Building Trust In A Cynical World | Jamil Zaki

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1:48And that type of organizational cynicism from leaders quickly spreads through all of their employees. Welcome to the Art of Charm podcast, where we break down the science of powerful communication and winning mindsets so you have the cheat code to succeed with people. Every episode is jam-packed with actionable steps to unlock the hidden superpowers inside of you. Level up with us each week by listening to interviews with the best in business, psychology, and relationships. We distill thousands of hours of research in the most effective tools, and the latest science so you can start winning today.

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2:59All right, let's kick off today's show. Today, we're talking with Dr. Jamil Zaki. We tackle the rise in cynicism and how to keep it from ruining your relationships. Dr. Zaki is a professor of psychology at Stanford University, where he directs the Stanford Social Neuroscience Laboratory. For nearly two decades, Dr. Zaki has studied how people connect with each other, how those connections help us, and how we can learn to connect better. His new book, Hope for Cynics, The Surprising Science of Human Goodness, is coming out this September, and we're excited to chat with him today to understand the rise of cynicism in society, learn to recognize and combat our own cynical tendencies, discover the crucial difference between skepticism and cynicism, gain strategies to cultivate hope and trust in a hopeless world, and find out how leaders can lower cynicism at work.

3:45Welcome to the show, Jamil. Great to have you. It's great to be here. I'm very curious, what piqued your interest in researching cynicism? Well, it would actually be my own experience. You know, I've spent 20 years studying, I guess you could say human goodness. So my lab and I study things like empathy, compassion, kindness, togetherness. And through that work, I've sort of become a little bit of an ambassador for those positive qualities. People bring me in to talk about how great everybody is. And this whole time, AJ, I've lived with a little bit of a secret, which is that even though I know what my data tell me, I believe that people are really oriented towards each other and are really kind and wonderful, I don't always feel that.

4:37And in fact, for a long time, I've secretly been pretty cynical about people myself. So this book began as my attempt to explore why the heck I couldn't get on board with my own science and grew into much more than that. Well, I know you mentioned in the book that you're an introvert. Do you feel that your introversion played a role in the cynicism? I would say it's almost the other way around. And for me, not for all introverts, but I think for a lot of people who shy away from others, it's because we kind of have this implicit theory that other people won't like us very much or maybe that conversations will go poorly.

5:15I think of these as social shark attacks. You know, like one thing that I experience a lot is I'll be getting ready to give a talk or go to a party or even just visit with an old friend, somebody who I know is great. And I, again, feel like, hey, this will be really fun. But I keep on having these intrusive thoughts about, well, what if everybody hates me? Or what if this conversation is awful and awkward? And I think of that as similar to shark attacks because shark attacks, as you know, are exceedingly rare, but people nonetheless are terrified of them. And it turns out that bad conversations are sort of like that.

5:55Most conversations are pretty good. But if you ask people to imagine what those conversations will be like, they think that they'll be much more awkward, less connected and less positive than they really are. So just like shark attacks, we fear them, and even though they're very unlikely to happen. So in that, it seems like the negativity is self-judgment. So I'm going to do poorly. I'm going to make it awkward. They're not going to like me. And in cynicism, the negativity is towards others. That's actually a really good way of putting it. I would say that the two can mix together a lot as well.

6:29You can think, gosh, this party is going to be terrible because nobody's going to want to talk to me because they're all so obsessed with themselves. So there's a way that cynicism and I suppose doubts about ourselves really can turn into this vicious cycle that pulls us out of connection and conversation. I think we've all encountered a cynic, but I'd love to get the definition scientifically of what cynicism is, looks like, feels like. Yeah. Cynicism, the way I think about it is it's a theory about people. It's the theory that people are selfish, greedy, and dishonest. It was first really brought into the world of psychology, scientific psychology, by two researchers, Walter Cook and Donald Medley.

7:19They wanted to come up with a test for teachers to see which teachers would get along with their students and which ones wouldn't. So they asked teachers to say whether they agreed with 50 different statements, like, most people will get away with anything if you let them, or people only care about you because they want to seem friendly. And it turned out that the more of these statements that teachers agreed with, the worse that their relationships with their students were. But it wasn't just teachers. It was all of us. If you agreed with these statements, you tended to be a kind of prickly, unfriendly, and judgmental individual.

7:55And that's how we think of cynicism now. Just like other theories, cynicism changes what we do, right? The theory of gravity, the idea that if you jump from a high place, you'll fall quickly, stops us from trying to leap off tall buildings and fly, right? Because we know that gravity is there. Cynicism, the idea that people are selfish, stops us from doing other things, like putting faith in them or trusting them, right? Every time you trust somebody, you're vulnerable to them. And cynics think that that vulnerability is for suckers. So they tend to trust people less. And then of course, people reflect that back to you.

8:34So they're distrusting a view. So it's a trap, right? It is a behavior that we have towards others based on a view of how others are going to act. And then in return, we see them act exactly that way because of the actions that we're putting forward. That's so well put. I know on the show, you've talked before about confirmation bias, right? The idea that when you think something, when you believe something, you start sort of thinking like a lawyer and looking for evidence that supports your claim and maybe ignoring evidence that doesn't. Cynics are like that too. There was a famous study where cynics and non-cynics looked at a video of two people talking, one talking about their problems, the other person comforting the first.

9:17And non-cynics thought the person who was listening was really warm and empathic. And cynics thought that they were really cold and maybe that they were bored, that they had ulterior motives for being there. And when you think in that way, as you're beautifully putting it, you act in a way that's judgmental, or maybe you seem really skittish around others. And as you're also saying, other people reflect that right back to you. We reciprocate other people's trust and we retaliate when other people treat us poorly. So cynics end up creating evidence for their own beliefs and not realizing that they're the ones generating that evidence.

9:55And I think an important part of this is recognizing that those thoughts, although we may feel they're internal, our nonverbal reactions, the choice of words that we use in our communication can really showcase that cynicism more openly than we might believe. So in our training program on the first day, we actually film our clients talking to our coaches. And then we show them back the video and first with no audio, just looking at what is their body language. And the clients that tend to be the most cynical coming into the program don't realize that they're not smiling. They're not showcasing any interest in the conversation that's happening in front of them.

10:35And of course, that person who's communicating with them starts to then reflect back that disinterest, that awkwardness and not want to be there. And those that are introverted but not cynical, they can still have that warmth even though there's discomfort going on. But there isn't this belief that the other person is thinking about them negatively or viewing them in a way that doesn't want to communicate with them. So it's really interesting how we often think those beliefs that we have internally are actually influencing more of our communication, nonverbal and verbal, than we realize. Well, I love that you do that.

11:08That's such a great way to bring people into self-awareness. And I completely agree. We have this, I think a lot of us walk around with this belief that we passively receive the world, that we're just observing other people and events and things happening. In fact, we act on the world even when we don't know we're doing it. We are really present and influential and we create in many important ways the social world that we inhabit. And I think that what you're getting at through this really helpful exercise with your clients is that we need to be aware of that power that we have in shaping the conversations that we have, the relationships that we have.

11:56And I think that overcoming cynicism as one of the first steps towards doing so is embracing and understanding that power and saying, hey, it's not just me responding to a bunch of jerks all around me in the world. I have power to change who people are and how they treat me by changing how I treat them first. Yeah, it's such a powerful mindset shift to recognize that and then to act on it in ways that influence the way people behave around you. Now, I know for a lot of our listeners, they might be curious to know what is sort of the relationship between skepticism and cynicism? Because it feels like we can be skeptical, maybe not cynical.

12:39What's going on there? And how do the two relate to each other? That is such a great question. And I think it's really important because definitions in this space can be really confusing. And sometimes when I tell people, hey, you know, cynicism isn't really that helpful. They say, well, sorry, I'm not just going to believe everything that people tell me. They think that the opposite of cynicism is gullibility or being naive, being a chump, a mark, a rube, basically. And if that's your only alternative, well, gosh, I can understand why you would go for cynicism instead. But it's not your only other option.

13:16And in fact, I would say that being really gullible and being really cynical are actually more similar than cynics would like to admit, right? Because both gullible people and cynics are pretty credulous, right? They rely on their assumptions. A gullible person will think that people can be trusted and will keep on believing that even after they take him for a ride. A cynical person will think that people cannot be trusted and will continue to believe that even if somebody treats them really well. The opposite of both of those is to be a skeptic. Skepticism is, you can think of it as a scientific mindset instead of a lawyerly mindset, right?

13:59It's this hunger for more information. It's a desire to not believe things unless you have evidence for them. And in that way, skepticism and cynicism really couldn't be more different. Research finds that people's levels of skepticism are pretty much uncorrelated with their levels of cynicism. So you can be somebody who's looking for more information, evaluating the evidence, thinking like a scientist, and be pretty cynical too. Or you can be that way and be very trusting. So I think it's important to remember that, you know, whereas cynicism is a lack of faith in people, skepticism is a lack of faith in our assumptions.

14:38And that second mindset can be really sharp, right? It doesn't mean taking everything that people say at their word. It doesn't mean sending your bank account information to the prince who wants to give you$15 million over email, right? It's rather being open to the world and ready to learn from it and from other people. Now, I'm curious with this cynicism, do you find scientifically that it's contagious? Can groups become more cynical over time? What are sort of the forces going on behind the scenes that might be influencing our cynicism? Yeah, absolutely. It can be contagious. I mean, one macro piece of example for that is that cynicism has been catching like a plague across our culture over the last 50 years.

15:26In 1972, about 50 % of Americans believed most people can be trusted. By 2018, that had fallen to about a third. The size of that drop is comparable to the fall in the stock market during the 2008 financial collapse. So we're really going through a collective trust deficit, which speaks to the contagion that you're talking about. There are two levels at which people have studied that contagion at a more fine-grained level. One is within one-on-one interactions and relationships. And this gets back to the point you were making about these self-fulfilling prophecies. So there's lots of evidence in studies from economics and sociology and psychology that when one person is cynical, they treat other people in ways that telegraph that cynicism.

16:15As you said, we're not as good at hiding it as we might think we are, right? And when other people see that we're treating them cynically, they in turn trust us less. They start to act in ways that are more selfish. So that's one micro level of contagion. And then there's a middle level of contagion, which happens a lot in organizations and communities. And that's especially when leaders are cynical. So if a CEO is really cynical, they'll institute practices that really display a low level of trust and low level of faith in the people in their organization. For instance, micromanaging them or monitoring them.

16:58One example of this during the pandemic, millions of people started working remotely for the first time. And their bosses could have said, okay, well, great, try to get your work done. We're living in generational levels of chaos right now. Just do what you can and come back to me when you've finished your work. and have been flexible and trusting. But instead, a lot of companies installed spyware on their employees' computers to make sure that their faces were on camera or their mouses were moving. And that type of organizational cynicism from leaders quickly spreads through all of their employees.

17:40So employees who are treated this way will really start to reflect that lack of trust back to their bosses and to their colleagues as well. So that's the sort of middle level at which we see a lot of contagion of cynicism. In that environment where the leadership is cynical, there's this lack of psychological safety that creates incentives to behave in ways that further the cynicism. So if you're feeling like you're being judged harshly, it's easier for you then to point out other people's failings and judge them harshly, throwing each other under the bus and not actually collectively working towards the goal.

18:20But in those situations, it can be very hard to fight that culturally when you feel from the top that the cynicism is emanating through spyware and the way that they're running meetings or the way that they're hiring and firing people. So what can we do in that situation where we find ourselves immersed in an environment where the leader is cynical? We ourselves might be skeptical, not cynical, and want to be optimistic? Gosh, it's a really hard situation for a lot of people, and I've talked with so many folks who are in that exact situation. They don't want to be cynical, but they feel as though the environment that they're in at work is forcing it out of them, turning them into a version of themselves that they don't want to be.

19:01I think there's many ways that you can respond to that. One is to focus on your organizational backyard or your social microclimate, right? I mean, you may not be able to change a thousand person or a 10 ,000 person organization if the CEO is really cynical, but maybe you can have conversations with your team, right? If you're a middle manager, for instance, or just with your colleagues, if you're an individual contributor, the people who you work most closely with and say, hey, let's make a pact. Let's be on the same side here. Let's work towards common goals as opposed to backstabbing or doubting one another.

19:43And one way that you can accelerate that process is by leading through example. As we've talked about, people retaliate against cynicism. If you treat people badly, they'll treat you badly. You can be the first mover towards the other side of that equation, right? By saying, hey, maybe we can do better here. And then acting in ways where you take leaps of faith on people, where you show up for them. It's a risk, of course, right? I mean, there's the risk that you go out on a limb and people break it behind you and you tumble to the ground. But that's the type of risk that you might have to take to see if you can turn a vicious cycle into a virtuous one.

20:25The upside of all this, though, is that if you can, in your own team, in a larger organization work cooperatively, even amidst a competitive and cynical organization, you're going to win at a bottom line level as well. The secret here is that cynicism doesn't just feel bad. It also does poorly in terms of teams' productivity, their efficiency and creativity. So if you can create an island of anti-cynicism in a cynical sea, you will actually perform better than people who can't. What's up, analytical thinker? Ready to dial up your charm and master persuasion? Then listen up. Welcome to the Art of Charms X Factor Accelerator.

21:10We've been at it for 17 years, helping over 10 ,000 listeners just like you grow their social capital and improve their dating life. Whether you prefer learning at your own pace or thrive in group coaching settings, we've got your back. Our comprehensive program is packed with secrets on swaying others, nailing chats, the secrets of influence, and the nuances of effective communication and rapid rapport building. Picture this, reading rooms like a pro, nailing every social situation, and a network that flings doors wide open. That could be you with our X-Factor Accelerator. Live implementation sessions, daily accountability, and weekly missions and exercises to hone in to your new skills.

21:52Don't just take our word for it. Ask the execs, engineers, and military badasses who've stepped up their game with us. Head over to unlockyourxfactor.com to jump in. Your mastery of influence starts now. Let's unlock your limitless potential at unlockyourxfactor.com. And I think it's important to note, I was talking with the executive coaching client of ours, and she was in that very similar situation where effort here is actually more important at the beginning than outcome. Recognizing that maybe you don't have as much power to change the forces above you, and maybe your team would love you to really shift the outcomes, but just you putting in the effort and showcasing to your team and your peers that this is the values that you're bringing and this is what you're putting forward in your communication and transparency, even if the outcome doesn't shift as much as your team would like, they're going to follow your lead based on the effort that you're putting in to establish this optimism on the team, this cooperativity that ultimately allows them to start to feel safe working with you.

22:58Oftentimes, if we're in a situation where we feel powerless and we feel that our manager is not acting at all on what we would love to see happen, then of course, we're not going to want to be productive. We're going to be looking elsewhere for jobs. And ultimately, we're going to get nowhere near the outcome. And it takes a lot of effort. But over time, the more people that you have coming together in this cooperative, impactful way, the more power you have ultimately in that environment. So I know very often we'll hear from clients who are frustrated around the politics at work and not recognizing how much agency they have in impacting those politics.

23:37It's easier to complain or to recognize the politics. And as we talked about before, we have a cognitive bias about how much we really have an impact in our own behaviors and actions around the politics around us. Yeah, that's really brilliantly put. And, you know, first, I want to validate people who are complaining about this. I mean, these struggles are real. Being part of an organization where your CEO is really cynical is painful. And I don't blame people for being upset by that at all. But the question is, where do we go from here? As you're saying, one option is just find work elsewhere.

24:14And cynical organizations do tend to shed more people quickly and have greater turnover than less cynical organizations. But if you're not going to do that, then as you're saying, another take on this, maybe a more hopeful take, is to say, well, what do I have power over? It's almost like that stoic philosophy as well of, hey, there are things that I can't control and there are things that I can. So what's in that second bucket and how can I be a leader, not maybe company-wide, but at least with the people directly next to me? And as you're saying, part of it is embracing our own power. In our research, my student Eric Neumann and I, we gave people a sense of their power.

25:00We taught some people, but not others, that if you trust others, they're more likely to become trustworthy. right? That if you take that leap of faith, other people are more likely to earn your trust because they see that you see the best in them and they want to live up to that positive expectation. When we taught people that versus people who we didn't teach that to, those people were more willing to trust others with money and in conversation. And when people were more trusting, both with money and in conversation, guess what happened? Other people actually did become more trustworthy. So I think that you're exactly right that this is a great space.

25:44Workplaces are a great space in which to understand, embrace, and own our own influence over other people and try to use that as a force for good. Now, recognizing that it is contagious, how can we self-diagnose or recognize that we might be moving from skepticism to cynicism? What are the telltale signs? Yeah, it's a great question. And I think that there's a couple of places that I would go with that. One is, what are your instinctual responses to other people? When somebody says something kind to you, do you accept that compliment? Do you feel good? Or do you start to feel suspicious? When you think about why somebody is doing something, do you start with the assumption that they're doing it for themselves?

26:34Or do you maybe believe that they're doing it for others? So I'd say interrogating our own reactions to other people is a good place to start. But hey, that could be skepticism too. It could be that you think somebody's selfish because they've acted selfishly the entire time you've known them. That's evidence-based. A second step that you might take is saying, well, my reactions to people are kind of negative. I'm sort of suspecting them. I'm doubting them. What evidence do I have? And to test your beliefs against the evidence you have. So if you're saying, wow, this person said something nice, but I bet they're just trying to get on my good side.

27:12They're buttering me up because they're going to ask me for a favor. If you then hit the pause button and say, well, what evidence am I basing that claim on? And your response is, actually, I've never met this person in my life, I have no idea why I'm thinking this, it just feels right, then that's evidence that you might be shifting from skepticism to cynicism. So I would say the two-step internal audit would be, one, am I defaulting to a negative view of people? And two, am I doing that in the absence of compelling evidence? If that's the case, then that sounds more like cynicism, and maybe it could be something that's worth working on.

27:50Now with this rise in cynicism, are there demographic shifts that are happening? Are there parts of the U.S.? Are there age groups, generations? Are there shifts where it's happening more frequently in your observation around cynicism, or is it basically generalized across the population? It's both. So within almost every demographic you can measure, cynicism is on the rise. So there's not really demographics that are very safe from this trend, but there are demographics that are being more impacted. AJ, if I might, might I ask you to guess, if you had to hazard a guess, what group of people, what demographic do you think would be rising in terms of cynicism, just based on your intuitions?