2024-09-05
58 分钟Cynicism is not a very critical way of viewing the world.
It's not a very scientific way of viewing the world.
So when you have a blanket assumption that everybody's on the take, you stop paying attention to the cues that could actually help you learn about the world.
All we have to do to become more hopeful is to pay closer attention, right?
There's this stereotype that hope is blinkered, that it's this pair of rose colored glasses we put on the in fact, we're all wearing, or most of us at least, are wearing mud colored glasses right now.
Right?
Hope is a matter of taking those off and seeing the world through less of a biased lens, not more.
Okay, so let's be honest.
It is easy to feel disillusioned these days, to become a cynic.
A relentless stream of negative news and topic social media feeds paints a pretty bleak picture of humanity, kind of rife with greed, selfishness, doom and gloom.
It makes you start questioning, are people really capable of fundamental goodness or positive change, or are people in the world just bad, not even capable of being better?
Nobody blame you for defaulting to a cynical point of view.
But it turns out there are powerful reasons not to give in to this tendency.
In fact, cynicism cannot just crush your spirit.
It can damage your relationships, your career, your health, mental health, and life.
There is a powerful science backed alternative, not just hope, but what my guest today, researcher Jamil Zaki, calls hopeful skepticism.
So Jamil is a psychology professor at Stanford who has spent over two decades rigorously studying the science of human connection, empathy, cooperation, and trust.
His book, hope for the surprising science of human goodness.
It makes a really powerful data driven and story driven case that shatters our cynical assumptions.
And at the core, human beings are actually far kinder and more generous and more aligned in our hopes than we give each other credit for.