do
Speaker 3: that very well.
Speaker 1: I would agree with that. Yes, another classification that he
Speaker 1: singles out or the master cynics, so rich and powerful
Speaker 1: contemporary cynics who hide their own cynicism by adopting the
Speaker 1: values and beliefs of people they hold power over. In
Speaker 1: a weird sense, this is kind of kind of a
Speaker 1: puzzle because a person who's really cynical about politics would
Speaker 1: no doubt assume that every politician is a master cynic,
Speaker 1: that they're just when they're a handing and so forth,
Speaker 1: they're just pretending to take on these values where deep
Speaker 1: down they know the truth, Like I know that people
Speaker 1: are just selfish and they're exploiting everyone as well.
Speaker 3: We're going to have to come back to the question
Speaker 3: of cynicism in politics and political participation because I think
Speaker 3: that raises all sorts of interesting questions.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and there's been a lot of research, a lot
Speaker 1: of writing just on that area alone. Now, the third
Speaker 1: of the categories that I'm going to reference here. There
Speaker 1: are some additional ones that I'm not getting into, but
Speaker 1: the third one I want to reference here is paternalistic cynicism,
Speaker 1: And in this one holds a cynical view of human
Speaker 1: motivations and seeks to capitalize on those motivations, but not
Speaker 1: for personal gain, but for the greater good. And that
Speaker 1: one made me think a little bit more and maybe
Speaker 1: gives us a little more room to play when considering
Speaker 1: the effectiveness or possible effectiveness of cynicism. I was thinking, like,
Speaker 1: let's say you wanted to encourage a certain behavior in
Speaker 1: the general public, and you're presented with two messaging options,
Speaker 1: one that works based on a cynical view of human motivations,
Speaker 1: you know, greed and self interest, while the other appeals
Speaker 1: to the higher angels of their nature. Well, which is
Speaker 1: more likely to work. It's going to depend on the messaging,
Speaker 1: of course, and the exact details of the target audience,
Speaker 1: you know, general audience versus you know, some narrow or audience.
Speaker 1: But yeah, which worldview is a better starting place? I
Speaker 1: feel like this might work as a good sort of
Speaker 1: practical thought experiment because it entails making a choice about
Speaker 1: how you're going to model the motivations of a given population.
Speaker 1: But on the other hand, we kind of come back
Speaker 1: to that sliding scale of cynicism. If one is cynical
Speaker 1: enough about the intended audience, then would any messaging seem
Speaker 1: like it would work, Like why are you even bothering?
Speaker 1: If you're just assuming that everyone out there is just selfish,
Speaker 1: you might not be able to get them to stop littering,
Speaker 1: or to recycle, or to I don't know where seat belts.
Speaker 3: But maybe the paternalistic cynicism model is like you, you
Speaker 3: must stop littering, and you must be kind to your
Speaker 3: fellows human being or you will go to hell. Something
Speaker 3: you know, like appealing to your base personal interest in
Speaker 3: order to get you to do something that the messager
Speaker 3: sees as good.
Speaker 1: Yeah, bring it back to fear right. Maybe I'm just
Speaker 1: muddying the waters. But there's so many different areas you
Speaker 1: can get into and discussions of modern cynicism. Rob.
Speaker 3: One thing you said in the last episode that I
Speaker 3: thought was really insightful and I have kept thinking about
Speaker 3: ever since we recorded that is that you said maybe
Speaker 3: one of the appeals of cynicism is that expressions of
Speaker 3: cynicism are cathartic statements like people suck. They when you
Speaker 3: say things like that, or when somebody else says that
Speaker 3: and you get to agree with them, it feels like
Speaker 3: a psychological pressure release valve. By like making a statement
Speaker 3: of that sort, you're sort of blowing off steam. And
Speaker 3: of course this can be true even for people who
Speaker 3: are not especially cynical on average, having these little moments
Speaker 3: of situational cynicism. But I was thinking more about the
Speaker 3: Catharsis element, and I wonder if this association of cynicism
Speaker 3: with cathartic relief also tells us something about how people
Speaker 3: can acquire generalized dispositional cynicism. Like what if the person
Speaker 3: who is very cynical on average gets to be that
Speaker 3: way by creating by like habituating themselves to a desire
Speaker 3: for that momentary catharsis that you get from saying people suck.
Speaker 3: Does that make any sense?
Speaker 1: Yeah, Like you dip your hand into the cynicism cookie
Speaker 1: jar a few times too often and the crumbs begin
Speaker 1: to stick. Yeah. I was thinking about this when I
Speaker 1: was looking at some material related to cynicism in the workplace,
Speaker 1: which is its own huge area of consideration that we're
Speaker 1: not really going to get into in this episode, per se.
Speaker 1: But I was just thinking about, Okay, if one's really
Speaker 1: cynical regarding one's employers, one's corporate overlords, you might excuse
Speaker 1: any amount of inaction or slacking based on the view that, well,
Speaker 1: they don't really care about me, they're not invested in me,
Speaker 1: they're not paying me enough, and so forth, all any
Speaker 1: grievance you might imagine. And maybe, just maybe in small doses,
Speaker 1: this gives you space to let things slide in ways
Speaker 1: that ease your work burden or create space for something
Speaker 1: else you want to do. And yeah, maybe it's a
Speaker 1: situation where if you stick your hand into that cookie
Speaker 1: jar too often, it does become your default view at
Speaker 1: least of your work situation. And maybe it bleeds over
Speaker 1: into other areas as well.
Speaker 3: That is an interesting possibility. So you're in a kind
Speaker 3: of a pressure inducing scenario and you, for whatever reason,
Speaker 3: you can get little moments of relief from that pressure
Speaker 3: by resorting to cynical evaluations. And so does that create
Speaker 3: a kind of addiction like you associate the moment of
Speaker 3: cathartic cynicism with real axation of the pain or with
Speaker 3: pleasure or even or something like that and you just
Speaker 3: kind of keep pressing the pleasure button until that's just
Speaker 3: what your personality is.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I don't have research to like back up that interpretation
Speaker 3: of where cynicism comes from, but I think that is
Speaker 3: an interesting possibility. I wonder if it ever sets in
Speaker 3: that way.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, I also was thinking, you know, in terms
Speaker 1: of dealing with this a corporation or a company, like
Speaker 1: it's one thing to sort of initially think cynically about
Speaker 1: like this faceless thing, this organization, But of course organizations
Speaker 1: are made up of people, and so I wonder how
Speaker 1: the cynicism might spread where you might generally have cynical
Speaker 1: ideas about a company, but then those cynical ideas end
Speaker 1: up applying to certain heads of that company. But then
Speaker 1: it could potentially trickle down, and then where does it stop,
Speaker 1: Like who stops being the face of the company. I
Speaker 1: guess they have to be cynical enough. They have to
Speaker 1: share your cynicism in order to be like your your
Speaker 1: brothers in arms against against the company, that sort of thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, you know, actually this sort of gets a
Speaker 3: little bit into something I'm going to talk about in
Speaker 3: the paper. I'm about to explain. But there are different environments.
Speaker 3: There are different sort of environments and contexts that encourage
Speaker 3: and reward different levels of cynicism, and so there can
Speaker 3: be very like cynicism positive organizations, Like if you are
Speaker 3: within a company that is very cruel and in which
Speaker 3: you know you don't do very well by placing trust
Speaker 3: in people, it can be quite reasonable to end up
Speaker 3: responding with the generalized cynicism about interactions within that company.
Speaker 3: Organizational culture is a thing. So anyway, so I want
Speaker 3: to turn to a concept in psychological research on cynicism
Speaker 3: that I found really interesting, and that is the so
Speaker 3: called cynical genius illusion. So I was reading about this
Speaker 3: in a paper by a couple of researchers that I
Speaker 3: cited in part one of the series. These scientists are
Speaker 3: Olga Stavrova, a professor of psychology at Tilburg University in
Speaker 3: the Netherlands, and Daniel Illebracht at the University of Cologne
Speaker 3: in Germany. These two published a paper in the year
Speaker 3: twenty eighteen in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin,
Speaker 3: and the paper was called the Cynical Genius Illusion, Exploring
Speaker 3: and debunking lay beliefs about cynicism and competence. Now, they
Speaker 3: begin by acknowledging a lot of the things we talked
Speaker 3: about in the last episode. They define cynicism as, you know,
Speaker 3: the main cognitive component of hostility. They're talking about it
Speaker 3: pretty much in the same terms we are, I believe
Speaker 3: that other people, you know, you should be suspicious of
Speaker 3: their motives, that they that they are primarily motivated by
Speaker 3: self interest, that they can't be trusted and will harm you.
Speaker 3: And then they run through the long list of ways
Speaker 3: that cynicism appears to be bad for us, bad for
Speaker 3: our life in health, in relationships and ability to attain
Speaker 3: goals and so forth. However, the authors complicate that picture
Speaker 3: by noting that if you just look at popular culture
Speaker 3: and literature and folk wisdom, cynicism does not seem to
Speaker 3: have and on the whole negative reputation. To read from
Speaker 3: their introduction here quote. Among nineteenth and twentieth century writers
Speaker 3: in popular figures, cynicism has often been seen as a
Speaker 3: sign of intelligence and wit. American writers Ambrose Bierce and
Speaker 3: Lillian Hellman praised cynicism as an art of seeing the
Speaker 3: true nature of things. Bernard Shaw referred to cynicism as
Speaker 3: a quote power of accurate observation, and John Stuart Mill
Speaker 3: noticed that quote it is thought essential to a man
Speaker 3: who has any knowledge of the world to have an
Speaker 3: extremely bad opinion of it. And as for the other
Speaker 3: authors they named, I looked up some of the cynical quotes.
Speaker 3: I can't believe I didn't think of Ambrose Beers as
Speaker 3: a good source of literary cynicism in the last episode,
Speaker 3: but in The Devil's Dictionary, Bierce defines a cynic as
Speaker 3: someone quote whose faulty vision sees things as they are,
Speaker 3: not as they ought to be. They also cited Lillian Hellman.
Speaker 3: Her version of this was quote, cynicism is an unpleasant
Speaker 3: way of saying the truth. And I do think there's
Speaker 3: something interesting in Hellman's phrasing here, because of the emphasis
Speaker 3: on tone. It is an unpleasant way of saying what
Speaker 3: is true. So what is the difference between somebody just
Speaker 3: quote being real and somebody being cynical. It might be
Speaker 3: in the substance of what they say and how they think.
Speaker 3: It might be like material substantive differences. But I think
Speaker 3: sometimes we make that distinction based on whether there is
Speaker 3: negative emotion in their expression, like if they are counseling
Speaker 3: us against trust. Did they deliver that count with anger
Speaker 3: or contempt? But anyway, so you've got all this literature
Speaker 3: that equates cynicism with the kind of wisdom and you know,
Speaker 3: like the power to see what is really going on. Also,
Speaker 3: the authors here point out that if you draw up
Speaker 3: a list of like cynical characters in popular culture, they
Speaker 3: don't tend to be pitiable wretches dealing with setbacks imposed
Speaker 3: by their lack of faith in humankind. More often, cynicism
Speaker 3: in fictional characters is presented as gruff hard one realism
Speaker 3: and wisdom. The cynical character has knowledge, insights, and powers
Speaker 3: of deduction not available to their more trusting peers. So
Speaker 3: think of Sherlock Holmes or The authors give the example
Speaker 3: of House from how simd. I'm not a watcher of House,
Speaker 3: but I'm familiar with the character.
Speaker 1: I mean, you could do a full stop after Sherlock,
Speaker 1: because Sherlock, of course, in influences so many different similar
Speaker 1: characters and cast a long shadow across across the English language,
Speaker 1: and and fiction and other languages, but cast a long
Speaker 1: shadow across our media. Yeah, yet at this and it
Speaker 1: is interesting to think about Sherlock Holmes in these terms,
Speaker 1: because yes, Sherlock Holmes is presented as being uh, you know,
Speaker 1: somewhat emotionally detached, but not you know, certainly he's fighting
Speaker 1: the good fight. He is on the side of the
Speaker 1: good guy and will sometimes even you know, break the
Speaker 1: rules a little bit or bend them in order to
Speaker 1: make sure that justice is served. But on the other hand,
Speaker 1: I think if you if you look closely enough at Sherlock,
Speaker 1: I mean he's also a character who at times admits
Speaker 1: that he's never loved anyone or has certainly never had
Speaker 1: a romantic love in his life. He also struggles horribly
Speaker 1: with addiction at one point. You know, so you know,
Speaker 1: he's he's not an angel. But again, I guess this
Speaker 1: part of his presentation, he's he's hard boiled. It's it's
Speaker 1: it's hard one cynicism that he uses in order to
Speaker 1: solve the crimes that he's presented with.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I mean I think that is actually generally true.
Speaker 3: Cynical characters are often presented as suffering as a result
Speaker 3: of their own cynicism, but not wrong because of it,
Speaker 3: like that their cynicism is something that hurts them and
Speaker 3: it makes them sad and lonely, but it also gives
Speaker 3: them cognitive superiority. It gives them intelligence and wisdom and
Speaker 3: power to see through the facade and see what's really happening. Yeah,
Speaker 3: but anyway, So, based on this background of the cynical
Speaker 3: geniuses in fiction and the sort of cynical wit and
Speaker 3: wisdom from literature, the author is conducted a number of
Speaker 3: different studies. They did four studies to explore common beliefs
Speaker 3: about the link between cynicism and cognitive superiority and competence,
Speaker 3: and then three more studies to look at whether they're
Speaker 3: actually is a link. So do people in general think
Speaker 3: that cynicism is a sign of knowledge, intellect, and competence.
Speaker 3: Do cynics actually seem smarter? And are they actually smarter
Speaker 3: and more competent than the rest of us?
Speaker 1: Well, Sherlock is above reproach, but yeah, I'm curious to
Speaker 1: hear how it lights to real people.
Speaker 3: So the authors begin by acknowledging some existing research that
Speaker 3: touches on these questions. For example, there was a study
Speaker 3: by Evans and Venda Caalceda published in Personality and Social
Speaker 3: Psychology Bulletin in twenty eighteen called the Reputational consequences of
Speaker 3: generalized trust. And this study looked at what we was
Speaker 3: just sort of a survey of what we tend to
Speaker 3: think of people when we know that they are high
Speaker 3: in trust or low in cynicism. The findings were that
Speaker 3: high trust individuals are seen as moral and seen as sociable,
Speaker 3: but also seen as less competent. And this kind of
Speaker 3: makes sense as a as a familiar personality archetype, right, like,
Speaker 3: Johnny is so trusting, he's a good guy, he's friendly,
Speaker 3: but he doesn't know what he's doing. So if showing
Speaker 3: generalized trust makes people think we're less competent, does that
Speaker 3: imply that showing generalized distrust makes people think we're more competent. Perhaps. However,
Speaker 3: the authors also found here that people see you as
Speaker 3: more competent if you display what they call discriminate ability,
Speaker 3: which is the ability to tell the difference between a
Speaker 3: situation in which you should trust and situations in which
Speaker 3: you should not. And this takes us back to the
Speaker 3: question we mentioned in part one. Obviously, nobody either trusts
Speaker 3: or distrusts in every situation, So how do you determine
Speaker 3: how cynical it is reasonable to be in this situation?
Speaker 3: And how do we know if we're off balance?
Speaker 1: Now?
Speaker 3: The authors also discuss reasons that people might think it
Speaker 3: is why to be cynical one is pretty familiar better
Speaker 3: safe than sorry, reasoning. They write, quote, in many domains,
Speaker 3: the consequences of false negative errors eg. Believing that someone
Speaker 3: is trustworthy when they really are not have often been
Speaker 3: more costly than false positive errors, eg. Believing that someone
Speaker 3: is untrustworthy when they really are trustworthy. Over human evolutionary history,
Speaker 3: making the cognitive system of modern humans biased toward false alarms,
Speaker 3: which is hard to argue with, right, Like, Yeah, in
Speaker 3: this series, we are showing lots of evidence that it
Speaker 3: is bad for you to be highly chronically cynical. And
Speaker 3: yet it's true that more often if you distrust a
Speaker 3: trustworthy person, the immediate consequences are fairly limited, but if
Speaker 3: you trust an untrustworthy person, the consequences can be disastrous.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we talked about this a little bit in the
Speaker 1: last episode Type one Errors and Cognition. You know, it's
Speaker 1: like you've got to make your way across an open field,
Speaker 1: and you know there's gonna be a time cost and
Speaker 1: and probably like you know, an anxiety cost to checking
Speaker 1: every bush along the way to make sure there's not
Speaker 1: a tiger in there to jump out and get you.
Speaker 1: But you know, the way our brains work and the
Speaker 1: way we're hardwired, it's like we know that that's one
Speaker 1: sort of risk I'm gonna lose some time, and I might,
Speaker 1: you know, feel horrible the whole way, versus getting eaten
Speaker 1: by a tiger. Yeah, Like one of those is like
Speaker 1: a mutt like looms far larger in our short term
Speaker 1: threat analysis.
Speaker 3: One side of the balance has an infinite cost on it. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's like kind of hard to outbalance that, even though
Speaker 3: like wasting all your time and resources checking every bush
Speaker 3: that that really does matter, like over time, that hugely
Speaker 3: impacts your quality of life.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, especially of course, you know when you get
Speaker 1: into not only real tigers, but all the paper tigers
Speaker 1: in one's life, you know.
Speaker 3: So anyway, they say that a general appreciation for the
Speaker 3: merit of the better safe than sorry framework could lead
Speaker 3: to the widespread notion that cynics are smarter people. They're
Speaker 3: more knowledgeable and more competent. Now, continuing the background review,
Speaker 3: the authors also get into existing research on whether there
Speaker 3: is an actual link between cynicism and competence so now
Speaker 3: we're asking not about how cynics are perceived, but about
Speaker 3: what their relative competence level actually is. And this, I
Speaker 3: guess comes back to another question we brought up in
Speaker 3: Part one. Do cynics or nonsnics have a better predictive
Speaker 3: model of the world? And one very interesting way of
Speaker 3: studying this is the so called trust game. So here's
Speaker 3: an example of a type of trust game. This was
Speaker 3: described in a paper called why so cynical asymmetric feedback
Speaker 3: underlies misguided skepticism regarding the trust worthiness of others. This
Speaker 3: was by Debt Left, Fetchenhauer and David Dunning in the
Speaker 3: journal Psychological Science in twenty ten, and it describes this
Speaker 3: what is sometimes called an investing game, but they call
Speaker 3: it a trust game, and it goes like this quote.
Speaker 3: In the game, the trust is given money that can
Speaker 3: be kept or handed to a completely random and anonymous stranger,
Speaker 3: the trustee. If the trust hands his or her money over,
Speaker 3: the amount of money is quadrupled eg. Five dollars becomes
Speaker 3: twenty dollars, and trustees have two options. They can either
Speaker 3: split the money evenly between themselves and the truster eg.
Speaker 3: Give ten dollars back and keep ten dollars for themselves,
Speaker 3: or they can keep all the money for themselves. So
Speaker 3: the way the game works is I'm the truster. I'm
Speaker 3: the person who gets to make the first decision. If
Speaker 3: I trust you and you are trustworthy, we both benefit
Speaker 3: and I double my money. I trust you and you
Speaker 3: are not trustworthy, I get nothing. So the authors did
Speaker 3: this experiment lots of times, and some interesting patterns came out.
Speaker 3: Uh they found that trusters estimate the rate of trustworthiness
Speaker 3: of anonymous strangers in the game. They estimate it will
Speaker 3: be between forty five and sixty percent. So it seems
Speaker 3: that most people think it's a little better than a
Speaker 3: coin flip chance that the other person will honor their
Speaker 3: trust and split the money for mutual benefit. In reality,
Speaker 3: the trustees honored the trust and split the money around
Speaker 3: eighty to ninety percent of the time. So people in
Speaker 3: this game massively underestimated how trustworthy random strangers would be.
Speaker 3: At least in the context of this game, anonymous strangers
Speaker 3: were something like twenty to fifty percent more trustworthy and
Speaker 3: cooperative than people expected them to be. Isn't that interesting?
Speaker 3: That's crazy?
Speaker 1: Yeah, eighty ninety percent of the time that's higher than
Speaker 1: I would have guessed. But but then again, it's like
Speaker 1: I like to think that if someone offered me the
Speaker 1: scenario and I was not too cynical and trusted that
Speaker 1: it was not some sort of a scam, I would
Speaker 1: be as trustworthy.
Speaker 3: Can I offer. I think maybe one thing that could
Speaker 3: be working in this particular scenario is that it makes
Speaker 3: sense to be wary of people who are offering to
Speaker 3: double your money in financial transactions. But I think that
Speaker 3: makes sense when like people come to you and they say, like, hey,
Speaker 3: you know, you give me some money and I'll double it,
Speaker 3: you should. I mean, if somebody says that they're not
Speaker 3: telling you the truth almost always, so like there's a
Speaker 3: good reason to be worried there. This is a different thing,
Speaker 3: because the trustee in this game is not somebody who
Speaker 3: is coming out of nowhere to offer you money if
Speaker 3: you just give them some first. They're a random stranger
Speaker 3: who is who has been pulled into this experiment designed
Speaker 3: by somebody else. And so I think what this shows
Speaker 3: is most of the time, if given the opportunity to
Speaker 3: be trustworthy and cooperate, most people will, But also it
Speaker 3: makes sense to be wary of people who are claiming
Speaker 3: they're trying to help you cooperate, you know, for mutual benefit.
Speaker 3: If they're coming out of nowhere with this, you know,
Speaker 3: that's often going to be a scam. Does that make sense?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I think so.
Speaker 3: But anyway, so yeah, in the trust game, most people
Speaker 3: are very trustworthy and players are on average way too
Speaker 3: cynical about their fellow human being. They are missing out
Speaker 3: on lots of opportunities to double their money. And this
Speaker 3: is consistent with research by Miller in nineteen ninety eight
Speaker 3: and ninety nine finding that people just tend to grossly
Speaker 3: overestimate the selfishness and underestimate the trustworthiness of strangers. In
Speaker 3: this particular paper, the authors note that cynicism might grow
Speaker 3: from what they call asymmetric feedback, and the way that
Speaker 3: works is this, when you trust somebody and you get betrayed,
Speaker 3: you get very clear feedback that it was wrong to trust.
Speaker 3: The downside of granting your trust is very apparent to you.
Speaker 3: They walk away with the money, you get nothing, and
Speaker 3: you know it's clear to you what happened. But when
Speaker 3: you refrain from trusting people, the downsides are often invisible
Speaker 3: to you because you don't actually see the lost opportunity
Speaker 3: as a scenario that plays out in front of you.
Speaker 3: You have to like imagine it as a counterfactual. It's
Speaker 3: not concrete and in your face, like being betrayed is.
Speaker 3: So you don't really get conditioned by feedback from instances
Speaker 3: where you harmed yourself by withholding trust.
Speaker 1: Does that make sense, Yeah, yeah, it's kind of like
Speaker 1: give like, here's a scenario. Let's imagine that you're just
Speaker 1: really pedantic when looking at the checks when you go
Speaker 1: out to eat with friends. You know, you're like, all right,
Speaker 1: I want to see every his work. I got to
Speaker 1: make one hundred percent sure this is fair. And maybe
Speaker 1: it's because at some point someone really did stick you
Speaker 1: over one of these situations, and so it maybe that
Speaker 1: is more apparent, Like you're never going to forget that
Speaker 1: that you were wronged in this way. But if you're
Speaker 1: just overly pedantic when it comes to the bills, eventually
Speaker 1: people might stop asking you to join them for dinner,
Speaker 1: and that might be very invisible to you that that's happening.
Speaker 3: Yes, you don't realize. Yeah, it's just like things are
Speaker 3: not as good now, and I don't know why I'm
Speaker 3: feeling lonely yeah, or is a more direct comparison. If
Speaker 3: you're not looking at the checks all the time, you
Speaker 3: might not notice the times when somebody made a mistake
Speaker 3: in your favor that just passed you never even noticed
Speaker 3: that it just goes right by you. That that is
Speaker 3: a good comparison. But anyway, what the study found is
Speaker 3: that if you give subjects symmetric feedback about the trustworthiness
Speaker 3: of others, it tended to deuce the subject's cynicism. So, like,
Speaker 3: let's say you play the trust game, symmetric feedback would
Speaker 3: be rob whether or not you decide to hand somebody
Speaker 3: the five dollars and try to cooperate to quadruple it.
Speaker 3: You get to find out what they would have done
Speaker 3: either way, so you know, you get to keep playing
Speaker 3: the game that way. And it turns out if you
Speaker 3: play it that way, where people keep seeing, oh, I
Speaker 3: kept the money, but they I saw that they would
Speaker 3: have doubled my money if I just trusted them, and
Speaker 3: you get to see that happen over and over. That
Speaker 3: actually does decrease people's cynicism, which also is interesting and
Speaker 3: that it gives you at least a little bit of
Speaker 3: an idea where some elements of cynicism could be coming from.
Speaker 3: It could be related in part to this asymmetric build
Speaker 3: up of information. We get to see where trust fails
Speaker 3: very clearly. But the opportunities we lose out on by
Speaker 3: not granting trust are often just like, we don't even
Speaker 3: realize what's happened. We don't even realize anything. We don't
Speaker 3: even know what we're missing. Yeah, so this research does
Speaker 3: not give us a complete picture, but I think some
Speaker 3: evidence is starting to accumulate that the cynic does not
Speaker 3: have a highly accurate internal model of the world. They
Speaker 3: might in some scenarios, but generalized cynicism is not like
Speaker 3: as some of these writers were saying, seeing things as
Speaker 3: they really are. In fact, cynicism often causes us to
Speaker 3: incorrectly predict the behavior of other people, assuming they will
Speaker 3: be more selfish and treacherous than they really are. Now,
Speaker 3: coming back to the main paper I was talking about,
Speaker 3: Bastavrova and Elibracht, they note some other research on the
Speaker 3: link between cynicism and competence. Again, contrary to the cynical
Speaker 3: genius archetype, the authors are able to cite a long
Speaker 3: list of studies looking at links between cynicism and various
Speaker 3: types of cognitive performance and ability, and they find it's
Speaker 3: exactly the opposite of what you might guess from the
Speaker 3: Sherlock Holmes exam. Higher performance on various types of cognitive, academic,
Speaker 3: and IQ tests is negatively correlated with cynicism. It is
Speaker 3: instead positively correlated with increased tendency to trust. There are
Speaker 3: a few confounding results here. It's not like every single
Speaker 3: study has found this, but the vast majority have. Some
Speaker 3: of the confounding results are. For example, they cite a
Speaker 3: twenty thirteen study that found that higher IQ does not,
Speaker 3: on average improve a person's ability to correctly predict who
Speaker 3: will be trustworthy and who will not. So like you
Speaker 3: do better on cognitive tests, that doesn't mean that if
Speaker 3: we pair you up with you know, Johnny and Billy
Speaker 3: in the in the trust game experiment, you can predict
Speaker 3: whether Johnny or Billy you'll be more likely to help
Speaker 3: you out. It just it doesn't help us in that regard.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like the compass is already pulling you in
Speaker 1: one direction or another, and however higher IQ is, I mean,
Speaker 1: that's just that's just the kind of mental energy that
Speaker 1: ends up being wrapped around the initial impulse.
Speaker 3: Another thing to keep in mind here is that, of course,
Speaker 3: while like various cognitive and IQ and academic tests can
Speaker 3: they can tell you a lot of things about cognitive ability,
Speaker 3: they don't tell you everything. So you know, they can
Speaker 3: tell you about certain kinds of skills with reasoning, certain
Speaker 3: kinds of intelligence. But there are always going to be
Speaker 3: elements of intelligence that are not perfectly captured by these
Speaker 3: sorts of tests. So the authors begin to develop a
Speaker 3: possible hypothetical model to explain what's going on here. They say,
Speaker 3: what if intelligence, knowledge, and competence don't really help you
Speaker 3: very much in identifying who to trust in a given scenario.
Speaker 3: They don't tell you really if Johnny or Billy, both
Speaker 3: of whom you've just met, is more trustworthy, But instead
Speaker 3: they help you evaluate the scenario itself to decide whether
Speaker 3: to deploy a more cynical or a more trusting framework
Speaker 3: given the environment. In the circumstances the author's right quote,
Speaker 3: high levels of competence might allow individuals to correctly identify
Speaker 3: the corruptness of their environment and adjust their level of
Speaker 3: cynicism to match it. Following this reasoning, high competence individuals
Speaker 3: might hold adaptable attitudes and recur to cynicism only when
Speaker 3: it seems warranted, while their less competent counterparts might show
Speaker 3: more cognitive rigidity and relying on the better safe than
Speaker 3: sorry heuristic tend to endorse cynicism indiscriminately. So if this
Speaker 3: model is correct, they're saying it can be efficient to
Speaker 3: just remain in better safe than sorry mode when you
Speaker 3: lack the ability to tell whether you're dealing with a corrupt,
Speaker 3: untrustworthy environment or not.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, just makes sense. We can all think of
Speaker 1: examples where the scenario is very clear, like, Okay, even
Speaker 1: if someone is out to get me, this is not
Speaker 1: the environment where they can just really take me for
Speaker 1: all I'm worth. I'm literally handing somebody a five dollar bill.
Speaker 1: What are they going to do? They're going to run
Speaker 1: away into the woods and keep my dollar fifty and
Speaker 1: change that the risks seem low.
Speaker 3: So onto Stevrova and Illibrac's actual experiments, and I'll start
Speaker 3: with the very short version of their findings. First of all,
Speaker 3: they find yes on average across multiple experiments. Regular people
Speaker 3: tend to believe that cynicism is a sign of cognitive
Speaker 3: superiority in others. If you think people are bad, you
Speaker 3: think people are selfish, and morals are fake. On balance,
Speaker 3: people will tend to assume you are smarter and more competent,
Speaker 3: especially at certain types of cognitive tasks, things involving like
Speaker 3: logic and numbers and stuff. They're more likely to assign
Speaker 3: you important cognitive tasks like doing mathematical calculations and logical
Speaker 3: analysis of documents if they think you're cynical. And on
Speaker 3: the other hand, the authors found in their experiments no,
Speaker 3: on average, cynicism is not associated with cognitive superiority or
Speaker 3: greater competence. They had three studies based on data from
Speaker 3: about two hundred thousand subjects across thirty different countries and
Speaker 3: showed that, on average, cynicism was negatively correlated with tests
Speaker 3: of cognitive ability and tests of academic knowledge and competency.
Speaker 3: So this included all kinds of things like reading comprehension,
Speaker 3: mathematical skills, scientific literacy, technological literacy, and so forth. And
Speaker 3: this negative association between cynicism and cognitive tests was true
Speaker 3: even after controlling for confounding variables like age, gender, household income, wealth, test,
Speaker 3: language proficiency, and Big Five personality traits. Now one major
Speaker 3: distinction here is that they found that people who tested
Speaker 3: higher incompetence tended to have attitudes of contingent trust. They
Speaker 3: might be trusting by default, but were not rigid in
Speaker 3: that regard become more cynical if it was warranted situationally
Speaker 3: or based on the environment and cultural context, whereas people
Speaker 3: scoring lower incompetence tended to accept an unconditionally cynical worldview.
Speaker 3: In the words of the author is quote suggesting that
Speaker 3: at low levels of competence, holding a cynical worldview might
Speaker 3: represent an adaptive default strategy to avoid the potential costs
Speaker 3: of falling prey to others cunning. Now, I wanted to
Speaker 3: expand on these findings with a few notes. One of
Speaker 3: the things about the early tests of people's perceptions of
Speaker 3: cynicism a control they had here, is that the authors
Speaker 3: didn't just ask about cognitive competence. They also asked about
Speaker 3: social and moral competence, and quite along the lines you
Speaker 3: might expect. People tended to think that low trust individuals
Speaker 3: would be better at cognitive things like math, logic, and
Speaker 3: critical thinking, but they thought that high trust individuals would
Speaker 3: be better at social tasks like cheering up a depressed
Speaker 3: friend or taking care of a stray animal. So it
Speaker 3: wasn't just like across the board we think cynics are great.
Speaker 3: We think cynics are better at everything. It's that people
Speaker 3: tend to think cynics are better at certain types of
Speaker 3: intelligence based skills, things like math and logic and so forth.
Speaker 1: So a lot of this is sounding kind of like
Speaker 1: when you see somebody smoking a cigarette. You know, they
Speaker 1: can look pretty cool, especially in movies, like but we
Speaker 1: all we know deep down that like, well, the smoking
Speaker 1: a cigarette doesn't actually make you cool, but we can't
Speaker 1: help it. And likewise you might think, well who you know.
Speaker 1: You might say, okay, doctor smoking a cigarette. I have questions.
Speaker 1: Maybe this is not the doctor for me. But private
Speaker 1: detective smoking a cigarette, Well, obviously that's the guy I
Speaker 1: want looking after my interests.
Speaker 3: Oh do you mean like the smoking of the cigarette
Speaker 3: implies like a rejection of the consensus about the health
Speaker 3: effects of it, or just that it I mean, I
Speaker 3: guess that often is suggested. It's like, I don't think
Speaker 3: it's hurting me. I don't care what people say. I
Speaker 3: guess there are two ways of going It's like it
Speaker 3: would be cynical. I think it's part of a cynical
Speaker 3: worldview to say, like, ah, these doctors who say it
Speaker 3: causes cancer or heart disease, they don't know what they're
Speaker 3: talking about. I can just smoke, it's fine. Or there's
Speaker 3: the version that's like I don't care what happens to me,
Speaker 3: which I think is a little bit different than cynicism.
Speaker 3: Maybe though could go along with cynicism.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, but.
Speaker 3: I follow you in general, because yeah, there's like, apart
Speaker 3: from thinking that cynical people are smart, there is also
Speaker 3: a tendency to think that cynical people are cool. Yeah,
Speaker 3: that's uh. In fact, I've got a section where maybe
Speaker 3: we'll get more into that in just a minute. Here.
Speaker 1: Scientific analysis of the coolness.
Speaker 3: Of another thing here is that they tried different like
Speaker 3: wordings and types of questions across multiple replication attempts to
Speaker 3: make sure that, like, the cynical genius effect was robust,
Speaker 3: And it was robust, but the effects were modulated a
Speaker 3: little bit by changes in phrasing, such as whether you
Speaker 3: describe the opposite of cynicism as an idealistic versus a
Speaker 3: positive view of human nature. Apparently people think being idealistic
Speaker 3: about human nature is a little bit dumber than being
Speaker 3: positive about human nature. It's always funny how just changing
Speaker 3: the swapping a word out can have some effects there.
Speaker 3: They also replicated these findings in different samples. So they
Speaker 3: did some online surveys, international online surveys, and they did
Speaker 3: some in person tests of university students in Germany. They
Speaker 3: did some with British adults, and the cynical genius effect
Speaker 3: appeared to varying degrees in all the groups tested here. However,
Speaker 3: in some of these experiments, respondents got to rate essentially
Speaker 3: how cynical they would like a person assigned to a
Speaker 3: cognitive task to be, and the breakdown, to be clear,
Speaker 3: was not toward a preference for extreme cynicism, but for
Speaker 3: higher than average cynicism. So one example here is that
Speaker 3: in a group of British adults selecting between hypothetical candidates
Speaker 3: to solve intellectual problems, participants quote desired mix of cynical
Speaker 3: and non cynical tendencies was fifty six percent cynical to
Speaker 3: forty four percent non cynical. So on average, the group
Speaker 3: they thought, we need somebody smart, we want somebody who
Speaker 3: is a little bit more cynical than the media.
Speaker 1: That makes sense, you know, if you were able to
Speaker 1: move the slider on your so like your android doctor,
Speaker 1: your android lawyer, or whatever it happens to be. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you want that the right mix of cynicism a little
Speaker 1: more than the average person, but not not too much.
Speaker 1: This will be interesting to get into later when we
Speaker 1: start talking about like absolute cynicism and what where, what
Speaker 1: that is and where we stand in relation to it.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So, as for the actual inverse link between cynicism
Speaker 3: and competence, when broken down by test domain, I was
Speaker 3: interested to see that the effect was strongest in reading
Speaker 3: skills and weakest in information processing speed. So in these tests,
Speaker 3: apparently highly cynical people holding up relatively okay with speed
Speaker 3: of reasoning, doing a lot worse in like reading comprehension
Speaker 3: and finally getting to the element of the paper. Comparing cynicism, competence,
Speaker 3: and environment, the authors tested levels of cynicism cross referenced
Speaker 3: with these cognitive tests in subjects across thirty different countries,
Speaker 3: and they found that in countries that scored low in
Speaker 3: corruption and high in rule of law according to an
Speaker 3: international database called the World Governance Indicators, the effect we've
Speaker 3: been talking about did hold true, but in countries with
Speaker 3: high corruption and eroded rule of law, the effect was
Speaker 3: greatly diminished. Quote the harsher the social climate, the more
Speaker 3: these high competence people embraced a cynical worldview. So kind
Speaker 3: of along the line of results we talked about in
Speaker 3: the last episode, it hurts you materially to hold cynical
Speaker 3: views unless those views are correct in the environment where
Speaker 3: you operate. Along these lines, the authors discuss ways that
Speaker 3: cynicism might be learned directly from personal experience. Despite the
Speaker 3: fact that they tried to control for the influence of
Speaker 3: variables like age, gender, and wealth, it's still possible that
Speaker 3: quote higher levels of cognitive ability, academic competence, and education
Speaker 3: might protect from adverse life experiences, not only as they
Speaker 3: allow discovering potential fraud, but also as they increase the
Speaker 3: chances of living in a safe and friendly environment, providing
Speaker 3: more evidence for a positive than for a negative view
Speaker 3: of human nature, and consequently preventing cynicism development. So that's
Speaker 3: talking about the idea that like that education and cognitive skills,
Speaker 3: they might not just be about how accurately you're seeing
Speaker 3: the world around you. They might actually, over time influence
Speaker 3: what the world around you. Is like on the other hand,
Speaker 3: since cynicism entails generalized distrust, quote cynical versus less cynical,
Speaker 3: individuals might be more distrustful of the opinions and knowledge
Speaker 3: of others, a behavior that can eventually prevent them from
Speaker 3: expanding their knowledge and understanding.
Speaker 1: Well, that that seems like it tracks the idea that
Speaker 1: if you're you're cynical about at about potential information sources,
Speaker 1: and you're more likely to sort of back your way
Speaker 1: into a corner where you have very few informational sources
Speaker 1: coming in and they're the only the only ones you're
Speaker 1: going to accept are the ones that back up your
Speaker 1: existing cynicism.
Speaker 3: Yes, but they say, of course, there is more work
Speaker 3: to do exploring the different possible causal mechanisms here. So
Speaker 3: this paper does find good, robust evidence for the cynical
Speaker 3: genius illusion, that the illusion is widely present and it
Speaker 3: is in fact an illusion, but the questions about why
Speaker 3: are still largely open. One thing I wonder about a
Speaker 3: lot of the cognitive tasks that subjects said they would
Speaker 3: entrust to a cynical person more than a non cynical person.
Speaker 3: I was looking through the inventory and a lot of
Speaker 3: these tasks involved scrutiny of details, like crunching numbers, following
Speaker 3: complex logic, analyzing scientific results, things like that, And I
Speaker 3: wonder if the same pattern would hold for cognitive tasks
Speaker 3: that people associate less with scrutiny of details and instead
Speaker 3: with things like creativity and imagination. And to be clear,
Speaker 3: the cynical genius effect would be an illusion even if
Speaker 3: it were only applied to scrutinizing cognition. But I wonder
Speaker 3: if the illusion is actually more specific to certain kinds
Speaker 3: of cognition.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that very much, that Sherlock Holmes scenario.
Speaker 3: But also coming back to this question, we've asked several
Speaker 3: times now, are there any benefit to generalize cynicism. It
Speaker 3: comes with tons of harms for the cynic It hurts
Speaker 3: you to be cynical, But are there any benefits? Well,
Speaker 3: first of all, this paper does find if you're in
Speaker 3: a really corrupt untrustworthy environment, obviously it does make more
Speaker 3: sense to be more cynical. That's just like a correct
Speaker 3: understanding of how your environment operates. Number two, even if
Speaker 3: you're not in a more corrupt untrustworthy environment, If you
Speaker 3: don't understand your environment and you're basically out of your depth.
Speaker 3: Cynicism may protect you from catastrophic outcomes. It's like, I
Speaker 3: don't really know what's going on here, don't know if
Speaker 3: I can trust or not, so by default I'm not
Speaker 3: going to trust. That's better safe than sorry. And then third,
Speaker 3: I think this is going to be mainly related to
Speaker 3: the cynical genius illusion. Having a reputation for cynicism may
Speaker 3: have the effect of convincing people around you that you
Speaker 3: are very smart and intellectually savvy, even though on average
Speaker 3: the opposite is more likely to be true. So there's
Speaker 3: a kind of social premium incentive to appear to be cynical.
Speaker 3: It's in a lot of cases it's going to make
Speaker 3: people think that you know something they don't, and you're
Speaker 3: a wise and world weary and intelligent person.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Cynicism is often kind of a safe gambole at,
Speaker 1: like a cocktail party or a mixer. Right if politics
Speaker 1: should come up, which of course is bad manners anyway,
Speaker 1: but if it were to come up, you might say
Speaker 1: something that is just kind of a you know, a
Speaker 1: blanket statement of cynicism, like Iowa politicians are all the same.
Speaker 1: And then what people are gonna have to double down.
Speaker 1: They're going to have to come back and try to
Speaker 1: convince you. No, no, not all politicians. Some are great,
Speaker 1: and they're going to look like the person who's naive
Speaker 1: where you've already you know, mounted your cynicism high horse.
Speaker 3: We've talked about this before. Yeah, the the like all
Speaker 3: politicians are the same as the kind of statement that
Speaker 3: I think is just facially untrue, could not be true,
Speaker 3: obviously wrong, but you feel foolish trying to argue with it. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and I think that goes beyond politics. I mean just generally,
Speaker 3: trying to argue with the cynic is so difficult. Statements
Speaker 3: of cynicism often come with this a priori texture of factuality.
Speaker 3: Just feel self evidently true with it, even when it's
Speaker 3: obviously wrong, when it would be absurd for it to
Speaker 3: be true. One more thing before I wrap up from
Speaker 3: the Stavrovia and Elebrects study here talking about in their discussion,
Speaker 3: they talk about why do we tend to assume highly
Speaker 3: cynical people are smarter than the rest of us, even
Speaker 3: though this is usually not the case. We touched on
Speaker 3: this earlier, but the authors do offer a few ideas
Speaker 3: based on common cognitive biases. In particular, they call out
Speaker 3: negativity bias and loss aversion. Negativity bias is the observation
Speaker 3: that we are more psychologically affected by negative things than
Speaker 3: we are by positive things of equal intensity, and loss
Speaker 3: a version is very similar. It's the finding that we're
Speaker 3: more strongly motivated to avoid a loss than we are
Speaker 3: to achieve a gain of the same value. So here's
Speaker 3: an example. I find a five dollars bill on the sidewalk. Ah,
Speaker 3: that's nice, quickly forget about it. Versus I drop a
Speaker 3: five dollar bill down a storm drain. Are you know why?
Speaker 2: Me?
Speaker 1: Ah?
Speaker 3: I hate this. You know, It's like the dollar value
Speaker 3: is exactly the same, but the loss is more memorable,
Speaker 3: it's more salient and will cause a greater emotional reaction.
Speaker 3: And I think for those reasons, like we are more
Speaker 3: likely to learn something from it, to try to draw
Speaker 3: a general inference that we will take and apply to
Speaker 3: the rest of life from these moments of loss than
Speaker 3: from gains of the exact same value.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I mean, I'd go as far as to
Speaker 1: say that at the very least, you're more likely to
Speaker 1: remember dropping that five than finding a ten. Yeah, And yeah,
Speaker 1: there's probably been an interesting thought experiment to be had,
Speaker 1: and just trying to determine at which point the find
Speaker 1: value would be equal to a much lesser loss value.
Speaker 3: I think I think work on that exact question has
Speaker 3: been done. I don't have it pulled up in front
Speaker 3: of me, but I think we've looked at that before. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I'm sure for some reason seeing the exact numbers is
Speaker 3: going to be really funny. But anyway, so you apply
Speaker 3: this these biases negativity, bias, and loss aversion to the
Speaker 3: domain of trust and cynicism, and they could mean that
Speaker 3: the pain of being betrayed is much greater than the
Speaker 3: pleasure of having our trust rewarded, even given the exact
Speaker 3: same original act of trust. And this is back to
Speaker 3: the mental cherry picking that you mentioned the last time.
Speaker 3: You know, you can always like think of these really
Speaker 3: sticky examples of times when you shouldn't have trusted someone
Speaker 3: or something. We may trust somebody twenty times, it works
Speaker 3: out great nineteen times, but the one time it did
Speaker 3: not work out is shocking and painful and we feel
Speaker 3: so hurt. And so from this we form an idea
Speaker 3: that people who do not trust easily have learned a
Speaker 3: lot of valuable lessons. Therefore they are generally knowledgeable, wise,
Speaker 3: and smart. Another explanation comes back to that study from
Speaker 3: the background section that we talked about briefly about the
Speaker 3: the invisibility of consequences in situations where we refrain from
Speaker 3: from giving trust to our detriment. So again, you get
Speaker 3: to see what happens when you trust and that trust
Speaker 3: is betrayed. But when you withhold trust and you just
Speaker 3: miss out on an opportunity to gain, you don't really
Speaker 3: get to see that loss made concrete. It's just like
Speaker 3: it's another path you could have taken, and you can go.
Speaker 3: You can even go without thinking about it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's right. Unless you're visited by you know, Christmas
Speaker 1: spirits or something, you're just not going to have any
Speaker 1: alternate views.
Speaker 3: That's a really you know what. I think a Christmas
Speaker 3: Carol is a great example here. That is something the
Speaker 3: ghost of Christmas past has to come and make the
Speaker 3: lost opportunities concrete. And then one last point the authors
Speaker 3: make that I thought was a very interesting point. They raise,
Speaker 3: what if the cynical genius illusion arises in part from
Speaker 3: biases of storytelling. We fill our lives with fictional stories
Speaker 3: fictional stories need to be entertaining. Stories are usually more
Speaker 3: entertaining if danger and conflict are heightened, if villains are
Speaker 3: meaner and more dangerous, if the stakes are high, if
Speaker 3: no one can be trusted you can. You can hear
Speaker 3: all these phrases in the Don la Fontaine movie trailer voice,
Speaker 3: can't you you know? It's like, that's what stories are
Speaker 3: made out of. Fictional storytelling selects four narratives about the
Speaker 3: dangers of trust and the risk of betrayal because stories
Speaker 3: like that are captivating to our attention and we want
Speaker 3: to know what happens next. So hostile and treacherous worlds
Speaker 3: may be more entertaining in a narrative. But it's possible
Speaker 3: that we draw incorrect inferences from those fictional worlds. We
Speaker 3: learn too much about how life works from unrealities that
Speaker 3: are specifically crafted to hack our attention. And who are
Speaker 3: the smart, savvy characters in these worlds. I think very
Speaker 3: often they are cynics who are very reluctant to trust.
Speaker 1: That's right, That's a great point.
Speaker 3: So anyway, that's all I've got in the study for now.
Speaker 3: But I think the cynical genius illusion is so interesting
Speaker 3: I'm going to be thinking about this a lot in
Speaker 3: the days and weeks to come.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this will be an interesting one to bring into
Speaker 1: our weird house cinema discussions as we inevitably come around
Speaker 1: to a film that has a cynic genius in it.
Speaker 1: And I'm sure if I was to go back and
Speaker 1: look at some of the titles we've covered, we've probably
Speaker 1: encountered the encounter these sorts of characters before, probably played
Speaker 1: by someone like Christopher Lee. Yes, all right, Well, on
Speaker 1: that note, we're going to go ahead and close up
Speaker 1: this episode, but we're going to come back with at
Speaker 1: least one more episode on cynicism. Again, this is a
Speaker 1: huge topic. In the next episode, I believe we're going
Speaker 1: to get into cynicism, politics, and social media, so that
Speaker 1: should be a fun discussion either way, tune in. We're
Speaker 1: looking forward to getting into it. In the meantime, I'd
Speaker 1: like to remind everyone that Stuff to Blow Your Mind
Speaker 1: is primarily a science and culture podcast, with core episodes
Speaker 1: on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We have a short form episode
Speaker 1: on Wednesdays, and on Fridays. We set aside most serious
Speaker 1: concerns to just talk about.
Speaker 3: A weird film on Weird House Cinema, Huge Things, As
Speaker 3: always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway. If you
Speaker 3: would like to get in touch with us with feedback
Speaker 3: on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic
Speaker 3: for the future, or just to say hello, you can
Speaker 3: email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind
Speaker 3: dot com.
Speaker 2: Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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