“If cynicism was a pill, it would be poison,” Zaki said. 

At Stanford, where he directs the Social Neuroscience Lab, Zaki and his colleagues have extensively researched cynicism, finding correlations between cynicism and stress, loneliness, unfulfilling relationships and even accelerated mortality rates. Their research has also revealed that the rate at which Americans feel unhappy and mistrusting of others is the highest it has been in decades; the country is in a 50-year-long trust deficit. 

Yet, Zaki said cynicism is enduring in part because people fear being seen as gullible, naïve or unintelligent. 

“It’s a suit of armor that doesn’t actually protect us but in fact suffocates us,” Zaki said. “If you’re cynical and can’t depend on people, you might not get taken advantage of, but you also lose out on friendship, collaboration, love and so many of the things that make life beautiful.” 

Regarding cynics as more intelligent is particularly ironic, as Zaki and others’ research indicates many significant assumptions people hold about each other simply aren’t true. 

In one study, Zaki set up one-on-one conversations between Democratic and Republican participants, charging them with discussing topics like gun control, abortion and climate change. Before the interactions kicked off, participants rated how they thought the other would behave. People overwhelmingly thought the worst — that their conversation partner was likely to be extreme, hateful or even violent. What the researchers found was the exact opposite. The conversations in fact decreased animosity and increased levels of mutual respect, with participants reporting the discussions as “delightful,” Zaki said.

“When we’re in community together, it’s really difficult to judge people in a black and white way,” he said. 

Trusting is an inherently vulnerable act, and Zaki shared four concrete steps people can take to make it a safer and more appealing option.

First, they should fact-check their cynicism by maintaining curiosity and interrogating their beliefs against what is factual. Second, people can take advantage of the troves of information and published scientific studies available to review, probing for information when they believe something is untrue. Third, taking small risks can make a difference, like striking up a conversation with a stranger or going to an event one wouldn’t typically attend. And finally, people must be open to learning from these experiences. 

“When we think like scientists, reality exceeds our expectations,” Zaki said. 

Although hope can serve as one antidote to cynicism, it does have limits. Zaki doesn’t suggest that cynicism is the only, or even the biggest, social problem, or that hope is a panacea. There are factors at play that create non-psychological systems that need non-psychological solutions, he argued. 

Zaki told the audience he has been thinking recently about Václav Havel, a Czech dissident who spent multiple periods as a political prisoner and eventually became the first democratically elected president in the Czech Republic. Zaki was struck by the idea that by putting faith in people now, society offers hope for the future. 

“He and Nelson Mandela were a model of hope in the face of deep oppression and injustice,” Zaki said. “Hope doesn’t mean accepting that things are actually great when they’re not — it means acknowledging that things are awful, but that many, many people want them to improve.”