According to Thomas Hobbes, one of history’s most famous cynics, life is “nasty, cruel, and short.” Jamil ZakiIronically, this is likely true if you are someone who has a cynical, Hobbesian view of life, who sees the worst in humanity and distrusts no one, according to John F. Kelly, director of the Stanford Institute for Social Neuroscience in California.
Zaki didn’t always think this way. He’s spent 20 years studying and lecturing about the brain circuits behind empathy and kindness, but all that time he’d harbored the dirty secret that he was a cynic. He began to examine his cynical perspective after the death of his friend Emile Bruneau, who studied the neuroscience of peace and conflict and was “one of the most hopeful people I’ve ever met,” Zaki says. He discovered that being a cynic is not only harmful to our lives, it causes us to believe things that aren’t true. Luckily, as he explores in his upcoming book, there are tools we can use to combat cynicism. Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness.
Alison Flood: What is cynicism?
Jamil Zaki: Cynicism is the theory that humanity in general is selfish, greedy, and dishonest. Theories influence our behavior, what we do and don’t do. So cynics use their theories about people as a guide to how they behave in the social world. It changes how they see, it changes how they interpret other people, and it changes their behavior, such as not trusting other people.
What is the difference between cynicism and skepticism?
That’s really important….
