New View EDU Episode 66: School in a Time of Hope and Cynicism

Available November 5, 2024

Find New View EDU on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and many other podcast apps.

How good are people? How well can you trust your neighbors? How much do you agree with others on fundamental values and ideals? Sometimes it can feel like the answers to these questions skew negative. But author and researcher Jamil Zaki says we’d be surprised by the reality. He sits down with host Morva McDonald to talk about his book, Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness, and what his findings mean for school leaders.

Jamil ZakiJamil says one of the most surprising things about human goodness is “how surprised people are by human goodness.” He offers examples that demonstrate trends toward kindness, generosity, and agreement on key issues. Yet research also shows that people believe the opposite—that kindness and generosity are declining, that others cannot be trusted, and that we are more divided than united on important matters. However, the bright spot is that when people are specifically asked those same questions about their own communities and those closest to them, the answers change. We are inherently more trusting and optimistic about the people we interact with regularly, even if it’s just the grocery store clerk who checks us out every week or the bus monitor who helps our kids get to school. 

What does that mean for school leaders? Jamil says education institutions are uniquely positioned to uplift perceptions of human goodness by how they impact their communities. Building trust within the classroom and the school, and helping students look outward to those around them who are trustworthy, is one potentially effective antidote to cynicism.

When asked to define cynicism, Jamil contrasts it to skepticism. Cynicism, he says, cynicism is “thinking like a lawyer,” whereas skepticism is “thinking like a scientist.” Cynics believe inherently that people are greedy and selfish, and they seek information and experiences that reinforce that worldview so they can strengthen their arguments. Skeptics don’t believe anything about humanity as a broad baseline. They instead seek information that will help them build an opinion, and they take a learning stance in their interactions with new people and ideas. As it turns out, Jamil says, cynics tend to have poorer mental and physical health outcomes over time, while skeptics are socially, physically, and mentally better off. Yet skepticism is difficult, he points out, because human beings are wired to feel more comfortable in certainty. Taking the posture of continually learning about others removes our ability to feel certain about our beliefs.

Ultimately, Jamil says, trust is formed in “three dimensions” through real-life relationships and interactions. School leaders build cultures of trust through showing faith in children, practicing restorative discipline that focuses on relationships rather than judgment, and helping highlight areas where agreement can be found, even amidst challenging topics. The number one thing we can do to improve things, according to Jamil, is to “help people see each other more clearly.” When we have a better understanding of how close together we really are, we can navigate differences more with skepticism than cynicism.


Key Questions

Some of the key questions Jamil and Morva explore in this episode include:

  • What is the difference between cynicism and skepticism? How can we understand their influences on our culture right now?
  • What does research demonstrate about human goodness and our ability to recognize and uplift it in our communities?
  • How can we help people move from cynicism and negative or dangerous worldviews to a more skeptical and even optimistic stance?
  • What does it mean for educators to build cultures of trust in our society?

Episode Highlights

  • “One, during the hardest time in many people's lives, during one of the greatest disasters of the century, people didn't respond to this adversity by falling apart and focusing on themselves. They came together and found ways to help one another, which is so remarkably beautiful. But then second, most people ignored this global avalanche of human kindness, which is the sadder surprise, that our minds are tuned away from goodness even when it's all around us.” (3:17)
  • “This decline in trust is really about the abstract, right? Abstractly, people seem to be bad and getting worse. Abstractly, schools seem to be bad. The economy seems to be bad. But if you ask people about their own personal experiences, they are much more positive. So one-third of Americans believe that their fellow citizens can be trusted, but two-thirds of Americans believe that the people they interact with on a regular basis can be trusted.” (5:10)
  • “Having an assumption about people, even if it's a gloomy assumption, is very comfortable. You get to maybe not have faith in people, but have faith in your assumptions. Letting go of that faith and saying, ‘I don't know what the world is like necessarily. I don't know what the future holds. I don't know what this person is like,’ is uncomfortable. But it's that courage to be humble about what we know and what we don't know that is the beginning of learning.” (13:54)
  • “We as a country are far less divided than we think we are. I am in no way here minimizing real extremism, real political violence, and real risk to human rights in this country. I think we're in a very scary time. But if you look at what people actually want, even their views on different issues, we're much closer together than I think the media and even politicians want us to realize that we are. We are being told the story of extreme division when reality is that we are divided, but not that much, and that there are many things that we have in common in terms of our values and what we want.” (31:19)

Resource List

Full Transcript

  • Read the full transcript here.

Related Episodes

About Our Guest

Jamil Zaki is a professor of psychology at Stanford University and the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab. He trained at Columbia and Harvard, studying empathy and kindness in the human brain. He is interested in human connection and how we can learn to connect better.