158. Hope for Cynics: Building Trusting Relationships through Communication

[00:00:00] Matt Abrahams: It doesn't take much to see how cynical we are in the world today. We doubt, we lack trust. What if we could develop hopeful skepticism where we trust loudly? 

[00:00:13] My name's Matt Abrahams, and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast.

[00:00:23] Today, I look forward to speaking with Jamil Zaki. Jamil is a professor of psychology at Stanford and the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab. He studies empathy and kindness, both at the interpersonal and neuroscience level. He has a new book out that I really enjoyed. It's called Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness.

[00:00:46] Jamil, I am so excited for our conversation. We've had such great chats with some of your colleagues in the psychology department at Stanford, Jeanne Tsai, Alia Crum, Phil Zimbardo. Welcome to Think Fast, Talk Smart. 

[00:00:58] Jamil Zaki: Oh, thank you so much, Matt. It's a pleasure to be here. 

[00:01:01] Matt Abrahams: Awesome. Should we get started?

[00:01:02] Jamil Zaki: Let's do it. 

[00:01:03] Matt Abrahams: Excellent. Trust is an important part of what you study. Can you define trust from your perspective and its impact on the relationships we have? 

[00:01:12] Jamil Zaki: Trust I would say is one person's willingness to be vulnerable on the expectation that another person will step up and have our best interest in mind.

[00:01:22] So for instance, when you loan somebody money, but also when you decide to open up with a new acquaintance about a struggle that you're going through. When you allow a babysitter to watch your kids, all of these are acts of trust. And I would say that those acts are the bedrock on which relationships are formed. The only way that strangers become friends and friends become best friends, the only way that we can build partnerships in business is through a willingness to count on one another. So without trust, all of those relationships would disappear. 

[00:01:54] Matt Abrahams: Absolutely. How are some ways that you have seen or studied that people can actually develop better trust? And I'm assuming communication plays an important role in all of that. 

[00:02:02] Jamil Zaki: Oh, absolutely. Trust is a matter of managing risk, it's a social bet. If you count on somebody and they betray you, you will lose. And if you count on somebody and they show up for you, you both win. I think that we might be too risk averse in our trusting relationships. Why is that? 

[00:02:20] Well, that time that you're let down lives on in your mind for years or decades. We all remember the times that we've been betrayed. But the opportunities that we miss, because we didn't trust somebody who would have honored that trust, we don't think of as much. So I think that our risk calculation is off and we might want to take more leaps of faith on people. You asked about how this could matter in terms of communication, and I think that there's an important point here too. Because trust isn't just about what you do, it's about how you explain what you do. I really love the term trusting loudly. That is when you put your faith in somebody else, it's important to tell them that you're doing so and to tell them that the reason you're doing that is because you believe in them.

[00:03:04] You say, well, you know, I've been going through this. I want to tell you about it because I really trust you. That simple message has way more power than I think most of us realize. It's a gift to another person and makes it much more likely that they will reciprocate by stepping up and becoming trustworthy as well as strengthening the relationship.

[00:03:24] Matt Abrahams: I love that notion of trusting loudly, making it explicit. And in many ways, as you say, not only is it an invitation and a gift, but it also is a way of demonstrating vulnerability and saying, I'm open to that.

[00:03:38] In this notion of risk aversion, we've talked about before on the podcast, and we've had Dan Pink on who talked about regrets. And the regretting of not taking the act because of not trusting, I think looms large in my life and in others. I appreciate that. And I'm going to think a lot about trusting loudly as we move forward. Your new book focuses on cynicism. What is cynicism from your perspective? And what is what you call the cynicism trap? 

[00:04:03] Jamil Zaki: Yeah. So cynicism can be thought of as a theory. A theory about the world and about humanity in particular. It's the theory that most people, at their core, are selfish, greedy, and dishonest. Now, that is not to say that a cynic believes nobody will ever do something kind. Rather, they think that those kind acts are a surface level performance of what we're supposed to be. But if you had a magnifying glass and could peer beneath the action into a person's soul, they're mostly looking out for themselves.

[00:04:36] This is a worldview that traps us in all sorts of ways. But the major form in which it traps us is that cynics lose all of the powerful benefits that we've just talked about when it comes to trust. Because if you believe that every act of trust is a social bet on another person, and you also have a theory that most people would lie, cheat, and steal if they could. Well then that bet is for suckers. And we see that in cynics actions and in their self-report as well, right? 

[00:05:08] They tell us in the lab and they tell researchers that they don't think it's a smart decision to trust almost anybody. And if you give them chances to trust others, both in the laboratory and if you measure how much they trust people in their lives, they're much less willing to take those chances. And that means that they often end up trapped in a smaller version of their lives than they might want to live in, right? So they might not be betrayed as much, but they also don't form as many friendships and partnerships. They lose access to the richness of social life, which I would argue is one of the best parts of being human.

[00:05:47] Matt Abrahams: Is it binary? Is it you're either a cynic or you're not? Is there a continuum? And what do you find in the work that you've done and the work others have done in terms of are most people towards the cynical side or are they more optimistic? And well, let me ask this, what's the opposite of cynicism? 

[00:06:01] Jamil Zaki: First, cynicism is not a binary, it's a spectrum. So there's all sorts of tests where you can measure your own cynicism through answering questions like, do you agree that most people would lie if they could get away with it? Or do you think that most people only help others because they feel obligated to? There's fifty questions like that, you can find a cynicism test online. And people range and they vary enormously.

[00:06:28] I would add that it's not just that people differ from each other. We differ from ourselves at different times and in different environments, right? So at a poker table, it's perfectly natural to be pretty cynical about the people you're playing against. They probably do have their best interest in mind. At a charity drive, maybe that's not as smart an assumption. What's the opposite of a cynic? It depends who you ask. If you ask a cynic, then the opposite of a cynic is a gullible rube or chump or mark. The opposite of cynicism is being naive. I would argue, from a scientific perspective, being naïve and being cynical are actually quite similar to one another.

[00:07:08] A naïve person might credulously, unthinkingly put faith in everybody without evidence and end up being betrayed. A cynic credulously and unthinkingly takes away faith from everybody. And neither one of them uses much evidence. You can think of both naive trusters and cynics as sort of like lawyers in the trial against humanity, right? Where cynics are part of the prosecution and naive trusters are part of the defense. I would say that the opposite of cynicism is skepticism. That is, not having one assumption or the other about what people are like. But thinking instead of like a lawyer, thinking like a scientist and looking for evidence to support our claims.

[00:07:52] Skeptics, unlike cynics, are more open to learning from every single act of communication, every interaction that they have. And that I think makes them a lot wiser than either cynics or gullible people. 

[00:08:07] Matt Abrahams: Thank you for that distinction. What are things we can do to foster what I think you call hopeful skepticism versus cynicism? How can we inculcate that? How can we teach that to others? How can we embody that in our own way and approach in situations where we might have a tendency to be cynical? 

[00:08:26] Jamil Zaki: Yeah, it's a hard task because I think that our brains and minds are set up for cynicism. And actually, we've become more cynical as a population over the last fifty years, right? So in 1972, about half of Americans believed most people can be trusted. By 2018, that had fallen to a third of Americans, right? So we have cynical tendencies, I think, because we have what psychologists call negativity bias. That is, we pay more attention to threats than we do to opportunities or to beautiful things in the world. And that makes sense from a survival perspective, right? 

[00:09:04] A hundred thousand years ago, the person who ignored a predator or a tsunami maybe wouldn't make it to pass on their genes. And the person who ignored the beauty of a sunset might be just fine, right? So, but that bias means that fighting cynicism is an uphill battle. But it's still a battle that we can fight and we can win.

[00:09:24] There's three steps that I suggest. The first is to think differently. So to acknowledge that we have negativity bias. And that might make us, as I was saying, too risk averse when it comes to trust and too negative in general about people. There's all sorts of evidence that people are more trustworthy, kinder, more compassionate than we realize. The average person underestimates the average person. So because of that, being skeptical about our cynicism can help. What I try to do when I find myself judging somebody, feeling suspicious, is to fact check my cynical beliefs. I say, well, wait a minute. Why do you think that? Why are you so sure that this person is going to betray you? Why are you so sure that what you're seeing in the news represents what people are really like? And that fact check can help me start in the journey of overcoming my own cynicism. 

[00:10:20] Matt Abrahams: I think that self-reflection, while hard, can be really helpful. We tend to seek out confirmatory experiences, which to me might be a bit of a challenge for this cynicism toolkit that you're providing.

[00:10:35] What advice do you have to broaden our worldview? Because it's very easy for me to say, oh see, that I was right, you know. Are there suggestions you have for managing that? 

[00:10:44] Jamil Zaki: Absolutely. I think, first of all, I just want to co-sign what you've said. It feels great to be right even if what you're right about feels terrible. A cynic might have a sort of bleak, bitter satisfaction when they see somebody act poorly. Because they say, aha, I've had their number all along, but we shouldn't be so ready to sit on our laurels as cynics, right? 

[00:11:07] Instead, we might want to challenge ourselves, not just with what we think, but with what we do, right? We've talked about how we can be reflective and challenge our assumptions by fact checking them. I, as I said, I sometimes say, what evidence do you have to support this cynical idea? Oftentimes, my answer is, not much evidence at all. 

[00:11:25] So the second step is to collect evidence. What does that mean? It means treat your life a little bit more like an experiment. If there is a person who you're considering trusting and you're sort of feeling yourself pulling away, maybe make the opposite choice. If you typically look at one news source because it confirms all of your expectations, try to check out a different one. Vary your experiences. 

[00:11:49] Now, I want to be clear. I'm not telling people to put it all on the line. I'm not saying that you should send your bank information to a prince who's going to forward you fourteen million dollars or to an influencer who says that there's one weird trick that will give you passive income and clear up your skin at the same time, right? We don't need to be naive. We just need to be data driven, and when we are, pleasant surprises are everywhere. 

[00:12:13] Matt Abrahams: I like that idea that it's more than just reflection and thinking, it's about the doing. In thinking about my own life, I know when something's going on that I am a bit cynical about. I'll seek others I know who will reinforce that cynicism. I have friends who will see the world the same way and we get together and rar together. 

[00:12:33] But I also know there are times where I'm feeling cynical and I have some friends who are very optimistic and I'll seek them out just to get a difference of opinion. It's like being in a group and purposely having a devil's advocate to challenge you. It's not just what happens internally, it's also the people you surround yourself with. 

[00:12:47] Jamil Zaki: Absolutely, we are fundamentally social creatures and the people you spend time with, choosing them is sort of like choosing who you will become. Because you're choosing your social environment and that environment shapes you, right?

[00:13:00] And I think that absolutely many of us crave confirmation of our negative assumptions and so we gravitate towards negative people. We also ourselves share a lot of negative information. There's a lot of temptation to go around giving life a one-star review on Yelp. And that attracts a lot of attention on social media as well. Posting negatively gets you more clout, more, uh, notoriety than being positive. But this too is a trend we can fight.

[00:13:30] One by surrounding ourselves with people, as you said, this sort of team of rivals approach where you look for a challenge. But second, I also think that we can honor our influence over others and realize, you had asked earlier, is there something we can do to fight cynicism, not only in ourselves, but in the people we care about?

[00:13:50] One way to do that is through what I call positive gossip. We typically gossip most about the harm that people do. In my lab, we found that when we give people stories or show them examples of somebody acting selfishly, and then somebody acting generously, and we ask, which of these stories do you want to pass on to future participants?

[00:14:11] People are three times more likely to gossip about a selfish person than about a generous person. And again, there is a great reason for this from a survival perspective. We want to protect our communities from people who would hurt us. That's a beautiful instinct. But it doesn't always serve us, in fact, because we end up giving people an unnecessarily negative view of who's in the community.

[00:14:36] And so what I try to do in my life and what I encourage other people to do is to catch people in the act of kindness or of compassion or of open mindedness. And then talk about them, call them out for doing good things. Two things happen when you do that. 

[00:14:52] The first is that you spread hopeful skepticism to the people in your lives. But the second is that you change yourself because of course, what we talk about becomes what we notice. And so a habit of speech around positive gossip turns into a habit of mind, which we could call positive noticing. 

[00:15:10] Matt Abrahams: The notion of positive gossip and being strategic and very thoughtful about it, I think is a really important thing for us in our own lives. But I also think of within organizations and within other collectives, families, etcetera. I really appreciate that. 

[00:15:24] You also study self-fulfilling prophecies. Can you define what those are for us and perhaps give us an example or two of how we can leverage these to help us feel better and do better in the world? 

[00:15:36] Jamil Zaki: It's a great question. And again, I think that a lot of us underestimate our power in the social world. My friend Vanessa Bohns studies this. She finds that much more than most people realize how we treat others changes who they become in our presence. And that, for cynics, I think leads to many toxic or sad self-fulfilling prophecies. Cynics, for instance, are much more likely to micromanage, spy on other people, to threaten and browbeat them, to try to protect themselves from what they imagine is a selfish person on the other side of the interaction.

[00:16:13] Well, guess what? If you treat people that way, then they become more combative, aggressive, disrespectful, and selfish. And then the cynic says, aha, I was right all along. 

[00:16:25] Matt Abrahams: And that's the self-fulfilling nature of it is you've created the situation you expected. Yeah. 

[00:16:29] Jamil Zaki: Exactly. That's exactly right. Now you asked not the gloomy version, but the brighter version. What can we do with it? And I would say that there are many cases where our instincts in an interaction is how can I protect myself? And that includes aggressive or even disrespectful action towards the other person. But watch out because if you focus too much on protecting yourself, you might damage the relationship and create that self-fulfilling prophecy.

[00:16:55] Instead, we can remember that by acting positively, doing things like taking leaps of faith, trusting loudly, that those actions aren't just ways of showing who we want to be. They are also likely to bring out the best in the other person. This is what economists call earned trust, which is that when we treat somebody well, including treating them as though they are a trustworthy and kind person. We bring that side out of them people lower themselves to our expectations if we're cynical and they raise ourselves to our expectations if we are non-cynical. 

[00:17:31] Matt Abrahams: Using self-fulfilling prophecy for good can have so many benefits and thank you for sharing. I first became aware of self-fulfilling prophecies in my research on how to feel more confident in communication. And many of us set ourselves up for that gloomy doomy version where we see the one person who isn't paying attention and then say, oh, we're not doing a good job and therefore we end up doing a poor job.

[00:17:53] Jamil Zaki: Hmm.

[00:17:53] Matt Abrahams: And we can use that same self-fulfilling prophecy mechanism for positive. Highlight the person who is engaged or think about the value. So I think self-fulfilling prophecy is a tool we have in our toolkit. That many of us don't think of deploying to help us.

[00:18:07] Jamil, this has been a fantastic conversation. Before we end, I'd like to ask you three questions. One I create just for you. And two, I've asked everybody who's been on this podcast. Are you up for that? 

[00:18:16] Jamil Zaki: Absolutely. 

[00:18:17] Matt Abrahams: You have used just eloquent language and analogies. You've talked about toolkits, you've talked about being lawyers, you've talked about leaps of faith. How much time do you spend thinking about how you communicate these concepts? And what sort of drives that because you have such an eloquent way of helping us to understand. Is that conscious? What do you think about to do that? 'Cause you do it so well. 

[00:18:42] Jamil Zaki: That's very kind of you to say, Matt. A secret about me is that before I was ever a neuroscientist or psychologist, I dreamed of being a novelist. I love the written word and always have. And so turns of phrase matter to me. Metaphors matter to me. And the beauty of language matters to me. So when I write, do a lot of iteration and I look for linguistic moments that turns of phrase that feel resonant to me. But I also learn an enormous amount through dyadic conversation, right? I consider myself really a thinker on the page, but also a thinker in conversation.

[00:19:20] Oftentimes, in real time when talking to somebody, I'll come up with a way of describing something that I never would have if I wasn't with them, right? And being shaped by those conversations also helps me figure out what resonates with other people and what resonates with me. 

[00:19:35] Matt Abrahams: I will absolutely read the novel you write when you take the time to do that. Thank you. And even in your description of what you do, you did so eloquently. A lot of us, I believe, in that conversation, in that dyadic exchange, a lot can be learned and just having a thought partner, maybe even if the person didn't know they were your thought partner, can be really helpful for those turns of phrase.

[00:19:55] Jamil Zaki: Yeah. You know, to build on that, I think a lot of us imagine thought to be something that occurs in our heads. I think thought happens in my hand when I'm writing and in the space between us when we speak. 

[00:20:07] Matt Abrahams: I love that quote. Thought happens in the space between us. And I would actually suggest that many of the things you talk about, trust, empathy happens in that space between us, I like that. 

[00:20:19] I'll be curious to get your answer to our second question. Who's a communicator that you admire and why? 

[00:20:25] Jamil Zaki: Oh, there's so many. A person who immediately comes to mind for me is the psychologist, Dan Gilbert at Harvard. I was a longtime admirer of Dan's and I'm lucky to call him a friend now. Dan showed me what writing and speaking about the human mind could be, right? So I shared that I wanted to be a fiction writer and I always loved neuroscience and psychology. But one thing that I missed about it was the poetry of language and description. And Dan, more than almost anybody I've ever encountered, just naturally is able to access that. His way of thinking about even very esoteric pieces of social psychology is so intuitive and so natural that he makes these ideas come to life for anybody regardless of their background. 

[00:21:15] Matt Abrahams: He is a great communicator. I'm a big fan of his written and spoken work. You remind all of us that we're not just translators for our material and our ideas, but we're also emotional conduits for it as well. Where the way we feel about it and what initiated our interest in it is something that's also important and he does a good job of it as you certainly do.

[00:21:35] Final question. What are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe?

[00:21:42] Jamil Zaki: I love this question. If I may, I want to talk about one type of communication that's been part of my lab's work recently, which is good disagreements. Disagreement, quite common, uh, in a lot of parts of our culture right now. And my lab and I have been really focused on, we bring people together to disagree about politics. And we ask ourselves, when do those conversations go well? What makes those disagreements useful? And there are three things that we see. 

[00:22:10] The first is to agree about what we disagree about. Oftentimes, people bring so many assumptions to these charged, potentially threatening conversations that they never bother to figure out whether they have common ground. They imagine that the Venn diagram between their perspective and the other person's perspective is really just two circles. But if you actually were to measure these people's views, there'd be much more overlap. So good disagreement often entails actually figuring out what the disagreement is before jumping into it.

[00:22:44] The second piece that we find is that it's much more effective to share stories than to share opinions. People often feel attacked if you just tell them, no, you were wrong, these are the facts. They feel much more open if you say, well, tell me about how you started to feel this way. And let me share how I started to feel that way. That's a natural narrative form of communication that brings up trust. And empathy as well. 

[00:23:12] And then the third piece is to be humble. I think a lot of us, especially in the context of disagreements, feel like we need to be confident to win. We're trying to battle this person to the ground. And it turns out that if we act that way and come into a disagreement that way, other people can tell and they don't react very well to it. That's a self-fulfilling prophecy. If instead we enter a disagreement with the goal of accurately representing ourselves, but also learning from the other person. If we show that humility, if we admit when we're uncertain and ask questions of the other person, well, first of all, we actually do learn more from them.

[00:23:53] But second, that self-fulfilling prophecy flips from something gloomy into something virtuous. That other person ends up listening to us more, opening up more. If you want somebody to pay attention to your perspective, one of the best things that you can do is show that you're paying attention to theirs first.

[00:24:11] Matt Abrahams: I am so glad that you are studying disagreement and good disagreement in our world today. It is such a big challenge. It's not surprising to me that you would end up studying that because I see it as sort of a crucible for all the things you're interested in. Cynicism and empathy and trust. The notion of figuring out what we agree on in our disagreement. The use of story, clearly something that's right in the bullseye of what we talk about. 

[00:24:36] Jamil, thank you so much for your time. Super instructive. This notion of cynicism and how to bolster hopeful skepticism, the notion of trusting loudly, positive gossip, all of this is so helpful. Thank you for your time and best of luck on your new book.

[00:24:55] Jamil Zaki: Matt, this has been delightful and thank you for all you do to bring these great messages to so many people. 

[00:25:02] Matt Abrahams: Thank you for joining us for another episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. 

[00:25:07] To learn more about how we create our social reality, please listen to Episode 84 with Brian Lowery. And to better understand connection and deepening relationships, check out Episode 128 with David Brooks.

[00:25:20] This episode was produced by Jenny Luna, Ryan Campos, and me, Matt Abrahams. Our music is from Floyd Wonder. With thanks to Podium Podcast Company. Please find us on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe and rate us. Also follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram and check out fastersmarter.io for deep dive videos, English language learning content, and our newsletter.