992: How to Break Free from Cynicism and Reclaim Hope with Jamil Zaki

Pete Mockaitis
Jamil, welcome.

Jamil Zaki
Thanks so much for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m so excited to dig into your wisdom here. Could you kick us off by sharing one of the most fascinating, surprising, and counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made about us humans and hope and cynicism?

Jamil Zaki
Sure. One of the, I think, counterintuitive discoveries is that when we think of hope, believing that the future can be better, thinking about how it could turn out well, what we want, we often imagine that that frame of mind is naive, like putting on a pair of rose-colored glasses. But it turns out that probably most of us are wearing a pair of mud-colored glasses already. We actually tend not to focus on the best things that could happen or the best parts of human nature.

We’re hyper-focused on the worst things that people do and all the untrustworthy and harmful events that we read about in the news. So, if anything, we’re biased away from hope, and being hopeful is not a matter of being naïve or sticking our head in the sand, or putting on glasses. It’s a matter of taking off those mud-colored glasses and seeing the world more clearly.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Jamil, I love it. Right from the get-go, we’re getting meta and your perspectives on hope are hopeful in and of themselves right away. So, tell us, if we’re skeptical, like, “Hmm, I’m not so sure that’s true, Jamil,” is there evidence, is there proof that, in fact, hope is more of an accurate, realistic view of what is and what is likely to be than our default mode?

Jamil Zaki
Yeah, first I want to jump on this great term that you just used, “skeptical,” and a lot of people think that being skeptical and being cynical are the same thing. They’re not. So, cynicism is this blanket assumption about people, that, overall, we are selfish, greedy, and dishonest. Skepticism is, instead, a more scientific way of thinking where you kind of don’t have blanket assumptions about everybody. Instead, you let the evidence guide you. You let people show you who they are and you learn from your experiences.

And it turns out that being skeptical is terrific. I mean, in no way am I saying that being hopeful should mean trusting everybody or ignoring all the people out there who really are cheating or doing harm in some other way. But, to your point, there’s lots of evidence that, when we become skeptical, cynicism actually falls apart.

So, for instance, people in study after study underestimate how trustworthy, generous, open-minded, and friendly other people are. That’s not to say that there aren’t jerks out there. Of course, there are, but the average person underestimates the average person. I’ll give you one example, Pete. So, in Toronto, there was a social experiment where researchers dropped wallets all over the city, and these wallets had money in them, and they had an ID card so that if the person who found them wanted to be a good Samaritan, they could return the wallet.

And the question that was asked of lots of people in Toronto was, “What percentage of these wallets do you think will come back?” And I wonder what you would guess. I know you’ve probably read the answer, but what you would have guessed before knowing?

Pete Mockaitis
Percent of the wallets? That’s so funny. Jamil, I’m a sucker for hypothetical scenarios because it’s like I’m solving a case study. I want all the details. So, there are some cash and some goodies in this wallet?

Jamil Zaki
There’s cash and there’s an ID card, so you can run away with it and make some money, or you can give it back to the person who clearly lost it.

Pete Mockaitis
Toronto. So, because I’ve heard that this could really vary by city, and Canadians are very polite and friendly, just a blanket stereotype. I guess you could do that if it’s good. So, I’m going to, say in Canada, let’s go with 55% return it.

Jamil Zaki
Yeah, 55, pretty bullish. I love it. You’re more optimistic than Canadians themselves. So, people in Toronto expected the return rate would be 25%. In fact, it was 80%.

Pete Mockaitis
Ooh, okay, even better.

Jamil Zaki
Yeah, and this experiment has been repeated all around the world, and the general trend is that most wallets are returned, and return rates reach 80% in several different countries. And also, that we don’t know that, that if you ask people for their forecasts, their expectations, they’re way bleaker than that. And this is true, again, all over the scientific landscape. It’s not just hypothetical situations. Real people underestimate what real people are like, in part because we are so captured by hyper-negative and, I suppose, yeah, hyper-negative and troubling portrayals of people in the media.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, this reminds me, and I’ve shared this story a couple times on the show, but I remember one day, I got a random LinkedIn message from someone who said they wanted to talk to me about careers in consulting. I said, “Okay, I mean, sure.” I didn’t have that much to do at the time, and he was local. I could just meet him at a coffee shop, a short walk from my apartment. And so, we chatted, and I had no connection to him. We were in a LinkedIn group that had many thousands of people in it.

And so, we chatted, and I noticed he had this notebook of all the people that he talked to, and I was like, “Wow, looks like you’ve talked to a lot of people. Are you just reaching out totally cold to total strangers like me?” And he said, “Yeah.” And I said, “Well, how often do people actually talk to you?”

And so, he had these detailed records in his notebook, and it was about 28% of total strangers, more than one in four, said, “You know, sure. I’ll take some time to chat with you about some career stuff.” And I thought that was exceptional because that’s a decent chunk of time for someone you don’t know at all, and again and again and again, folks were doing it. It was awesome.

Jamil Zaki
I love this story, and it rings so true. There’s a bunch of research where people are asked to predict, “If you try to talk with a stranger, or even deepen a conversation with an acquaintance, open up about something you’re going through, ask for a favor, try to provide support, how will it go?” And people inevitably think it will be awful, they’re like, “Oh, my gosh, this is going to be so cringe. People will put on their headphones and try to ignore me. There’ll be awkward silence.”

We think about the worst possible outcome of trying to connect with somebody because we don’t really have enough faith in each other. And it turns out that if these same experimenters ask people to go ahead and try that conversation with the stranger, try connecting deeper with a friend, it goes extremely well, far better than we think. So, our cynicism isn’t just clouding our judgment about what people are like, it’s directly standing in the way of opportunities to build new connections and deepen old ones.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s powerful. And then just that experience, experiencing that directly, I think probably packs a much bigger punch, Jamil, is my guess, than us sharing these cool studies, and trust us, humans are actually pretty good. And I recall that there’s some therapists, they’ll do homework, in which they’ll assign them, it’s like, “Hey, go ask women.”

I recall this from the Feeling Good Podcast. This therapist gave some homework, “Go ask women if any of them would ever be interested in dating a person who has once checked into an in-patient psychiatric facility for depression,” because he thought, “No one would ever want to be with me.” And when he did, what he heard most often back was, “Well, is he rich?”

And so, it was eye-opening, like, “Huh, okay, so this is not an immediate disqualify or deal-breaker for me. Aha!” So, we’ve got some evidence, and if you go out and do it for yourself, you’ll see even more potently and feel that. That’s cool.

Jamil Zaki
Yeah, this is a great poll and a really important connection because I think depression is a story that we tell about ourselves often, “I’m worthless. Nobody likes me,” and that story can become its own kind of prison because you don’t then collect the data. You don’t then reach out and have those conversations that could disprove the very story that you’re living with, so you end up in this situation where your depressive stories become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

And cynicism is kind of like that, except it’s not about ourselves. It’s stories about other people, about humanity. So, if you think that most people are only out for themselves, well, then you start to treat people that way. You start to kind of micromanage them, and monitor them, and even threaten them to make sure that they don’t run away with your money or betray you. You start to just act in an untrusting manner.

And guess what? That brings out the worst in other people. People reciprocate our kindness, generosity, and trust, and they retaliate against our selfishness, callousness, and mistrust. So, cynics, because they believe so little in people, treat people poorly, end up getting treated poorly in response, and then decide, “Aha, I was right all along.”

So, the way to break that cycle is exactly like you’re saying, this therapist’s homework from the Feeling Good Podcast, is to instead treat your life a little bit more like an experiment, to give yourself homework, to get out of your comfort zone, and try something new, whether it’s talking to a stranger or trusting somebody in your life in a new way, and don’t just do it.

As you do it, try to mark down, like this person did with his networking opportunities, mark down, “How did it go?” I call this encounter counting. Count and really record how these conversations go because, if you’re like most people, there will be pleasant surprises everywhere. And the goal is not to be surprised all the time, but rather, to learn from those surprises until we can update our expectations to be both more hopeful and more accurate.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s so good. Well, Jamil, it feels like we’ve already got our money’s worth for this in terms of this is powerful, enriching stuff. I already feel good and more hopeful myself. So, thank you for that treat. So, I’m curious then, could you share with us one of your favorite stories of someone who made the leap from a lot of cynicism to some more hope and saw some cool results? And if I could really put you on the spot, let’s have that be in the workplace.

Jamil Zaki
Oh, sure. I want to make it a type of workplace that’s a little bit unusual. So, this is the principal of a middle school. So, this is this great person, LaJuan White, she was a principal in schools around Brooklyn, and then decided she wanted to move out of the city. And when you’re in this public school system, you can’t decide the school that you go to.

And so, she was assigned this place called Lincoln Middle School in Syracuse, New York. York. She looked it up and it seemed terrifying. It was on a list of persistently dangerous schools, meaning that there was more than one violent incident per 100 kids per year. It was one of the least resourced schools in the state, and it had spit out four principals in the previous six years. So, this was not a workplace that you necessarily wanted to be in. She was being tapped to act as its leader.

And so, she showed up there, and immediately realized that it wasn’t that the kids at this school were awful people. It’s that the culture around them was bringing out their worst. So, teachers, for instance, were really quick to punish kids, to suspend them, even expel them if they did anything wrong, and they had this hair trigger to see the worst in the kids at the school. And White realized, “Wait a minute, we’re not putting any faith in these kids, so it’s no wonder that they’re retaliating.”

As I said earlier, people become the folks we expect them to be. And so, what White did was, she said, “We’re going to replace this punishment culture with one where we try to treat these kids like the children that we hope they are.” So instead of focusing on punishment, they focused on opportunities and incentives for kids who did the right thing, who made good decisions.

And, over time, and not much time, by the way, we’re talking the course of one academic year, this school was pulled up. The kids started to relate more with each other and with their teachers, suspension rates fell, and the school ended up off of the dangerous list for good. White managed to reform this culture by focusing on trust, even and especially when things were difficult.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I love that. Thank you. I was going to put you on the spot in terms of, “Okay, what are we looking at for crime, what are we looking for data in terms of performance?” So, we got the crime reduction, we got the suspension rates improvement. Beautiful. And could you zoom way in, in terms of what would be some examples of practices or ways of treating, interacting students, that speak to the low trust versus some of the new enhanced better ways teachers were interacting with students every day?

Jamil Zaki
White talks about two models of justice. One is punitive justice, where the idea is the person who’s done something wrong is the enemy, and my goal as a teacher is to protect the rest of the classroom from that negative element. So, that is exclusionary. Basically, if a kid does something wrong, you try to get them out of there, you try to send them to detention, suspension, or expulsion.

White replaced that with restorative justice, where the idea is, if a kid does something wrong, yes, they should be punished, but there should also be curiosity and compassion. We want to know why they did that. We want to treat them as a member of our community who we want to keep in our community. So, we want to ask more about what’s happening with them. We want to be curious.

White visited the homes of many troubled students and found out what a harsh and difficult home life they had. So, she had much more context to understand that a lot of these kids were acting out because they were struggling. And also, instead of just kicking kids out of the classroom, teachers were equipped with this new set of restorative justice practices, where when a kid acted out, they tried to pull them aside for conversations, “What’s going on with you? What do you need right now?”

This is still in the context of protecting other kids, and kids would still have to face consequences, but it was much more empathic. And it turns out that, especially when things are difficult, it matters how you take on that situation, how you treat somebody. And so, even in the context of a kid acting out, treating that kid kindly, treating them like they still deserve your respect, is a huge part of the change that they made within, at the micro level in the classroom.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful. All right, Jamil, so thinking about the workplace, hope, one, just feels good. Two, it helps other folks step up and live out their best selves and rise to expectations in a good way. Are there any other key benefits or results we might see in terms of work and being awesome at your job when we have less cynicism and more hope?

Jamil Zaki
A hundred percent. So, let’s focus first on individual contributors. I talk with a lot of people who tell me, “Yeah, you know, cynicism, it doesn’t feel good, but I need it to survive and to succeed because, guess what, it’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, and we got to compete. We got to duke it out. If you want to succeed, you need to step over or on your colleagues.” And it turns out that that’s a terrible strategy for success in most places.

So, there’s research from tens of thousands of people that finds that over a 10-year span, cynics earn less money than non-cynics, even if they start out at the same point. Now, why would that be? Well, cynics try to win at work to be awesome at their job by dominating other people. They try to outperform and outshine folks because they think in zero-sum terms. They think that “Anything you get, I lose, and anything you lose, I get.” But it turns out that that dominant attitude to work isn’t really how most people get ahead.

Most people get ahead by collaborating, by working together, doing things that none of them could do alone. And cynics, because they’re trapped in this sort of zero-sum mindset, don’t take advantage of those really important ways of succeeding. And this is where hope and trust and connection matter. In workplaces, yeah, all of those qualities feel good. People, when they feel connected and trusting toward their colleagues, they have greater mental health and resilience, but they also do better.

They’re more willing to take creative risks with their work because they know that their colleagues have their back. They’re more willing to share information, knowledge, and perspective, which aligns people and allows them to, again, collaborate more creatively and they’re more productive. So, it’s not an either/or. It’s not that you have to choose between hope or success. Actually, they go hand in hand.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, as I think about this study, I know how we measure earnings. That’s pretty straightforward. How do I measure whether or not someone qualifies as a “cynical person” versus a “non-cynical person”?

Jamil Zaki
Yeah, there’s a big questionnaire, a very famous one. I can give you just a couple of questions from it. So, I’m going to ask, I’m going to give you a couple of statements, and you tell me whether you agree in general or not, okay? Here’s one, “Most people can be trusted.”

Pete Mockaitis
Mostly agree.

Jamil Zaki
Okay. “People are honest chiefly through fear of getting caught.”

Pete Mockaitis
Mostly disagree.

Jamil Zaki
Okay. And “People generally don’t like helping one another.”

Pete Mockaitis
Disagree.

Jamil Zaki
Well, you’ve scored very anti-cynical on this test. That’s 0 for three, right? And there’s 50 questions like this, and you can score yourself if you want. There are cynicism tests online. This is called the Cook-Medley Cynical Hostility Scale for those folks who want to try it out themselves.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m just imagining, it’s like, “Oh, hey, how was your podcast, honey?” “Well, I just took a score. I took a test and it proved that I’m a cynic.” Like, “I already knew that.” I’m just imagining how that unfolds in people’s relationships and work. Well, so that’s handy. All right. Well, then, so let us know. So, let’s say we do have that, we got a heaping pile of cynicism, and we recognize, “Huh, I’d rather not have that. It doesn’t feel so good. Jamil is making a case that I’ve got benefits associated with ditching that. But personality transplants are not available at the local hospital,” so what’s a person to do?

Jamil Zaki
You brought up something that I think is a great starting point, which is the way that therapists operate, the way that they challenge people with depression or anxiety. I think that personality transplants are not available, as you said, but we are all works in progress. People’s personalities do change over the course of their lives. Events in our life can change our personality and we can change ourselves on purpose, therapy being the primary way that most people do this.

But I’m, personally, a recovering cynic. I deal with this all the time, and I’ve used tools from cognitive therapy on myself. I call it being skeptical of my cynicism. So, when I find myself suspicious of a person that I’ve never met, or over-generalizing and saying, “This politician did something corrupt, therefore, all politicians are fundamentally corrupt,” I ask myself, “Okay, Zaki, wait a minute. What evidence do you have for that claim?”

I’m a scientist. I can challenge myself to defend a position from a scientific perspective. And, oftentimes, I find myself saying, “Wait a minute, that’s not something that I have evidence for. That’s just my bias. That’s just my intuition.” And I don’t have to believe my intuition all the time. In fact, oftentimes our intuitions are dead wrong. So, I think that’s the first step, is to audit your inner experiences, to ask yourself whether you’re jumping to conclusions or whether you have enough evidence.

If you have enough evidence, great. Go for it. You’re not being cynical, you’re being skeptical. If you don’t have enough evidence, try to do an experiment. Try to take a leap of faith on somebody. Now, I’m not saying you have to share your bank information with a prince who’s going to wire you $14 million or anything like that, but try to take small, growing, calculated risks on other people.

Now, that doesn’t just help you learn about them, “Who can I trust and who can’t I trust?” based on evidence. It also changes other people for the better. Economists call this “earned trust.” When we put faith in other people, they’re more likely to step up and meet our expectations because they’re honored that we believe in them. So, that’s something really powerful that we can do to restructure our own thinking and also to bring out the best in the people around us.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, any other potential approaches or fun ways to get started right away?

Jamil Zaki
Yeah, I think that there’s two things that I could add to this, which are ways that we communicate with other people. One is, if you decide to trust somebody, don’t be quiet about it. I do something called trusting loudly, and I think this is especially important for supervisors, managers, leaders of any type, because we often put our faith in somebody. We give them a new responsibility, for instance, at work because we think they’re capable of it, but we don’t tell them, “Hey, I’m doing this because I believe in you.”

And it turns out that that simple message, just being upfront and clear. about the trust that we put in other people can intensify that act of earned trust. It can make that – the power of our trust, the gift of our trust – more clear and more impactful. The second thing that I would add when it comes to sharing or communicating differently is what I would call positive gossip. A lot of us are not just cynical in what we think, we’re cynical in what we say. We go around giving one-star Yelp reviews to life and everybody in it, and we can choose to do the opposite.

One thing that I try to do with my kids is share with them something kind that I saw somebody do each day, and, A, that helps me fight cynicism in them and help them stay attuned to the goodness of others, but it also changes how I think. Because if you are getting ready to tell somebody something, you’ve got to notice it. If I want to tell my kids about somebody who’s been helpful, I have an antenna up in my mind to spot helpers who are super easy to find when you’re looking. So, a habit of speech in this case, can become a habit of mind.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot. Anything you recommend we stop doing right away?

Jamil Zaki
Oh, interesting. I would say we can stop jumping to conclusions, first of all, and trusting our instincts. This is one thing that people tell me a lot. It’s like, “I don’t know, man. I’ve just got this gut instinct that this person is not trustworthy, and I trust my gut.” And it’s like, “Well, okay, but your gut also tells you all sorts of other things that are probably wrong.”

Our gut instincts include, for instance, focusing on the negative over the positive, trusting people who look like us more than people who don’t, bias around race and gender and identity. Our gut instincts include being meaner when we’re hungry than when we’re full, being hangry. I mean, we don’t trust those instincts because they’re not right. They’re a poor match for the data. So, I would say one thing to stop doing is to credulously, naively trust our gut instincts because those gut instincts are very biased.

Another thing that I think we should stop doing is thinking of trust only in terms of the risk that we’re putting in. I think, again, a lot of leaders and managers lead like they’re trying not to lose, like they expect other people to shirk and try to take advantage of them, and their job is to police that, to stop people from doing something wrong. Well, if you treat people that way and show them how little you trust them, they’re going to actually act in ways that are less trustworthy.

There’s one story from the Boston Fire Department that I share in the book where the Boston Fire Chief, a new chief, actually, came in around the year 2000, and he realized that more sick days were being taken by firefighters on Fridays than any other day of the week. Now until then, firefighters had had unlimited sick days and been treated in a pretty trusting fashion because of their role. But this new chief said, “Nah, I don’t think so. These people are cheaters, and I’m going to make sure that they don’t do it anymore on my watch.”

So, he capped the number of sick days that firefighters could take at 15 a year. You had to get a doctor’s note if you went above that, you would get your pay docked. There’s all sorts of draconian policies where he was just trying to stop people from taking advantage of him and the city. Now, I wonder, Pete, whether you have a guess as to what the effects of that untrusting policy might have been.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s funny, I feel my own internal, I don’t know what I want to call it, the big word is pusillanimous, small-hearted, like, “Well, oh, so it’s going to be like that, then. Oh, well, I got a doctor buddy who’s going to write all kinds of notes.” So, it’s like, “It’s going to be like that? All right, then. I’m going to…” It stokes the lower part of me that I don’t aspire to be, and, hopefully, I will be able to breathe and think through and say, “Okay, hey, you know what, I’m going to be as honest as possible and be sick when I’m sick, but my immediate desire is to stick it to them.”

Jamil Zaki
It’s beautifully put, and that’s exactly the desire that firefighters felt. So, the overall number of sick days taken by the entire city’s fire department in the year after that policy was rolled out was more than twice as high as it was before. And the number of firefighters who took exactly 15 sick days increased by 1,000%, ten times.

And it’s exactly as you said, that when you treat people cynically, when you choose to not trust them, you’re trying to cover your own butt. But actually, what you’re doing is you’re bringing out the worst side of these people. You’re appealing to their smallness, their pusillanimous side, where you’re saying, “I think you’re a cheater,” and people say, “Oh, you think I’m a cheater? I’ll show you a cheater.” And it turns out that this occurs all over our lives, and so people, in an attempt to protect themselves, harm each other and relationships, and then harm themselves as a result.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, well, I think we’re really getting into it in terms of decisions, policies, systems, processes, the stuff that you’re doing, in terms of how you’re running your team and your organization. In some ways, I’m feeling this tension because there are those who take advantage, and yet you want to extend trust to encourage the goodness in folks, and I guess to trust them loudly. That’s a good turn of a phrase.

So, help us out, what would be the optimal way? Let’s go with the same fire chief example. So okay, I’ve got firefighters. It looks like there’s a level, there may be, we don’t know, it could be statistically just happened that way. We suspect there’s a bit of abuse, that many Friday-sick days are not so much sick, so much as early weekend starts.

So, that’s what we suspect. We’d like to curb that, getting all bean counter-y in terms of, “This is how many days you get in the policies, and don’t you dare violate them.” It’s counterproductive. So, what’s your take, knowing all you know, what might be an optimal approach to address that matter?

Jamil Zaki
So, a mindset in general, that I recommend and sort of champion in the book, is being a hopeful skeptic. That is, paying very close attention to the data, being really evidence-based, but also the hopeful piece is understanding that our defaults, our factory settings as human beings, are probably too negative. So, basically saying, “Okay, let me be as scientific as I can in my interactions, but also let me curb and understand and audit my knee-jerk negativity.”

So, the fire chief here, he saw the statistic and his knee-jerk negativity took over. He said, “I’m going to take it out on my entire staff.” Well, probably if he had looked more closely at the data, he would find that maybe, I don’t know, 5% of firefighters were overrepresented in these Friday sick days. So, instead of making a blanket assumption about his entire team, his entire department, he could have asked, “Well, what’s up with these 5% of people?” and ask them some more questions, say, “Hey, I noticed that you’ve taken four Fridays off and no Tuesdays off. Are you getting sick in an unusual way? Can you tell me more about this?”

And sometimes just a little bit of curiosity, showing that, “Hey, I’m paying attention to this,” could probably curb that behavior. And the 5% statistic, by the way, I’m just hypothesizing here, but he could have also looked at the 95% of his staff who were not taking extra sick days on Friday, and said, “Wow, we’ve got such an honorable group of people here. You’ve got unlimited sick days and yet you’re only taking a pretty reasonable amount in a pretty reasonable way. This speaks to the spirit and the values that you all have as firefighters to protect your community.”

This is the thing that, I think, we do way too often as leaders is we focus on the 5%, 10%, 2% of people in our organization who we’re scared of, or who we feel like are threatening the organization, and not on the 90% or 92% or 98% of people who are upholding our values and probably all want the same thing. So, I would say, if I was in the fire chief’s seat, I would focus on the supermajority and try to develop policies and practices for them, and also extol their positive values as opposed to hyper-focusing on the two or five percent of folks who are not playing by the rules.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I love that and I think that’s just a great practice, in general, in organizations to celebrate the cool stuff that’s happening that you’re noticing, that you’re doing. I’m in a team and we have in the meetings a one minute of awesome in which we folks share, “Hey, this is a cool thing that happened,” and it speaks to the values and remind us, “Oh, yeah, this is why we do this. This is cool. All right. Good deal.”

So, yeah, and to trust loudly when you’re seeing cool things, to speak to it, as opposed to I get this sense and, huh, boy, this is a whole another conversation maybe, good doctor, that as humans, it seems like when good things happen regularly, we just become habituated to them and expect them, and that’s the baseline. Even though it’s amazing, it’s a blessing, it’s so good, we’re so lucky, it’s so privileged and delightful, we just get accustomed to it, take it for granted. That’s what normal is.

And then if we suddenly don’t have that, then, “Oh, this is an injustice, and it’s bad, and my expectations are being violated, and I’m cranky about it,” as opposed to realizing, “Hey, well, you know what? I’ve had it pretty good. I’ve been pretty lucky for a really long time. I guess I could just appreciate how, in this absence, how so often I am blessed with this thing,” usually isn’t how we respond to these deprivations. Is that just how we’re wired, neuroscience doctor? Can anything be done about this?

Jamil Zaki
Yes, and yes. So, what you’re describing is called hedonic adaptation, sometimes also known as the hedonic treadmill, which is that we get used to whatever is going on in our lives. We have a set point that’s related to our personal baseline. So, my baseline and your baseline in terms of what we’re used to in life might be totally different.

If we switched places, we would feel intensely the differences between how we live, but we don’t feel those differences now. The same way that when you put on clothes in the morning, you feel them for about five seconds and then you kind of forget that they’re there and you stop feeling them. We get used to stuff and that’s good. That is a form of adaptation, but it also means, as you’re saying, we get used to all the good stuff and forget how lucky we are, forget how good we have it.

Is there anything we can do about it? Yeah, there is. There’s a great practice called savoring. I think gratitude practice is really well known. You think about all the good things that have happened to you today or in your life in general. Savoring is much more physical and palpable. It’s about enjoying the good stuff as it happens.

Kurt Vonnegut has a terrific quote that I love, the novelist Kurt Vonnegut, where he says, “Sometimes you got to stop and say, ‘If this isn’t good, I don’t know what is.’” And savoring is in essence that. It’s pausing and noticing what’s happening, and especially noticing the things that you are happy about right now in the moment.

I think that one version of this that we don’t do enough is what I would call social savoring. That is stopping to notice the good in other people and the wonderful things that they do for each other, for us, for everybody, for the world all the time. And I mean constantly millions of people are doing good things every minute of every day, and we have grown adapted to that the same way that we’ve adapted to all the other good things in our lives.

But when we notice, there’s so much to be gained. My friend, Dacher Keltner, studies the emotion of awe, the idea of something that is vast and makes us feel small in a good way, like we’re part of something greater than ourselves. And when I think of awe, I think about, I don’t know, seeing the Milky Way, or the Aurora Borealis, or a grove of redwood trees, and those things all produce awe. But in a study of tens of thousands of people, Dacher asked them, “What made you feel awe today?”

And the most common response, the most common thing that made people feel awe, this beautiful experience, was what he calls “moral beauty.” That is the everyday acts of goodness, kindness, generosity, and compassion that people around us are performing all the time. So, when you start to notice that and savor the goodness of others, you have access to really, I mean, I know I’m sounding hyperbolic and maybe a little bit warm and fuzzy, but I mean it. I really do think that people do beautiful things. And to open ourselves to that beauty is a really powerful way to stop hedonic adaptation, to get off the treadmill and actually enjoy our lives.

Pete Mockaitis
I love it. I love it. Can you tell us what are some things you savor?

Jamil Zaki
Oh, well, I savor my children first and foremost. I feel wonder and awe at their new developments and hobbies and interests, and just the way they treat people all the time. I savor the work of people who fight through adversity. A special type of person to me is what I would call the wounded healer, the person who struggles mightily with something, and then turns around and helps other people.

So, this is veterans who help other veterans with PTSD, survivors of assault who become assault counselors, people who have suffered addiction who then join the recovery community and become sponsors. That’s a type of beauty to me that it never gets old. I find that those folks to be incredible. inspiring as well. How about you?

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. You know, it’s funny, when you say savor, the first thing that comes to mind, well, two things, is washing my hands, just enjoying that warm water and my favorite soap.

Jamil Zaki
Nice.

Pete Mockaitis
And then, in my back porch, I’ve got these sliding wood cedar doors, which just look really cool and kind of unique. We just lucked out, the house had it. And I like to, whenever I open or close those doors, to take just a good whiff of that cedar smell and appreciate the home and the setting that I’m in. So, that’s what I savor.

Jamil Zaki
I love that. I love that. Those are beautiful everyday experiences, right? And I think that that’s the thing is, you could have gotten used to those things. Washing your hands, the smell of cedar, these are easy things to fall into the background of our minds, to relegate to the landfill of lost memories, but you’ve chosen to keep your attention open, to keep your mind open to those experiences. And I think that’s really the good fight. That’s what I think we need to do to retain a hopeful and skeptical mindset.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, Jamil, tell me, anything else we should cover before we hear about your favorite things?

Jamil Zaki
No, I think this has been great. I hope that all this is useful to your listeners.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’d say I’m feeling good, so I hope they are, too. How about a favorite quote?

Jamil Zaki
Okay, I got to go Vonnegut again. Kurt Vonnegut said, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.” And to me, that speaks to everything that we’ve been talking about. Our beliefs about the world are self-fulfilling prophecies. We create the version of the world that we live in, and that, in turn, shapes the type of life that we go through. So, it’s, to me, critical to mind our minds because they’re so powerful in structuring who we become.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And could you share a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Jamil Zaki
I’ll share one again that speaks to workplaces and how they shape us. Unusual workplaces for most of us, there are two fishing villages in southeastern Brazil, separated by about 40 miles, similar in economic status, religion, and so forth, but one of them sits on the ocean. And it turns out that if you’re going to fish on the ocean, you need big boats, heavy equipment. You need to work together. You can’t do it alone.

The other village is on a lake. So, fishermen strike out on small boats alone, and the only time they see each other is when they’re competing. Economists went to these villages about 10 years ago and had these people play a series of social games to assess how trustworthy and how generous they were. And it turns out that when you started out in your career in one of these fishing villages, you’re not different from each other. People on the ocean and people on the lake equally trusting, equally trustworthy, equally generous.

But over time, working in a co-operative setting made people more trusting and more generous. I mean, we’re talking over the course of decades, and over the course of decades working in a competitive cutthroat environment made people less trusting and less generous. So, choose your workplaces carefully because they shape you into the version of yourself you will become.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Jamil Zaki
I just finished Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber, which I found absolutely fascinating, an account of why so many of us do work for most of our waking hours that we don’t think creates any good in the world, so that’s one. But here’s a more hopeful one, A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit is a book about disasters over the course of the last century or so. So, the earthquakes here in San Francisco in 1906 and 1989, the bombing of London in World War II, 9/11, Hurricane Katrina.

And in all of these, Solnit asks the question, “What do disasters teach us about ourselves?” And there’s a stereotype that when disaster strikes, people show their true colors, which is that we are selfish and awful and social order falls apart. By looking at the history, Solnit finds that the exact opposite is true, that when disaster strikes, people band together, they help one another, and they find solidarity. So, there’s a lot more goodness in even the hardest times than most of us realize.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Jamil Zaki
Yes, I use, well, a bunch of tools that I love, but one is a type of notebook, and I’m of course now blanking on the brand name, but I use it when I interview people for journalistic parts of my writing. And it’s this pen that has a recording device in it, and the paper has sort of sensors on it. So, as you write, it records what time it is that you were writing, and you can then later press down on any note that you took, and it will play back the recording from the pen of that moment that you were writing that particular note. It’s incredibly useful for interviews and for recording stuff.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool, yeah. And a favorite habit?

Jamil Zaki
Savoring, the one that we just talked about.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a particular nugget you share that folks really connect and resonate with, and quote back to you often?

Jamil Zaki
From this book, not yet because it’s not out yet, but I think that, oftentimes, I think people are simply happy and relieved and surprised to learn the statistics on helping and kindness. I think that people really are fundamentally underestimating one another. And the freedom to stop doing that is enlivening for folks.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where to point them?

Jamil Zaki
Well, Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness is available wherever books are sold. And my lab, the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab, is at ssnl.stanford.edu.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Jamil Zaki
Yeah, take a leap of faith on somebody today or tomorrow, this week at the latest, and write down what you think will happen, and then write down what actually happens. And if your predictions are different from reality, try to remember that and ask yourself why the difference is there.

Pete Mockaitis
Jamil, this has been a real treat. Thank you. I wish you much hope and joy.

Jamil Zaki
Thank you so much. This has been delightful.