Hope for Cynics by Jamil Zaki
Cynicism is a negative view of people as being selfish and untrustworthy. The main tenets of cynicism are:
- Nobody cares what happens to you.
- People dislike helping others.
- People act honestly chiefly out of a fear of getting caught.
Cynicism feels smart, but it is usually the result of intellectual laziness. Cynicism is typically a mass extrapolation to all of humanity done on the basis of a small number of negative experiences. Human attention is biased towards negativity, and in cynics this bias runs unchecked.
Cynics are worse at detecting liars than non-cynics despite being more confident in their ability to do so. Cynics rarely learn what people are actually like, instead making their judgments based on their worldview rather than on the details of individual cases.
People who score high in cynicism suffer from more anxiety and depression, drink more alcohol, earn less income, and have shorter life expectancies. Communities with low levels of interpersonal trust unravel during crisis situations, whereas high-trust communities increase their cooperation to meet the challenge. Across countries, levels of public trust are positively correlated with future GDP growth.
Cynicism is often confused with skepticism, which is ultimately a separate trait. Cynicism is a lack of faith in people, whereas skepticism is a lack of faith in assumptions. Unlike blind trust, blind cynicism does not allow itself to be tested and possibly be proven foolish. When high cynicism is accompanied by low skepticism towards that cynicism, the resulting worldview can be very immune to change.
Public opinion is full of cynical and poorly-thought-out positions. People widely believe that humanity has become more immoral over time, but scientific research that studies specific measurable questions generally concludes the opposite. People complain that people are untrustworthy, but also that people are not trusting enough. People have low views of humanity in general, but also hold positive views of the communities they personally belong to.
Research shows that the positive view of humanity grounded in real-life experiences is usually the truer view. Strangers are consistently more friendly and generous than people predict. People consistently overestimate the likelihood of a social interaction going badly. In conflict situations, people consistently overestimate the extremeness and stubbornness of the other side’s views. People also underestimate the other wide’s willingness to end a conflict through mutual agreement or at least to de-escalate its scope.
Cynicism is often rooted in the belief that people are fundamentally amoral and self-serving. In this “Homo economicus” model, people will do anything they can get away with and can only be swayed through incentives and threats. Homo economicus is widely used in economics as a baseline model, but it is known to underestimate how pro-social people are and how easily they can solve small-scale collective problems without the need for institutions. Contrary to the common belief that Darwinian evolution creates a lonely “survival of the fittest” struggle, cooperative behavior is widespread in the animal kingdom, especially in harsh environments where self-sufficiency is difficult. Humans are the most cooperative animal of all, so assuming that people will always act like Homo economicus can often backfire.
Cynical Strategies
Cynical people become disappointed with the behavior of others before they have even seen what happens. Pre-disappointed people have two main ways to protect themselves, both of them counterproductive.
1. Preemptive strikes. This is the approach favored by authority figures. In preemptive strikes, cynics loudly announce their mistrust through the use of rules, surveillance, and threats. Ironically, institutionalizing a social contract in this manner can leave everyone both worse-behaved and less-trusting. People are usually very wary of betraying someone (even a stranger) who has placed trust in them, as doing so would feel unprovoked and indefensible. However, if the other party has already started the relationship with an insult, then defying, bending, or exploiting the rules can feel like a morally justified act of revenge. Treating people upfront as if they are lazy, selfish, or dishonest can indirectly prompt them to behave in those ways. Wiser people understand that a better strategy, especially for authority figures, is to be attentive without being overbearing.
2. Preemptive withdrawal. This is the approach favored by people who feel powerless to change their environment. A withdrawal into isolation and self-sufficiency caps the potential downside of dealing with others, but it caps the potential upside too. Social withdrawal is often rooted in irrational fears similar to the fear of shark attacks, based more on the emotional vividness of the dreaded event rather than the actual likelihood.
The Causes of Cynicism
Cynicism levels differ greatly between communities, even when the people in them are otherwise similar. The level of cynicism within a community can be predictably increased through the following factors.
1. Inequality. When your individual success depends much more on your relative standing within your community than on the success of the community itself, it can lead to a zero-sum worldview in which your peers are your enemies. When hierarchy is such a high-stakes question, low-ranking people resent high-ranking people, high-ranking people live in fear of low-ranking people, and everyone lives in fear of slipping in rank from where they currently are. At the level of nations, high inequality predicts low levels of public trust much more strongly than low wealth.
2. Elite abuse. Betrayals are always bad for trust, but abuses of power by a community’s elites are the most damaging betrayals of all. Elite abuse erodes people’s sense of a social contract, replacing it with a worldview built around powerful abusers and powerless victims who live under different sets of rules. Elite abuse dampens people’s view of human nature, giving the impression that everyone is corruptible and that people will do anything their power lets them get away with. For people who view human nature this way, it feels inevitable that the status quo will repeat itself forever, making lasting positive change feel impossible. Ironically, this type of mass cynicism is convenient for authoritarian and abusive elites, since a cynical populace is less likely to mobilize for change.
3. Exchange-based relationships. The more people interact with others in the formal world of market and institutional norms rather than than the informal world of communal and social norms, the more cynical they become. Markets and institutions make it possible for people to cooperate without any brotherly love between them. However, they also leave people unsure about whether other people’s nice behavior is genuine rather than done out of self-interest. In a world of transactional relationships, people live in fear of how they may be treated by other people to whom they have nothing to offer.
4. Commodification. In social settings where comparisons are easy, it becomes difficult to live in a way that doesn’t involve constantly keeping score. When the worth of any gift or favor can be measured, or when merit or value can be quantified, people can be tempted to try optimizing numbers as opposed to what those numbers are supposed to represent. This type of score optimization can lead to antisocial behavior and to perceptions of antisocial behavior in others. Scorekeeping is fatal to communal relationships, so any setting that becomes numbers-driven and comparison-driven begins to feel more like a competitive marketplace.
5. Gossip. Gossip is an essential part of humanity’s social toolkit. The threat of being socially shunned or gossiped about has long deterred dishonest, extractive, and free-riding behavior within tight-knit communities. However, gossip skews negative, and much of it is not actionable or even true. Exposure to too much gossip can skew people’s view of human nature too negatively.
The Recent History of Cynicism
Mass cynicism took on a recognizable modern form during industrialization in the 19th century. Ordinary workers left their tight-knit rural communities for city life, entering a lonely dog-eat-dog world of extractive institutions, abusive bosses, and cold transactional relationships. Economic shifts drastically increased economic inequality, creating a jarring contrast of extravagance existing alongside poverty. Robber barons monopolized entire industries by getting chummy with politicians, then had the gall to credit their successes to individual merit. Elites used social Darwinism to justify their status, warning that helping the poor comes with moral hazards. Political camps representing different socioeconomic classes became increasingly tribalistic and extreme, putting legislatures into gridlock. Politicians attempted to break through the gridlock not by persuading others, but by selectively reducing voter turnout, suppressing activism, and stoking divisions among enemy voters, ultimately regressing democratic norms back by several decades. Newspapers, many of them low-quality, gleefully published real and exaggerated stories of society’s moral rot.
In the US, the 1890s decade was a low point in terms of public trust, but the downward trend didn’t continue forever. The early 20th century is remembered today as a period of great progressive achievements, including women’s suffrage, antitrust law, standardized labor laws, and campaign finance reforms. Civic culture grew rapidly, with social Darwinism falling into decline and a more community-oriented and compassionate ideology taking its place. By curtailing the worst injustices of the early industrial era, change-makers built a social contract that people could believe in, causing public trust to recover from what seemed like a terminal decline.
After peaking during World War II, public trust in both people and institutions began declining again in the second half of the 20th century; as of the 2020s, this decline is still ongoing. Unlike the 19th century decline, the 20th-21st century decline has been thoroughly studied and is known to be a global trend. Economic conditions and public safety have improved in recent decades, but cynicism has increased anyway.
Economic inequality has again risen with the transition to a service-based economy. The social safety net for the poor has become so bureaucratic and opaque that people have stopped trusting it to be there for them. A metric-obsessed and competition-obsessed culture has infected many workplaces, improving performance in the short term while creating culture rot in the long term. As the media landscape diversified and became more competitive, news media has increasingly turned to negativity and sensationalism as a way of attracting attention. Social media has inserted itself as a mediator of social relationships, turning a once-informal setting into a numbers-driven marketplace. Schools have become increasingly smothering and surveillance-oriented, giving children a sour first taste of the world of adult institutions. Political polarization has intensified, with people increasingly self-sorting along ideological lines.
These social trends are all widely unpopular, but people underestimate the extent to which other people agree with their views. As severe as the current trust recession now feels, the late 1800s trust recession almost certainly felt even more hopeless at the time. Positive change will not come from a cynical mindset because cynicism is fatalistic, insisting the status quo cannot change and then making a self-fulfilling prophecy. Positive collective change requires group cooperation. Group cooperation requires people to renounce the use of preemptive strikes and preemptive withdrawals, accepting that interactions with other people will always come with risks, but that it will probably be worth it.