Read the full transcript of Episode 66 of the NAIS New View EDU podcast, which features author and researcher Jamil Zaki. 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.
Morva McDonald: You know how sometimes you come across a book and a set of ideas that are perfectly timed? Reading Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness arrived in my life at the perfect moment. It reoriented me away from cynicism to hope, but not really naive hope, right? But rather a kind of grounded skepticism. I want to welcome Dr. Jamil Zaki to New View EDU today.
Dr. 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's interested in human connection and how we can learn to connect better, something so central, right, to the work of schooling and learning.
Hi, Jamil, it's great to talk with you. Your book was just so perfect for me. It came at the right time for me personally and professionally. And I'm thinking about the subtitle, which is The Surprising Science of Human Goodness. And you also in the book identify yourself as a cynic of sorts, right? So I'm wondering if you can provide some insights or share with us what's the surprising part, actually, of the science of human goodness for you.
Jamil Zaki: Yeah, thanks Morva, and I'm thrilled to be here by the way. So I think that the surprising part for me is twofold. One, that people tend to be better than we realize. And two, that it's so hard for us to see that, to realize that, right? Part of the surprising science of human goodness is how surprised people are by human goodness.
One example that I use in the book surrounds the pandemic. So I surveyed a thousand Americans recently and I asked them, do you think that in the early pandemic, say 2020 to 2022, kindness around the world increased, decreased or stayed the same? And Morva, I wonder if when you saw that quiz question, whether you had an intuition?
Morva McDonald: I did, I was a head of school at the time that the pandemic hit. So I was leading a school at that time. And in my community, I would say that definitely, kindness increased, or maybe to your point, I think became more visible, right?
Jamil Zaki: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. So you were more optimistic than most people in my survey. More than half the people I surveyed believed that kindness had decreased. Barely 20% thought that it had increased. And I think that's potentially because most people weren't serving in a role like you were, leading a community. A lot of people were just stuck at home experiencing humanity through their screens, watching a bunch of stories about people fighting over toilet paper in grocery store aisles, right?
So if you look at the data though, from what's known as the World Happiness Report, it's clear and in the opposite direction. Donations to charity, volunteering, and helping strangers skyrocketed during the early pandemic. And to me, this is again, surprising in two ways. 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.
Morva McDonald: Yeah, I have a question about that. There's kind of a view, right, that if you ask people about public schooling, as an example, they will say, public schooling is terrible, right, that we have a view of public education of having faltered. But if you ask them about the school, if their kid happens to go to a public school, this would be true probably of an independent school as well, if you looked at that, somebody did the research, they'll say, my public school is really good.
So I'm curious, right, in your own understanding of what's happening, is if the view is that like, if I think globally about the problem, I think people aren't that kind. But if I think locally about it, I wonder if that changes the way people's perspective is. Do you have a sense of that?
Jamil Zaki: You're 100% spot on. And it's really interesting because, right, so if you ask people, can most Americans be trusted? If you ask people in the US, can most Americans be trusted? A, we are fairly pessimistic, and B, we've been getting more pessimistic over time. So in 1972, about half of Americans would agree that most people in this country could be trusted. By 2018, that had fallen to about a third of Americans. And to your point, our faith in institutions plummeted during that same time, government, media, public education, but also science and medicine.
And as you say though, 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. Not just their friends, but their grocer, their bus driver—
Morva McDonald: —The people they encounter maybe every day.
Jamil Zaki: Yes. And the same goes for schooling, as you said, the same goes for economic experiences, right? People believe that the US is in a recession, but if you ask them, how are you doing? They tend to say that they're OK. The Atlantic journalist, Eric Thompson calls this the everything stinks, but I'm fine effect. I think it's, again, has this dual characteristic of great hope and great lost opportunity because the closer we get to people, the more we believe in them.
Morva McDonald: That seems really relevant. Yeah, that seems very relevant to your own— If I'm understanding it from reading it, Jamil— like to your own pathway or trajectory, right? Is that, and let's talk a little bit about your friend, Emile, who I think if I understand it was kind of the provocation for you to be more hopeful, to think about your own cynicism and to create a more maybe optimistic view, which is really personal, right? That's not an abstraction, right, of how you got there.
And so I'm just curious, like, can you talk a little bit about that experience and how your relationship to him changed your intellectual commitments, really, as well as your personal decisions, right, you have some agency, you made a choice, right, to become somebody who was more optimistic, who actually thought more about goodness. And I'm just curious about that story for yourself.
Jamil Zaki: Yeah, Emile Bruneau was a friend of mine and was also one of my heroes. We both on paper did pretty similar work. We both studied the neuroscience of human empathy. And, you know, there's not a million people who do that. It's a pretty small community.
Morva McDonald: You know everybody, yeah.
Jamil Zaki: And you know everybody. Yeah. And our names rhyme as well. We were always a sort of a one-two act in a bunch of different conferences. We became really good friends.
And, you know, when you study something, there's this stereotype that you must live it as well. So if you study human goodness, you must be blissed out by witnessing it constantly. And I feel as though there's been some pressure on me personally during my career to show that sort of rosiness, but I really didn't feel it very much. I tend to be quite cynical.
Emile, by contrast, was one of the most optimistic, hopeful people I ever knew. He really walked the walk so much that I would think to myself, what is this guy, sheltered or something? What gives?
Morva McDonald: Yeah, how did he get there? Yeah.
Jamil Zaki: How is he so blissed out all the time? And it turned out that he was the opposite of sheltered. He grew up right around where I am now in the peninsula of the Bay Area, right around Stanford, very poor. And his mother had severe schizophrenia, was really unable to raise Emile. So he was raised by his father in really challenging circumstances. And it turns out that he basically took this adversity, I suppose like people did during the pandemic, and decided to leverage it, to use it to become the person he wanted to be. And he made a choice during his teenage years. He said, despite all the difficulty, I want to live a life where I see the good in people.
His hope was a fierce choice. And he kept that as his life came to a really unfortunate end. I mean, he was diagnosed with a very aggressive form of brain cancer in 2018 and he died in 2020 at the age of 47, leaving behind a very young family. And so he had this tragedy that bookended his life and he decided again, in a very intentional way, to find the best that he could in life despite those circumstances. And, you know, when he died, that probably was around the bottom of my own cynicism, really a low point for me, not just because of his death, but because the early pandemic and just so much happening in the world made it feel almost impossible to hold onto any hope.
And I thought, Emile was such an inspiration. Can he be more? Can he be a challenge? And so it was really his life that in a way inspired me to go on this scientific journey, to try to learn about cynicism, and also on a personal journey to try and combat it in myself.
Morva McDonald: I think that's a really powerful story. I mean, lots of people, but I think actually particularly maybe, this is a guess on my part, like maybe educators, I think, come to the work through some kind of personal trajectory, right? That is linked to purpose, broader purpose, broader contribution, broader connection. And I think many educators at this point, if you think about the last five years, the pandemic, many, many other things have happened in the country and potentially, right, the election, which creates a lot of turbulence, I think are really struggling, right? To re-center themselves as individuals in their professional role around that. And so it's good to be reminded, right? About how somebody comes to make a fierce choice about optimism and about possibility.
Jamil Zaki: I couldn't agree more. You know, I myself am an educator, although of course a college educator, and I prize that identity really, I hold it at the core of what I try to do. And it is challenging. Educators have faced enormous pressure. There's a changing landscape. As we've been talking about, trust in education has fallen. So educators might feel as though they're being put on the spot in new ways and there are some broken relationships that used to be intact, it's all so difficult.
But on the other hand, educational settings and classrooms in particular are incredibly impactful in shaping children's lives, not just in terms of what they learn, but in terms of their values and their ability to see the goodness in other people. So you know, despite the challenges, I see the opportunity that educators have as richer and more vital than ever.
Morva McDonald: That is a story of hope and possibility, right? Previously on the podcast, we talked to somebody, Megan Kennedy, who talks a lot about resilience. These are very connected ideas, I think. I'm curious, right, before we kind of get to your thoughts on rediscovering one another, right, kind of building cultures of trust and the future of hope, help me understand really from kind of your own perspective, the problem of cynicism and the value of skepticism.
Jamil Zaki: Yeah, absolutely. Cynicism is the belief that people in general are selfish, greedy, and dishonest. And I'm afraid that our culture has prized that belief a little bit. We've started to glamorize cynicism as a form of wisdom, even a form of morality, you know, holding power to account, for instance. It turns out that cynicism is far less useful than we think it is. It's far less smart than we think it is as well.
Right? I mean, a cynic has a blanket assumption about people and they use that assumption even before they meet somebody, to make a decision about who that person is. And then they just seek out evidence that confirms that assumption. It's really thinking like a lawyer as opposed to thinking like a scientist.
And that hurts our ability to understand one another. Cynics are less accurate about who they can trust, for instance, but it hurts our ability to connect as well. And so cynics end up, for instance, more depressed, lonelier, they even die younger than non-cynics. I often think of social connection as a form of psychological nourishment. And if you think that way, then cynics in essence can't metabolize the calories of social life.
Skepticism is often confused with cynicism, but they're quite different from one another. So if a cynic believes people are terrible, a skeptic doesn't believe anything about people at baseline. They want to find out. They don't want to think like a lawyer, but instead think like a scientist, collecting data and adapting to new situations, learning from new people. And that actually turns out to be a much wiser way to move through the world.
Now it's harder, because 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.
Morva McDonald: In your own research or experience, do you have a story, if you will, of that transition? Because it's a very, like when I was reading your book, I was thinking about it as a book that's both in some ways, like in its best sense, the best genre of the self-help genre, right? And also a book about how to make systems change. It's both things.
So it is a lovely book about the demand on individuals, but also the demand on systems, which I really appreciated. And I'm curious in your own thinking or your own, like all of the work you've done and all the people you've spoken with, the stories of that personal transition, right, from cynicism to skepticism and what that takes.
Jamil Zaki: Yeah, I think it takes connection and it takes bravery. One of the people I profile in the book is this really lovely, really empathic person, sort of West Coast liberal person who in 2020 found herself ensconced in the QAnon movement. And of course, this is a very harmful conspiracy theory, and to try to understand why people get into it is not the same as letting them off the hook for harmful beliefs.
But this is a person, I call her Megan in the book, that's not her real name, who just had a really difficult childhood, had a really difficult time trusting people. And she just had this sense that something was wrong. She knew that she couldn't trust the government. She felt sure that she couldn't trust authorities. And when QAnon came up and a friend introduced her to some of the materials, she felt seen and heard. She felt safe, because her mistrust could be changed into a philosophy. She called it being red-pilled, right? Meaning seeing the truth for the first time. And she was so confident, and the other people in the movement were so confident that she felt really safe and understood around them.
She managed to get out of QAnon. She was only part of the movement probably for about six or eight months. And I asked her, what did it take to get you out? Because a lot of people end up stuck in that for years or their whole life. And it turns out that what it took to move her from cynicism, just believing her own mistrust and forming a worldview around it, to skepticism, was close relationships.
So her partner and her father told her, look, we really love you, we believe in you. That doesn't mean that we believe in what you're saying. So can you show us where you're coming from? And I think it's really easy when somebody in our life believes something that is, we find objectionable, to just reject them out of hand. What happened with Megan is the people in her life refused to reject her. And it was the strength of their bonds and their acceptance that gave her the sense of safety that she needed to say, OK, well, maybe I can be skeptical instead. And as soon as she did, she saw all the holes that obviously form in any conspiracy theory and was able to leave.
Morva McDonald: It's a hopeful story in some ways, I think, but also kind of a difficult one in a time when we understand that actually where our social connections are so frayed right now. Whether that's a result of polarization or a result of social media or all the things that are influencing us, right? The demand for us.
So I'm curious, like, schools are a huge part, a huge institution in the country. I mean, everybody goes to school and they play a really important role, particularly in how kids come to understand their relationships, their responsibility to one another, how they stay connected, what they believe, even the notion of, am I a scientist? Do I believe in evidence and information or not? Which is challenged right now.
So in your book, you talk a lot about building cultures of trust. And I'm wondering if you can talk to us about what's key in your mind, what's central in the work of building a culture of trust. Why is it important? And what gets in the way of that, right?
Jamil Zaki: I mean, first of all, it's hard. And I agree with you that these days, it's a little bit more of an uphill battle than it used to be. As we've talked about, trust and connection come naturally in three dimensions. And they're much harder in two dimensions, when we flatten our perception of one another, typically by interacting online.
And so these days in schools, we are combating a separate way that children receive information, which is through smartphones and through the internet. So that makes our work as educators harder and more important. So how do we create a culture of trust? Well, some of the evidence from work on education and school settings suggests that the very first step, if we want kids to trust us as educators and to trust each other, is that we show faith in them.
I think a lot of…less so in educational settings necessarily, but a lot of parenting culture has changed in ways where we as parents, and I'll speak for myself as well, we have a culture of safety-ism, where we often restrict our kids more than we used to because, well, we want them to be safe. And there's no more natural instinct on the planet. But that sense of telling our kids, you can't go out on the sidewalk anymore. You can't go down the street to the store. It sends two messages that we might want to be careful about. One, you can't trust the world. We're telling our kids the world is a dangerous place. Your neighborhood is dangerous. And two, we don't trust you. We don't think that you can handle yourself in that dangerous world.
Again, I'm not here to tell any parent what to do in any one situation, but I think that globally, if you think about the weight of those choices that we are all making together and the worldview that's cultivating in children, I'm not sure that it's one that's conducive to cultures of trust.
Morva McDonald: I agree with you. I'm a parent of four kids. And this is a thing we talk a lot about, right? Like risk and safety and adventure and confidence building, all the things, right, that kids need to develop. So when you think about an institution like a school, right, that has such responsibility, I think, in this regard, kind of, and you think about this dimension of really, I think you've contrasted kind of a over-reliance…Alfie Kohn in his book, very famous book that he wrote, right, talks a lot about being able to say yes and not hiding behind safety as the reason to say no, which I as a parent really appreciated.
And so when we think about schools, right, kind of how do you think about building that culture of trust and helping schools transition towards really in some ways believing in kids and believing in their competency? While at the same time, many schools are saying you can't have cell phones. This is kind of an, it's an interesting contradiction, right, in some ways about that. So I'm curious about your thoughts on that.
Jamil Zaki: I love Alfie Kohn's writing on this. And you know, I'd say that to me, those two truths can be held in mind at once quite easily, partially because I don't know that I trust myself with my cell phone. You know, I think it would be better if somebody took my phone away from me when I got to a workplace or a concert or anything and just didn't let me have it.
I think that there's a couple of places that we can go here. One is the way that we act when kids have a hard time. So this can involve conflict, discipline, right? How do we act in those difficult circumstances? Emile Bruneau, my friend who we've been talking about, was heavily influenced by the independent school he went to right around here, which is called the Peninsula School. This beautiful, very heart forward community. And one of the things that he loved about it was that when kids had conflicts, instead of trying to step in right away, the teachers would bring the kids together and say, OK, let's talk this out. My kids now go to a Quaker school and they have a peace table. So during conflicts, again, the kids are empowered to solve those conflicts themselves.
I mean, this is not always easy, right? And in larger schools, this might be much trickier, but it's a signal of trust, both from educators to kids, and fosters trust between children. Likewise, in disciplinary settings, one big question is, what message are we sending when a kid makes a mistake, when they do something even hurtful? Do we believe that that's who the kid is? Or do we believe that the kid, who they really are, is hiding underneath that behavior?
And one of my friends, Jason Okonofua, pioneered this form of empathic discipline. It's not, by the way, it's not a case where you don't discipline a child. The disciplinary action is the same. It's the conversation around discipline that changes, where the teacher focuses on, I care about you and I want things to go better for you. There's obviously been a problem here. Something has not gone right. How do we fix it together? And Jason, in his research, finds that when you apply, when you teach teachers that form of discipline, it increases trust between kids and teachers. Again, even when kids have been disciplined, even when they've been suspended, and it makes those kids less likely to be suspended again in the future. So I think that we can focus, in building cultures of trust, on the hard moments, and how we face those moments maybe a little bit differently.
Morva McDonald: It reminds me of the tenets, if you will, of restorative justice practices, which came out of the system related to prisons and criminalization. But I think many, many schools have picked up many of the restorative practices. And the things that you're talking about are similar.
I'm wondering if you have thoughts, though, about the way in which identities that are marginalized in this country, we can think about race, we can think about gender, we can think about sexual orientation. There are many things, we can think about class, as the structures of that. And I'm wondering if you can share with us your own thinking about the ways that marginalization and marginalized identities, for lack of a better phrase for that, intersect with this notion of cynicism and skepticism and building cultures of trust, because I think they do intersect. And I'm just curious from your experience and knowledge, what your thoughts are about that.
Jamil Zaki: Absolutely. I think that people who are part of an identity group that has been marginalized, they might face experiences that make them feel rightly cynical about certain parts of their life, about certain institutions, for instance. And that I almost wouldn't call cynicism, right? Cynicism is this blanket black and white view. I would say that's just disappointment, right?
Morva McDonald: Yeah, that's interesting.
Jamil Zaki: So a lot of people, including kids, have the experience of being serially disappointed by institutions. And I think that that's something that we need to reckon with and in some cases validate. One thing that's really difficult for people in power and for institutions to do is apologize. But apology can be deeply moving to people because it helps them feel seen.
Another thing that I want to add, though, is around ideals of inclusion across different identities. There's so much conversation these days about inclusion and so much controversy around it, more than I would have expected. And it's growing, feels like every week there's a new op-ed in the New York Times voicing very conflicting opinions about inclusion. And I think that one of the issues is that oftentimes people feel as though inclusion is being pasted on to their institutions, that it's being brought from the top down and is not something that people actually want.
It turns out, though, that one way to deliver on inclusion much more holistically is to start by asking people what they do want. Because it turns out that inclusion is enormously popular in virtually every community. But teaching people that this is what the folks in your community want can supercharge those efforts. It can make people feel included in inclusion.
There was a great study at the University of Wisconsin where they surveyed undergraduates and said, how many of you, you know, do you believe in these principles? And then sort of laid out their DEI principles. And something like 95% of Wisconsin students agreed with those principles. And so these researchers then targeted certain classrooms and dorms and put up posters saying, did you know 93% of UW students agree with this? 97% agree with this. And it turned out that showing people those norms, those social norms, made them more open to these inclusion practices and made them more committed to taking part in them.
So I think that when we consider how to bring people together across different identities, one place to start is to realize that that's what most of us want. And again, that's an anti-cynical practice, because if we just use our assumptions about people, we might think a lot of folks don't want inclusion. If we look at the data instead, we realize that we're part of a supermajority.
Morva McDonald: One of the things I'm taking away from this conversation with you, and just want to check my own, a little bit of checking my own understanding, is that even in this last example, the power of making people's ideas and beliefs visible is kind of central if I understand it. Like if I were to walk away from this conversation as a head of school, I think, really what I should think about in my own community is how do I make the values of my community visible in order to engender trust?
And I'm curious if you feel like that's a good interpretation, or if you have additions to the ways that I might be thinking as somebody who runs a large institution that cares for children.
Jamil Zaki: I think your read on this is absolutely accurate. There are many anti-cynicism practices that we can do as individuals. We can fact check our cynical feelings. We can take more leaps of faith on other people, try to take more risks in the social world. We can try to engage in what I call positive gossip, sharing stories of goodness that we witness.
I think all of those are great practices as individuals, but as leaders, the number one thing I think we can do is help people see each other more clearly. Help people understand each other's values. Because again, cynicism often just boils down to a misunderstanding. You might imagine, Morva, that spending the last four years, this entire decade marinating myself in the science of suspicion and hopelessness would have made me a gloomier person, less like Emile than...But it's done the opposite.
I've come away from this work absolutely committed to the view that A, this cynicism is leading to a sad outcome and it's doubly sad because it doesn't have to be this way. We leave so much on the table. There is so much desire for connection, for inclusion, for egalitarianism, sustainability, peace. These values are so deeply shared, more than we realize. And that one of the best things we can do about that is help people understand each other's values, because that will make them feel less alone and more hopeful. And in order to cultivate those outcomes, the best thing is we don't need to lie to people. We just need to tell them the truth.
Morva McDonald: I really appreciate that. It's not lost on me that I'm talking to you and it's two weeks, I think we decided, 15 days, I believe, from the election. And our belief, I think at NAIS, is that no matter what happens, it will be a turbulent time. It is a turbulent time and it will be a turbulent time likely post the election.
I'm just wondering, as you look at the state of the country and you think about it, what you think the relevancy of this set of ideas is, more broadly as we think about where we are as a country? And I think schools are really instrumental in changing the path that we're on. Because, maybe it's just because I'm an educator and I'm biased in that way. But I definitely think that we have an opportunity to shift what's happening. And so I'm just curious about your own reflections about where we are as a country and how you think about that, given your work.
Jamil Zaki: I'm frightened and anxious like I think most people in the country are now. It seems like we're on a knife's edge between very different realities, very different futures. And I think that I don't have any magic bullet for this, but there's a few things that I would say.
One, 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. So that's the first thing that I would say.
The second is that I do think, and I know that this sounds a bit cliché and maybe even Pollyannaish these days, but I do think that conversation across difference is a critical practice to try to re-engage with. I know it feels like putting a bandaid on a third degree burn at this point, but it really is true. In my lab, we ran a study a couple of years ago where we brought Democrats and Republicans together for Zoom conversations. They talked about gun control, abortion, and climate change. I mean, these are not easy issues.
Morva McDonald: Yeah, these tend to be polarizing topics. Yep.
Jamil Zaki: And we asked them beforehand, how do you think this conversation is going to go on a one to 100 scale, where one is the worst that it could go and 100 is the best that it could go?
And people guessed that the conversation would be around a 30, pretty unpleasant.
Afterwards, we asked them, how did it go? And the most common response we got was a 100 out of 100. People loved these conversations because they were shocked that somebody they disagreed with was actually a human being with values. It wasn't some monster trying to destroy the country. And again, I feel as though— I'm not saying that those conversations would fix everything at all. But I think that we desperately need to understand and rehumanize people who we disagree with, if we are ever to find any form of peace in the country.
And then the last thing that I'll say is that I don't know what the outcome will be 15 days from now. Whatever it is, a lot of people are going to feel really hopeless. Now, who those people are, I don't know, because it will depend on the outcome. But hope is not the belief that things are great or that they will be great. It's the belief that things could get better. And it's especially useful in times of great adversity, even in times when it feels like things are moving backwards socially. If you think about Nelson Mandela in apartheid South Africa or Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia under Soviet rule, these are extremely hopeful people in extremely hopeless times.
And it was their hope, their belief that things could change, that motivated them to make those changes. So I think it's just critical that no matter what happens, we don't lose our hope, because it is one of the things that propels us to fight for what we believe in.
Morva McDonald: Yeah, that's a, I mean, again, I think what's so powerful in some ways in the message of your book is this relationship between individual agency, the fierce choice that Emile makes and I think obviously that you have made, you know, in this case. And that we have to, we're going to have to make a fierce choice no matter what happens in 15 days. We're going to have to, what I hear is we have to make a fierce choice, right? About hopefulness and as leaders of schools holding communities. Some of which are, feel polarized, some of which have tensions, right? That this is part of a potential approach or strategy or a way to move forward.
I'm curious, I'm always curious when I talk to people about like, what's next for you? What's the next thing that you're really deeply thinking about? What's kind of around the corner for you in terms of your intellectual work and kind of research and promise to the future?
Jamil Zaki: There are a lot of directions that my lab is going in and that my mind is going in, which is par for the course for us and for me. A couple of things. One is I'm very interested in the connection between low trust and what you might call the mental health crisis among younger people. We have a generation of young adults coming up, my undergraduates, for instance, who are the least happy young Americans since we've been collecting these data, and also the loneliest since we've been collecting these data as a nation.
And I really do believe, again, that people want more connection than they realize they want. And that other people want connection more than we realize. And so at Stanford, we're running a major project trying to do what we've been talking about, Morva, right? Which is to show people each other's values, to show people that, hey, did you know your average peer wants to connect with new friends? They want to help people who are down. And we're trying to see whether we can use Stanford as a laboratory. Can we foster a culture of people who understand each other better, connect more effectively, and are mentally healthier?
I realize that when we consider why we have this anxious generation, the default now has become, it's the phones. And maybe it's the phones. I think it's almost certainly partially part of the story. I think that we really need to not fixate too much on just the device and think also about the cultures that we're building. And so that's one big direction that we're going in.
I'm super interested in using anti-cynicism as a tool in a polarized world, as we've been talking about just now. And then I'll give you one snippet of a very future direction for me, which is I'm really interested in the idea of co-regulation. My lab is starting to study communities as sort of organisms in which a person is just one part. And we're really interested in how people use their own emotional skills to regulate others in their community, and how we can think about building emotional communities that work well and are as healthy as possible.
Morva McDonald: That's really exciting work. And as a person who works in schools, I think we're all trying to learn about how to shift the context, the community that young people that we know are struggling are experiencing. And so we'll be excited to learn from you and hear from you about your future work and what's taking place. And I just really appreciate the conversation today and talking with you and learning from you. And we're looking forward to what's next, Jamil. Thank you.
Jamil Zaki: Yeah, thank you. And I've loved the conversation and it's just a privilege to talk with you and to have this conversation about education. I hope that this is useful for educators and it's just something that I feel really passionate about that we have this incredible power. And I know that the people listening in want to use that power as wisely and kindly as they can. So it's just a privilege to be in touch with this community.
Morva McDonald: It's a perfect message for now, I think. So thank you. Appreciate it.
Jamil Zaki: Thank you.