From the Vault: Cynicism, Part 2

This is an I Heart Podcast. Guaranteed human. No gloss, no filter. Just stories, spoken without fear. A person who is not generous cannot be an artist. The world will be at peace only when it is ruled by poets and philosophers. Listen to my weekly podcast, the Pooja Bhachon on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Come for the honesty, stay for the fire. What a scream. We installed telephone wires across rural Britain over a century ago, and you're still paying to use them for your broadband today. Ha ha ha. If it ain't broke, what? Stop! Your days of selling phone age broadband are over. Blast! I've spilled the beans. Upgrade to 100% full fibre. Gigaclear, faster broadband for rural Britain from only 19 pounds a month. Price may rise during contract. T's and C's apply. Check availability at gigaclear.com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. It's Saturday, vault episode, cynicism, part two. Originally published for 17, 2025. This is part two of four. Let's dive right in. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of the Pooja Bhachon Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb. And I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with part two in our series on cynicism, the tendency to believe other people are selfish, untrustworthy, and immoral. In part one, we talked about what cynicism means and its modern usage, and we contrasted that with similar but distinct concepts like pessimism and also with cynic philosophy, the latter being a school of philosophy born in ancient Greece that emphasized moral integrity, self-sufficiency, and virtue achieved in part by shedding pretensions, like ignoring the pressure to conform and living in accordance with our nature. The word cynic comes from the Greek word for dog, and so a cynic philosopher in the ancient sense might say that we can all learn something from watching the honest way that a dog lives according to its nature. This, of course, is quite different from what we mean by cynicism today in common language, which is a disposition of low social trust, the tendency to believe, as we put it last time, that people are bad, people are selfish, and morals are fake. Yeah, yeah. Ancient philosophic cynics be like a dog. Modern cynics dog eat dog. Yes. Now, last time we also talked a bit about cynicism in literature with my observation that really, like the most cynical writing I could find anywhere was all in the Bible, which I'm not sure exactly what to make of that, but that is kind of surprising and counterintuitive, perhaps. But it's like especially in the books of the prophets in the Hebrew Bible, like Micah and Jeremiah, full of just very eloquent, devastating condemnations of human nature, the heart is deceitful above all things. There is none that doeth good, no, not one, that sort of thing. We also discussed medical, psychological, and sociological research on the correlates of cynicism, with the overwhelming conclusion being that holding cynical beliefs about human nature and low trust in others is quite harmful to us in many different ways. It appears to be bad for our health, mental, and physical health. It is correlated with all kinds of undesirable outcomes, including early death. We didn't really get into this research last time, but you probably won't be surprised to learn it is associated with low-quality social relationships. And despite the archetype of the ruthless cynical striver and achiever, it also tends, on average, to make it harder for us to reach even our material goals, like making money and attaining positions of leadership, at least in part because cynical people waste a lot of time and resources trying to avoid being made a sucker and miss out on opportunities to cooperate with others for mutual benefit. So I think it's safe to say that believing everyone is just in it for themselves and cannot be trusted is, in so many ways, bad, bad, bad for us. It's bad for our lives. But of course, the somewhat heartwarming implied inverse of all this is the evidence that it really does us good to cooperate and trust people. Definitely so overlining there to all of this research we've been doing here. Now, in the last episode, we also raised a number of questions that we weren't able to fully answer yet, and we'll come back to them throughout the series. I think we'll look at at least one study today that sheds some light on this. But these were questions like, do more cynical or less cynical people actually have a better predictive model of the world? Like whose model of how other people behave is more accurate? And in any given situation, how can we know if we're being too trusting, too cynical, or if we're striking just the most reasonable balance? And also, given that it comes with so many clear downsides, what, if anything, is the benefit of cynicism? Well, I'm not sure this will actually help us answer any of these questions, but maybe it'll give us just a little more elbow room to work with the concept. I was reading through Ansgar Allen's cynicism book, M-I-T, that I referenced in the last episode. And he covers several subsets of modern cynicism. And here are a few that I thought might help us out. So one category is insider cynics. So the cynicism of contemporary professionals who believe that people are ultimately selfish and that these individuals do their best to survive in their organizations by dealing with their colleagues on those terms. So we might think of it as a, you know, I'm not here to make friends approach, but, you know, only to work or specifically to work with the idea being that maybe outside of that work environment, they are less cynical. Oh, okay. Well, I would certainly have questions about how skilled people are actually are at like turning cynicism on and off when switching between contexts. But you can certainly see how that would be useful. Maybe because, you know, it's quite reasonable to understand that like certain professional environments require a lot less trust, require you to be more doubting of people. Maybe if you are, I don't know, investigating murderers or something like that, like you really need to not just like trust people. There are so many movies about murder detectives being able to neatly separate their work life from their home life. But so hopefully if you were in a job like that, or if you're just in kind of a cutthroat business environment where everybody, you know, everybody's trying to edge other people out in deals, you would hope to be able to turn that off when you come out of that and get into your relationships in life. I guess it's questionable to what extent people can do that very well. I would agree with that. Yes. Another classification that he singles out are the master cynics. So rich and powerful contemporary cynics who hide their own cynicism by adopting the values and beliefs of people they hold power over. In a weird sense, this was kind of a kind of a puzzle because a person who's really cynical about politics would no doubt assume that every politician is a master cynic. That they're just when they're glad handing and so forth, they're just pretending to take on these values where deep down they know the truth like I know that people are just selfish and they're exploiting everyone as well. We're going to have to come back to the question of cynicism in politics and political participation because I think that raises all sorts of interesting questions. Yeah, there's been a lot of research, a lot of writing just on that area alone. Now, the third of the categories that I'm going to reference here, there are some additional ones that I'm not getting into, but the third one I want to reference here is paternalistic cynicism. And in this one holds a cynical view of human motivations and seeks to capitalize on those motivations, but not for personal gain, but for the greater good. And that one made me think a little bit more, maybe gives us a little more room to play when considering the effectiveness or possible effectiveness of cynicism. I was thinking like, let's say you wanted to encourage a certain behavior in the general public and you're presented with two messaging options, one that works based on a cynical view of human motivations, greed and self-interest, while the other appeals to the higher angels of their nature. Well, which is more likely to work? I guess it's going to depend on the messaging, of course, and the exact details of the target audience, general audience versus some narrower audience. But yeah, which worldview is a better starting place? I feel like this might work as a good sort of practical thought experiment because it entails making a choice about how you're going to model the motivations of a given population. But on the other hand, we kind of come back to that sliding scale of cynicism. If one is cynical enough about the intended audience, then would any messaging seem like it would work? Like why are you even bothering if you're just assuming that everyone out there is just selfish? You might not be able to get them to stop littering or to recycle or to, I don't know, wear seat belts. But maybe the paternalistic cynicism model is like, you must stop littering and you must be kind to your fellow human being or you will go to hell, something like, you know, like appealing to your base personal interest in order to get you to do something that the messenger sees as good. Yeah, bring it back to fear, right? Maybe I'm just muddying the waters. There are so many different areas you can get into in discussions of modern cynicism. Rob, one thing you said in the last episode that I thought was really insightful and I have kept thinking about ever since we recorded that is that you said maybe one of the appeals of cynicism is that expressions of cynicism are cathartic statements like, people suck. When you say things like that or when somebody else says that and you get to agree with them, it feels like a psychological pressure release valve by like making a statement of that sort. You're sort of blowing off steam. And of course, this can be true even for people who are not especially cynical on average, having these little moments of situational cynicism. But I was thinking more about the catharsis element and I wonder if this association of cynicism with cathartic relief also tells us something about how people can acquire generalized dispositional cynicism. Like, what if the person who is very cynical on average gets to be that way by like habituating themselves to a desire for that momentary catharsis that you get from saying people suck? Does that make any sense? Yeah, like you dip your hand into the cynicism cookie jar a few times too often and the crumbs begin to stick. Yeah, I was thinking about this when I was looking at some material related to cynicism in the workplace, which is its own huge area of consideration that we're not really going to get into in this episode per se. But I was just thinking about, okay, if one's really cynical regarding one's employers, one's corporate overlords, you might excuse any amount of inaction or slacking based on the view that, well, they don't really care about me. They're not invested in me. They're not paying me enough and so forth, any grievance you might imagine. And maybe just maybe in small doses, this gives you space to let things slide in ways that ease your work burden or create space for something else you want to do. And yeah, maybe it's a situation where if you stick your hand into that cookie jar too often, it does become your default view, at least of your work situation, and maybe it bleeds over into other areas as well. That is an interesting possibility. So you're in a kind of a pressure inducing scenario and you, for whatever reason, you can get little moments of relief from that pressure by resorting to cynical evaluations. And so does that create a kind of addiction? Like you associate the moment of cathartic cynicism with relaxation of the pain or with pleasure even or something like that and you just kind of keep pressing the pleasure button until that's just what your personality is. I don't have research to back up that interpretation of where cynicism comes from, but that is an interesting possibility. I wonder if it ever sets in that way. Yeah, yeah. I also was thinking in terms of dealing with, let's say, a corporation or a company. Like it's one thing to sort of initially think cynically about like this faceless thing, this organization. But of course, organizations are made up of people. And so I wonder how the cynicism might spread where you might generally have cynical ideas about a company, but then those cynical ideas end up applying to certain heads of that company, but then it could potentially trickle down. And then where does it stop? Like who stops being the face of the company? I guess they have to be cynical enough. They have to share your cynicism in order to be like your brothers in arms against the company, that sort of thing. Yeah, yeah. You know, actually this sort of gets a little bit into something I'm going to talk about in the paper I'm about to explain, but there are different environments. There are different sort of environments and contexts that encourage and reward different levels of cynicism. There can be very like cynicism positive organizations. Like if you are within a company that is very cruel and in which you don't do very well by placing trust in people, it can be quite reasonable to end up responding with the generalized cynicism about interactions within that company. Organizational culture is a thing. So anyway, so I want to turn to a concept in psychological research on cynicism that I found really interesting, and that is the so-called cynical genius illusion. So I was reading about this in a paper by a couple of researchers that I cited in part one of the series. These scientists are Olga Stavrova, a professor of psychology at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, and Daniel Elbrecht at the University of Cologne in Germany. These two published a paper in the year 2018 in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, and the paper was called The Cynical Genius Illusion Exploring and Debunking Lay Beliefs About Cynicism and Competence. Now they begin by acknowledging a lot of the things we talked about in the last episode. They define cynicism as the main cognitive component of hostility. They're talking about it pretty much in the same terms we are, a belief that other people, you should be suspicious of their motives, that they are primarily motivated by self-interest, that they can't be trusted and will harm you, and then they run through the long list of ways that cynicism appears to be bad for us, bad for our lives, in health, in relationships, in ability to attain goals, and so forth. However, the authors complicate that picture by noting that if you just look at popular culture and literature and folk wisdom, cynicism does not seem to have an on-the-hole negative reputation. To read from their introduction here, quote, Among 19th and 20th century writers in popular figures, cynicism has often been seen as a sign of intelligence and wit. American writers Ambrose Bierce and Lillian Hellman praised cynicism as an art of seeing the true nature of things. Bernard Shaw referred to cynicism as a, quote, power of accurate observation, and John Stuart Mill noticed that, quote, It is thought essential to a man who has any knowledge of the world to have an extremely bad opinion of it. And as for the other authors they named, I looked up some of the cynical quotes. I can't believe I didn't think of Ambrose Bierce as a good source of literary cynicism in the last episode. But in the Devil's Dictionary, Bierce defines a cynic as someone, quote, whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. They also cited Lillian Hellman. Her version of this was, quote, Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth. And I do think there's something interesting in Hellman's phrasing here, because of the emphasis on tone, it is an unpleasant way of saying what is true. So what is the difference between somebody, just quote, being real and somebody being cynical? It might be in the substance of what they say and how they think. It might be like, you know, material substantive differences. But I think sometimes we make that distinction based on whether there is negative emotion in their expression. Like if they are counseling us against trust, did they deliver that counsel with anger or contempt? Anyway, so you've got all this literature that equates cynicism with the kind of wisdom and, you know, like the power to see what is really going on. Also, the authors here point out that if you draw up a list of like cynical characters in popular culture, they don't tend to be pitiable wretches dealing with setbacks imposed by their lack of faith in humankind. More often, cynicism in fictional characters is presented as gruff, hard-won realism and wisdom. The cynical character has knowledge, insights, and powers of deduction not available to their more trusting peers. So think of Sherlock Holmes, or the authors give the example of House from House MD. I'm not a watcher of House, but I'm familiar with the character. I mean, you could do a full stop after Sherlock because Sherlock, of course, influences so many different similar characters and casts a long shadow across English language and fiction in other languages, but casts a long shadow across our media. Yet it is interesting to think about Sherlock Holmes in these terms because, yes, Sherlock Holmes is presented as being, you know, somewhat emotionally detached, but not, you know, certainly he's fighting the good fight. He is on the side of the good guy and will sometimes even, you know, break the rules a little bit or bend them in order to make sure that justice is served. But on the other hand, I think if you look closely enough at Sherlock, I mean, he's also a character who at times admits that he's never loved anyone or has certainly never had a romantic love in his life. He also struggles horribly with addiction at one point, you know, so, you know, he's not an angel. But again, I guess this part of his presentation, he's hard boiled. It's hard one cynicism that he uses in order to solve the crimes that he's presented with. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that is actually generally true. Cynical characters are often presented as suffering as a result of their own cynicism, but not wrong because of it. Like that their cynicism is something that hurts them and it makes them sad and lonely, but it also gives them cognitive superiority. It gives them intelligence and wisdom and power to see through the facade and see what's really happening. Yeah. So based on this background of the cynical geniuses in fiction and the sort of cynical wit and wisdom from literature, the authors conducted a number of different studies. They did four studies to explore common beliefs about the link between cynicism and cognitive superiority and competence. And then three more studies to look at whether there actually is a link. So do people in general think that cynicism is a sign of knowledge, intellect and competence? Do cynics actually seem smarter and are they actually smarter and more competent than the rest of us? Well, Sherlock is above reproach, but yeah, I'm curious to hear how it relates to real people. So the authors begin by acknowledging some existing research that touches on these questions. For example, there was a study by Evans and Vanda Calceda published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin in 2018 called the reputational consequences of generalized trust. And this study looked at what we, it was just sort of a survey of what we tend to think of people when we know that they are high in trust or low in cynicism. The findings were that high trust individuals are seen as moral and seen as sociable, but also seen as less competent. And this kind of makes sense as a familiar personality archetype, right? Like Johnny, Johnny is so trusting. He's a good guy. He's friendly, but he doesn't know what he's doing. So if showing generalized trust makes people think we're less competent, does that imply that showing generalized distrust makes people think we're more competent? Perhaps. However, the authors also found here that people see you as more competent if you display what they call discriminant ability, which is the ability to tell the difference between a situation in which you should trust and situations in which you should not. And this takes us back to the question we mentioned in part one. Obviously, nobody either trusts or distrusts in every situation. So how do you determine how cynical it is reasonable to be in this situation? And how do we know if we're off balance? Now, the authors also discussed reasons that people might think it is wise to be cynical. One is pretty familiar, better safe than sorry reasoning. They write, quote, in many domains, the consequences of false negative errors, e.g., believing that someone is trustworthy when they really are not, have often been more costly than false positive errors, e.g., believing that someone is untrustworthy when they really are trustworthy. Overhuman evolutionary history, making the cognitive system of modern humans biased toward false alarms, which is hard to argue with, right? Like, in this series, we are showing lots of evidence that it is bad for you to be highly chronically cynical. And yet, it's true that more often, if you distrust a trustworthy person, the immediate consequences are fairly limited. But if you trust an untrustworthy person, the consequences can be disastrous. Yeah, we talked about this a little bit in the last episode, type one errors and cognition, you know? It's like, you've got to make your way across an open field. And, you know, there's going to be a time cost and probably like, you know, an anxiety cost to checking every bush along the way to make sure there's not a tiger in there to jump out and get you. But, you know, the way our brains work and the way we're hardwired, it's like, we know that that's one sort of risk. I'm going to lose some time and I might, you know, feel horrible the whole way versus getting eaten by a tiger. Yeah, one of those is like a mutt, like looms far larger in our short term threat analysis. One side of the balance has an infinite cost on it. Yeah. So it's like kind of hard to outbalance that. Even though like wasting all your time and resources checking every bush, that really does matter. Like over time, that hugely impacts your quality of life. Yeah, yeah, especially of course, you know, when you get into not only real tigers, but all the paper tigers in one's life, you know? So anyway, they say that a general appreciation for the merits of the better, safe, than sorry framework could lead to the widespread notion that cynics are smarter people. They're more knowledgeable and more competent. Why did you cope with a reckless father like me? Join me, Pooja Bhatt, as I sit down every week with directors, actors, musicians, technicians and beyond. You don't need to work with the biggest people and the biggest sound to have great music. I have gone through the Saab Siddhi Khachakar, reached the pinnacle, stung by the sneaker, I've fallen down again. I am not writing actively anymore and when I see my old work, it kind of saddens me. I am only as good as the last shot that I gave. Mom's gone, but don't shut the theater. The show must go on. Listen to my weekly podcast, the Pooja Bhatt show on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Come for the honesty, stay for the fire. Now continuing the background review, the authors also get into existing research on whether there is an actual link between cynicism and competence. So now we're asking not about how cynics are perceived, but about what their relative competence level actually is. And this, I guess, comes back to another question we brought up in part one. Do cynics or non-cynics have a better predictive model of the world? And one very interesting way of studying this is the so-called trust game. So here's an example of a type of trust game. This was described in a paper called Why So Cynical? Asymmetric feedback underlies misguided skepticism regarding the trustworthiness of others. This was by Detlef Fetchenhauer and David Dunning in the journal Psychological Science in 2010. And it describes this, what is sometimes called an investing game, but they call it a trust game. And it goes like this, quote, In the game, the trustee is given money that can be kept or handed to a completely random and anonymous stranger, the trustee. If the trustee hands his or her money over, the amount of money is quadrupled, e.g. $5 becomes $20, and trustees have two options. They can either split the money evenly between themselves and the trustee, e.g. give $10 back and keep $10 for themselves, or they can keep all the money for themselves. So the way the game works is, I'm the trustee, I'm the person who gets to make the first decision. If I trust you and you are trustworthy, we both benefit and I double my money. If I trust you and you are not trustworthy, I get nothing. So the authors did this experiment lots of times and some interesting patterns came out. They found that trusteers estimate the rate of trustworthiness of anonymous strangers in the game. They estimate it will be between 45 and 60%. So it seems that most people think it's a little better than a coin flip chance that the other person will honor their trust and split the money for mutual benefit. In reality, the trustees honored the trust and split the money around 80 to 90% of the time. So people in this game massively underestimated how trustworthy random strangers would be. At least in the context of this game, anonymous strangers were something like 20 to 50% more trustworthy and cooperative than people expected them to be. Isn't that interesting? That's crazy. Yeah, 80 to 90% of the time. That's higher than I would have guessed. But then again, it's like, I like to think that if someone offered me this scenario and I was not too cynical and trusted that it was not some sort of a scam, I would be as trustworthy. Can I offer? I think maybe one thing that could be working in this particular scenario is that it makes sense to be wary of people who are offering to double your money in financial transactions. But I think that makes sense when people come to you and they say, like, hey, you give me some money and I'll double it. If somebody says that, they're not telling you the truth almost always. So there's a good reason to be wary there. This is a different thing because the trustee in this game is not somebody who is coming out of nowhere to offer you money if you just give them some first. They're a random stranger who has been pulled into this experiment designed by somebody else. And so I think what this shows is most of the time, given the opportunity to be trustworthy and cooperate, most people will. But also it makes sense to be wary of people who are claiming they're trying to help you cooperate for mutual benefit if they're coming out of nowhere with this claim. That's often going to be a scam. Does that make sense? Yeah, I think so. But anyway, so yeah, in the trust game, most people are very trustworthy and players are on average way too cynical about their fellow human being. They are missing out on lots of opportunities to double their money. And this is consistent with research by Miller in 1998 and 1999, finding that people just tend to grossly overestimate the selfishness and underestimate the trustworthiness of strangers. In this particular paper, the authors note that cynicism might grow from what they call asymmetric feedback. And the way that works is this. When you trust somebody and you get betrayed, you get very clear feedback that it was wrong to trust. The downside of granting your trust is very apparent to you. They walk away with the money, you get nothing and it's clear to you what happened. But when you refrain from trusting people, the downsides are often invisible to you because you don't actually see the lost opportunity as a scenario that plays out in front of you. You have to imagine it as a counterfactual. It's not concrete and in your face like being betrayed is. So you don't really get conditioned by feedback from instances where you harmed yourself by withholding trust. Does that make sense? Yeah, it's kind of like, here's a scenario. Let's imagine that you're just really pedantic when looking at the checks when you go out to eat with friends. You're like, all right, I want to see everybody's work. I've got to make 100% sure this is fair. And maybe it's because at some point someone really did stick you over one of these situations. And so it may be that is more apparent to you. You're never going to forget that, that you were wronged in this way. But if you're just overly pedantic when it comes to the bills, eventually people might stop asking you to join them for dinner. And that might be very invisible to you that that's happening. Yes, you don't realize. Yeah, it's just like, things are not as good now and I don't know why I'm feeling lonely. Or as a more direct comparison, if you're not looking at the checks all the time, you might not notice the times when somebody made a mistake in your favor. You never even noticed that. It just goes right by you. That is a good comparison. But anyway, what the study found is that if you give subjects symmetric feedback about the trustworthiness of others, it tended to reduce the subjects cynicism. So like, let's say you play the trust game, symmetric feedback would be Rob, whether or not you decide to hand somebody the $5 and try to cooperate to quadruple it, you get to find out what they would have done either way. So, you know, you get to keep playing the game that way. And it turns out if you play it that way where people keep seeing, oh, I kept the money, but they I saw that they would have doubled my money if I just trusted them. And you get to see that happen over and over. That actually does decrease people's cynicism, which also is interesting in that it gives you at least a little bit of an idea where some elements of cynicism could be coming from. It could be related in part to this asymmetric buildup of information. We get to see where trust fails very clearly. But the opportunities we lose out on by not granting trust are often just like we don't even realize what's happened. We don't even realize anything. We don't even know what we're missing. Yeah. So this research does not give us a complete picture, but I think some evidence is starting to accumulate that the cynic does not have a highly accurate internal model of the world. They might in some scenarios, but generalized cynicism is not like, as some of these writers were saying, seeing things as they really are. In fact, cynicism often causes us to incorrectly predict the behavior of other people, assuming they will be more selfish and treacherous than they really are. Now, coming back to the main paper I was talking about, but Stavrova and Elobracht, they note some other research on the link between cynicism and competence. Again, contrary to the cynical genius archetype, the authors are able to cite a long list of studies looking at links between cynicism and various types of cognitive performance and ability. And they find it's exactly the opposite of what you might guess from the Sherlock Holmes example. Higher performance on various types of cognitive, academic and IQ tests is negatively correlated with cynicism. It is instead positively correlated with increased tendency to trust. There are a few confounding results here. It's not like every single study has found this, but the vast majority have. Some of the confounding results are, for example, they cite a 2013 study that found that higher IQ does not, on average, improve a person's ability to correctly predict who will be trustworthy and who will not. So you do better on cognitive tests. That doesn't mean that if we pair you up with Johnny and Billy in the trust game experiment, you can predict whether Johnny or Billy will be more likely to help you out. It doesn't help us in that regard. Yeah, it's like the compass is already pulling you in one direction and another in however high your IQ is. I mean, that's just the kind of mental energy that ends up being wrapped around the initial impulse. Another thing to keep in mind here is that, of course, while various cognitive and IQ and academic tests can tell you, they can tell you a lot of things about cognitive ability, they don't tell you everything. So they can tell you about certain kinds of skills with reasoning, certain kinds of intelligence, but there are always going to be elements of intelligence that are not perfectly captured by these sorts of tests. So the authors begin to develop a possible hypothetical model to explain what's going on here. They say, what if intelligence, knowledge and competence don't really help you very much in identifying who to trust in a given scenario? They don't tell you really if Johnny or Billy, both of whom you've just met, is more trustworthy. But instead, they help you evaluate the scenario itself to decide whether to deploy a more cynical or a more trusting framework given the environment and the circumstances. The authors write, quote, High levels of competence might allow individuals to correctly identify the corruptness of their environment and adjust their level of cynicism to match it. Following this reasoning, high competence individuals might hold adaptable attitudes and recur to cynicism only when it seems warranted, while their less competent counterparts might show more cognitive rigidity and relying on the better, safe, than sorry heuristic tend to endorse cynicism indiscriminately. So if this model is correct, they're saying it can be efficient to just remain in better, safe, than sorry mode when you lack the ability to tell whether you're dealing with a corrupt, untrustworthy environment or not. Yeah, it just makes sense. We can all think of examples where the scenario is very clear, like, okay, even if someone is out to get me, this is not the environment where they can just really take me for all I'm worth. I'm literally handing somebody a $5 bill. What are they going to do? They're going to run away into the woods and keep my $1.50 in change. The risks seem low. So on to Stavrova and Elabrax actual experiments. And I'll start with the very short version of their findings. First of all, they find yes, on average, across multiple experiments, regular people tend to believe that cynicism is a sign of cognitive superiority and others. If you think people are bad, you think people are selfish and morals are fake. On balance, people will tend to assume you are smarter and more competent, especially at certain types of cognitive tasks, things involving like logic and numbers and stuff. They're more likely to assign you important cognitive tasks like doing mathematical calculations and logical analysis of documents if they think you're cynical. And on the other hand, the authors found in their experiments know on average, cynicism is not associated with cognitive superiority or greater competence. They did three studies based on data from about 200,000 subjects across 30 different countries and showed that on average, cynicism was negatively correlated with tests of cognitive ability and tests of academic knowledge and competencies. So this included all kinds of things like reading comprehension, mathematical skills, scientific literacy, technological literacy, and so forth. And this negative association between cynicism and cognitive tests was true even after controlling for confounding variables like age, gender, household income, wealth, test language proficiency, and Big Five personality traits. Now, one major distinction here is that they found that people who tested higher incompetence tended to have attitudes of contingent trust. They might be trusting by default, but we're not rigid in that regard and would become more cynical if it was warranted situationally or based on the environment and cultural context. Whereas people scoring lower incompetence tended to accept an unconditionally cynical worldview. In the words of the author is quote, suggesting that at low levels of competence, holding a cynical worldview might represent an adaptive default strategy to avoid the potential costs of falling prey to others cunning. Now, I wanted to expand on these findings with a few notes. One of the things about the early tests of people's perceptions of cynicism, a control they had here is that the authors didn't just ask about cognitive competence. They also asked about social and moral competence. And quite along the lines you might expect, people tended to think that low trust individuals would be better at cognitive things like math, logic and critical thinking. But they thought that high trust individuals would be better at social tasks like cheering up a depressed friend or taking care of a stray animal. So it wasn't just like across the board, we think cynics are great, we think cynics are better at everything. It's that people tend to think cynics are better at certain types of intelligence based skills, things like math and logic and so forth. So a lot of this is sounding kind of like when you see somebody smoking a cigarette, you know, they can look pretty cool, especially in movies. But we all we know deep down that like, well, the smoking the cigarette doesn't actually make you cool, but we can't help it. And likewise, you might think, well, whom, you know, you might say, OK, Dr. smoking a cigarette, I have questions, maybe this is not the doctor for me. But private detective smoking a cigarette. Well, obviously that's the guy I want looking after my interest. Oh, do you mean like the smoking of the cigarette implies like a rejection of the consensus about the health effects of it or just that it. I mean, I guess that often is suggested. It's like, I don't think it's hurting me. I don't care what people say. I guess there are two ways of going. It's like it would be cynical, I think it's part of a cynical worldview to say like, these doctors who say it causes cancer or heart disease, they don't know what they're talking about. I can just smoke. It's fine. Or there's the version that's like, I don't care what happens to me, which I think is a little bit different than cynicism, maybe they could go along with cynicism. Yeah, yeah. But I follow you in general because yeah, there's like, apart from thinking that cynical people are smart, there is also a tendency to think that cynical people are cool. Yeah. That's in fact, I've got a section where maybe we'll get more into that in just a minute here. Scientific analysis of the coolness of things. Down every week with directors, actors, musicians, technicians and beyond. You don't need to work with the biggest people and the biggest sound to have great music. I have gone through the Saab Siddhi Khachakar, reached the pinnacle, stung by the sneaker and I've fallen down again. Yeah. I am not writing actively anymore and when I see my old work it kind of saddens me. I'm only as good as the last shot that I gave. Mom's gone but don't shut the theater. The show must go on. Listen to my weekly podcast, the Pooja Bhachow on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Come for the honesty, stay for the fire. Trends come and go. Your skin barrier doesn't. E45 lotion is effective, science-backed hydration for everyday use. Lightweight, fast absorbing and trusted to do what your skin needs. No fuss, no compromise. Just soft, smooth, healthy looking skin every day. Grab your E45 lotion now. Another thing here is that they try different like wordings and types of questions across multiple replication attempts to make sure that like the cynical genius effect was robust and it was robust but the effects were modulated a little bit by changes in phrasing such as whether you described the opposite of cynicism as an idealistic versus a positive view of human nature. Apparently people think being idealistic about human nature is a little bit dumber than being positive about human nature. It's always funny how just changing, swapping a word out can have some effects there. They also replicated these findings in different samples. So they did some online surveys, international online surveys and they did some in-person tests of university students in Germany. They did some with British adults and the cynical genius effect appeared to varying degrees in all the groups tested here. However, in some of these experiments respondents got to rate essentially how cynical they would like a person assigned to a cognitive task to be. And the breakdown to be clear was not toward a preference for extreme cynicism but for higher than average cynicism. So one example here is that in a group of British adults selecting between hypothetical candidates to solve intellectual problems, participants quote desired mix of cynical and non-cynical tendencies was 56% cynical to 44% non-cynical. So on average the group, they thought we need somebody smart. We want somebody who is a little bit more cynical than the median. That makes sense. You know, if you were able to move the slider on your, your so like your Android doctor, your Android lawyer or whatever it happens to be. Yeah, you want the right mix of cynicism, a little more than the average person but not too much. This will be interesting to get into later when we start talking about like absolute cynicism and what, what, where, what that is and where we stand in relation to it. Yeah. So as for the actual inverse link between cynicism and competence, when broken down by test domain, I was interested to see that the effect was strongest in reading skills and weakest in information processing speed. So in these tests, apparently highly cynical people holding up relatively okay with speed of reasoning, doing a lot worse in like reading comprehension. And finally, getting to the element of the paper, comparing cynicism, competence and environment. The authors tested levels of cynicism cross referenced with these cognitive tests in subjects across 30 different countries. And they found that in countries that scored low in corruption and high in rule of law, according to an international database called the world governance indicators, the effect we've been talking about did hold true. But in countries with high corruption and eroded rule of law, the effect was greatly diminished. Quote, the harsher the social climate, the more these high competence people embraced a cynical worldview. So kind of along the lines of results we talked about in the last episode, it hurts you materially to hold cynical views, unless those views are correct in the environment where you operate. Along these lines, the authors discuss ways that cynicism might be learned directly from personal experience. Despite the fact that they tried to control for the influence of variables like age, gender and wealth, it's still possible that quote, higher levels of cognitive ability, academic competence and education might protect from adverse life experiences. Not only as they allow discovering potential fraud, but also as they increase the chances of living in a safe and friendly environment, providing more evidence for a positive than for a negative view of human nature and consequently preventing cynicism development. So that's talking about the idea that like that education and cognitive skills, they might not just be about how accurately you're seeing the world around you, they might actually over time influence what the world around you is like. On the other hand, since cynicism entails generalized distrust, quote, cynical versus less cynical individuals might be more distrustful of the opinions and knowledge of others, a behavior that can eventually prevent them from expanding their knowledge and understanding. So that seems like it tracks the idea that if you're cynical about potential information sources, then you're more likely to sort of back your way into a corner where you have very few informational sources coming in and they're the only ones you're going to accept are the ones that back up your existing cynicism. Yes. But they say, of course, there is more work to do exploring the different possible causal mechanisms here. So this paper does find good robust evidence for the cynical genius illusion that the illusion is widely present and it is in fact an illusion. But the questions about why are still largely open. One thing I wonder about a lot of the cognitive tasks that subjects said they would entrust to a cynical person more than a non cynical person. I was looking through the inventory and a lot of these tasks involved scrutiny of details like crunching numbers following complex logic analyzing scientific results things like that. And I wonder if the same pattern would hold for cognitive tasks that people associate less with scrutiny of details and instead with things like creativity and imagination. And to be clear, the cynical genius effect would be an illusion, even if it were only applied to scrutinizing cognition. But I wonder if the illusion is actually more specific to certain kinds of cognition. Yeah, yeah, very much that Sherlock Holmes scenario. But also coming back to this question we've asked several times now, are there any benefits to generalized cynicism? It comes with tons of harms for the cynic. It hurts you to be cynical, but are there any benefits? Well, first of all, this paper does find if you're in a really corrupt, untrustworthy environment, obviously it does make more sense to be more cynical. That's just like a correct understanding of how your environment operates. Number two, even if you're not in a more corrupt, untrustworthy environment, if you don't understand your environment and you're basically out of your depth, cynicism may protect you from catastrophic outcomes. It's like, I don't really know what's going on here. Don't know if I can trust or not. So by default, I'm not going to trust. That's better safe than sorry. And then third, I think this is going to be mainly related to the cynical genius illusion. Having a reputation for cynicism may have the effect of convincing people around you that you are very smart and intellectually savvy, even though on average, the opposite is more likely to be true. So there's a kind of social premium incentive to appear to be cynical. In a lot of cases, it's going to make people think that you know something they don't and you're a wise and world-weary and intelligent person. Yeah, cynicism is often kind of a safe gamble at like a cocktail party or a mixer, right? If politics should come up, which of course is bad manners anyway. But if it were to come up, you might say something that is just kind of a blanket statement of cynicism, like, I love politicians. They're all the same. And then what are the people are going to have to double down? They're going to have to come back and try to convince you, no, no, not all politicians. Some are great and they're going to look like the person who's naive, where you've already, you know, melted your cynicism high horse. We've talked about this before. Yeah, the like all politicians are the same as the kind of statement that I think is just facially untrue. It could not be true, obviously wrong, but you feel foolish trying to argue with it. Yeah. And I think that goes beyond politics. I mean, just generally trying to argue with the cynic is so difficult. Statements of cynicism often come with this a priori texture of factuality. It just feels self-evidently true, even with it, even when it's obviously wrong, when it would be absurd for it to be true. No Gloss, No Filter. Just Stories. Spoken without fear. Addiction is a disease and it should be looked upon as any other disease. How did you cope with a reckless father like me? Join me, Pooja Bhatt, as I sit down every week with directors, actors, musicians, technicians and beyond. You don't need to work with the biggest people and the biggest sound to have great music. I have gone through this sub-credits, Chakka. Reached the pinnacle, stung by the snake and I've fallen down again. Yeah, I am not writing actively anymore and when I see my old work it kind of saddens me. I'm only as good as the last shot that I gave. Mom's gone but don't shut the theatre. The show must go on. Listen to my weekly podcast, the Pooja Bhatt show on the iHeart Radio app. Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Come for the honesty. Stay for the fire. One more thing before I wrap up from the Stavrovia and Ila Brax study here. Talking about, in their discussion they talk about why do we tend to assume highly cynical people are smarter than the rest of us, even though this is usually not the case. We touched on this earlier but the authors do offer a few ideas based on common cognitive biases. In particular they call out negativity bias and loss aversion. Negativity bias is the observation that we are more psychologically affected by negative things than we are by positive things of equal intensity. And loss aversion is very similar. It's the finding that we're more strongly motivated to avoid a loss than we are to achieve a gain of the same value. So here's an example. I find a $5 bill on the sidewalk. Oh that's nice. Quickly forget about it. Versus I drop a $5 bill down a storm drain. Why me? I hate this. It's like the dollar value is exactly the same but the loss is more memorable, it's more salient and will cause a greater emotional reaction. And I think for those reasons we are more likely to learn something from it, to try to draw a general inference that we will take and apply to the rest of life from these moments of loss than from gains of the exact same value. Yeah, I mean I'd go as far as to say that at the very least you're more likely to remember dropping that $5 than finding a $10. Yeah. And there's probably an interesting thought experiment to be had and just trying to determine at which point the find value would be equal to a much lesser loss value. I think work on that exact question has been done. I don't have it pulled up in front of me but I think we've looked at that before. Yeah. I'm sure for some reason seeing the exact numbers is going to be really funny. But anyway, so you apply these biases, negativity bias and loss aversion to the domain of trust and cynicism. And they could mean that the pain of being betrayed is much greater than the pleasure of having our trust rewarded even given the exact same original act of trust. And this is back to the mental cherry picking that you mentioned last time, Rob. You know, you can always like think of these really sticky examples of times when you shouldn't have trusted someone or something. We may trust somebody 20 times, works out great 19 times, but the one time it did not work out is shocking and painful and we feel so hurt. And so from this we form an idea that people who do not trust easily have learned a lot of valuable lessons. Therefore they are generally knowledgeable, wise and smart. Another explanation comes back to that study from the background section that we talked about briefly about the invisibility of consequences in situations where we refrain from giving trust to our detriment. So again, you get to see what happens when you trust and that trust is betrayed. But when you withhold trust and you just miss out on an opportunity to gain, you don't really get to see that loss made concrete. It's just like it's another path you could have taken. You can even go without thinking about it. Yeah, that's right. Unless you're visited by Christmas spirits or something, you're just not going to have any alternate views. That's a really, you know what? I think a Christmas carol is a great example here. That is something that goes to Christmas past has to come and make the lost opportunities concrete. And then one last point the authors make that I thought was a very interesting point. They raise, what if the cynical genius illusion arises in part from biases of storytelling? We fill our lives with fictional stories. Fictional stories need to be entertaining. Stories are usually more entertaining if danger and conflict are heightened, if villains are meaner and more dangerous, if the stakes are high, if no one can be trusted. You can hear all these phrases in the Don LaFontaine movie trailer voice, can't you? That's what stories are made out of. Fictional storytelling selects for narratives about the dangers of trust and the risk of betrayal because stories like that are captivating to our attention and we want to know what happens next. So hostile and treacherous worlds may be more entertaining in a narrative, but it's possible that we draw incorrect inferences from those fictional worlds. We learn too much about how life works from unrealities that are specifically crafted to hack our attention and who are the smart savvy characters in these worlds. I think very often they are cynics who are very reluctant to trust. That's right. That's a great point. So anyway, that's all I've got on this study for now, but I think the cynical genius illusion is so interesting. I'm going to be thinking about this a lot in the days and weeks to come. Yeah, this will be an interesting one to bring into our Weird House Cinema discussions as we inevitably come around to a film that has a cynic genius in it. And I'm sure if I was to go back and look at some of the titles we've covered, we've probably encountered these sorts of characters before. Probably played by someone like Christopher Lee. Yes. All right. Well, on that note, we're going to go ahead and close out this episode, but we're going to come back with at least one more episode on cynicism. Again, this is a huge topic. In the next episode, I believe we're going to get into cynicism, politics and social media. So that should be a fun discussion. Either way, tune in. We're looking forward to getting into it. In the meantime, I'd like to remind everyone that Stuffed to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We have a short form episode on Wednesdays and on Fridays. We set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema. Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, JJ Pawsway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com. Stuffed to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. This is an iHeart podcast.