>Cross-cultural analyses showed that competent individuals held contingent attitudes and endorsed cynicism only if it was warranted in a given sociocultural environment. Less competent individuals embraced cynicism unconditionally, suggesting that—at low levels of competence—holding a cynical worldview might represent an adaptive default strategy to avoid the potential costs of falling prey to others’ cunning.
One might argue that incompetent people are cynical because, without the insulation and support structures that foster education, they are more attuned with the one true cynical reality of the world.
Another might argue that incompetent people are cynical because, without sufficient intellectual capacity, they are susceptible to false ideas concerning the one true non-cynical reality of the world.
The hopelessness and hopefulness of reality can be endlessly debated, but ultimately, it's up to the individual to choose which of these to put their faith in. I agree that that an overall cynical view could be an adaptation to defend against the threat of being taken advantage of. One should weigh this against whether or not such a worldview truly works in your favor. Amazing advances have been made in this world over the past few centuries, and I can't accept the notion that these come about through cynicism rather than hope for the future.
Holding a position that rejects human progress requires one to believe that good is ultimately insignificant. Judging by the increasing suicide rates of young people, this seems to be a modern problem, and so perhaps the solution can be found if we look towards the traditions that have unified humanity in the past.
Well stated. Cynicism can prevent you from being scammed, but it won’t help you succeed in any active endeavor. At its root, I think cynicism comes from being repeatedly disappointed by how things turn out and creating a defense mechanism. But it’s also possible to take it all in, register disappointment, but instead of becoming cynical, one can recognize the chaotic and impersonal nature of the universe and contemplate what levers are available to influence future outcomes more favorably. Easier said than done for sure, but no one ever said life was easy!
Just because your paranoid, doesn’t mean you are paranoid enough.
In fact, given every credible story science suggests, regarding how the universe ends, involves us or our successors ending disappearing into some thermodynamic hell in extremely unpleasant ways, … oh look, ice cream!
> Cynicism refers to a negative appraisal of human nature—a belief that self-interest is the ultimate motive guiding human behavior.
This is a poor starting point, since there are also neutral and positive appraisals of self-interest as the ultimate motive. That includes biologists from Darwin to Dawkins and economists from Smith to Hayek.
It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages.
If you agree with Smith's famous dictum, self-interest is not by itself a negative appraisal. Most moral views can be interpreted as compatible with self-interest, if that is defined in a sufficiently long term. Can someone who has a neutral or positive appraisal of natural human self-interest in general be cynical? If not, and if human nature is actually driven by self-interest, then a non-negative attitude toward it is healthier.
Smith here isn’t arguing for a moral reevaluation of selfishness but rather pointing out that market systems have evolved to take advantage of even selfishness. In areas where this market systems haven’t evolved proper mechanisms yet, the expectation would be high levels of fraud. For instance in the case of butchers, people can trust a local butcher more than a traveling one - and in modern capitalism, regulations allow monopolies to maintain a minimal level of quality.
They're close, but it's not those who are incompetent who tend toward cynicism as a defense against being taken advantage of. It's those who feel powerless, and have a high level of vigilance against further perceived losses of agency. This is fueled by the same psychological mechanisms as loss aversion, but what is perceived to be at risk of loss is not finances or resources, but rather the ability to express one's own will (the most precious resource of all).
This very principal is behind the rise of conspiracy theories in times of upheaval and uncertainty throughout history, including during the pandemic.
I can’t recommend any books on it unless you want to get into Friedrich Nietzsche as I think it has much to do with his theory of “will to power”, but if you are having a problem with cynicism, know that there’s nothing wrong with you. Your brain is just doing what it’s supposed to do and what we evolved to do. It’s just that those tendencies can be counterproductive in today’s world.
Powerlessness is created by fear and very often, self-inflicted. Find out what you really want and what fears are stopping you. Work at that, and talk to a professional about it. Working through this kind of thing with a book can be tough.
"Less competent individuals embraced cynicism unconditionally, suggesting that—at low levels of competence—holding a cynical worldview might represent an adaptive default strategy to avoid the potential costs of falling prey to others’ cunning."
That's rational behavior when the rate of incoming scams is several per hour or worse. The processing load imposed by today's sheer quantity of scam input is huge.
It's really quite minimal for that exact reason. The volume of scans is high enough that very optimized pattern matching for them is developed by the brain. Most scams take less than 1s to identify.
But if you are somewhat smart, by the sheer amount of scams that you receive, you realize how depraved and fraudulent humankind is. As a next step, you realize how few people are willing to stand up and fight against all this, which strongly reinforces this cognition.
The success or failure (in terms of an individual's outcome) of what could also be called rational actor theory seems very context-dependent. Cynicism as described in this article, i.e. extreme selfishness, is an understandable response to societal breakdown of various kinds.
For example, people might resist paying taxes in the context of high levels of governmental corruption, as evidenced by a governmental failure to deal with widespread problems like poor roads, endemic homelessness, etc. In contrast, if the government used tax revenues wisely and efficiently to improve citizen's quality of life, rational actors would be happy to pay a higher percentage of their income as taxes, as the benefit to themselves would be greater (as even if they paid no taxes, they still wouldn't have the resources needed to address societal-scale problems).
Take Prisoner's Dilemma as another case. In a stable society, players develop reputations as cooperators or betrayers. Two people with long-standing reputations of cooperation would be much more likely to trust one another, while in an unstable society without any reputational basis, the opposite would be true (and damage to one's reputation wouldn't have any persistent negative effect). This can be treated as Repeated Prisoner's Dilemma (pdf):
Of course humans aren't rational logical actors, which is why advertising often works, and those who try the hardest to achieve that status don't seem to be very happy people.
> For example, people might resist paying taxes in the context of high levels of governmental corruption, as evidenced by a governmental failure to deal with widespread problems like poor roads, endemic homelessness, etc.
The adjusted R^2 is not what indicates the quality of a result, but rather the p-value...R^2 indicates an effect size, whereas p-value indicates significance. A small R^2 just means there are other things that should be in the model.
- P-value is the result of a hypothesis test with the question being "is this effect size 0". The p-value is the probability of seeing the observed data under the assumption of the effect being zero.
- The R^2 is a measure of how well the regression model 'explains' the observed data so to speak.
- The effect size is contained in the coefficients assuming near perfect independence between the variables
> competent individuals held contingent attitudes and endorsed cynicism only if it was warranted in a given sociocultural environment.
The paper doesn't speculate on how many cultural environments cynicism is warranted. Is it statistically signficantly different from unconditionally embraced cynicism!?
I might be being a cynic right here but it seems to me "less competent" get less and are surpassed by "more competent" who get to the top and also get more ( money, status, better life ) so the later are of course less cynic.
It reminds me of those people financially set and secure for life who find the time to regularly do some random acts of charity as opposed to those skinflint poor individuals...
Ultimately they are asking individuals to make a personality association call.
The effect is not huge in the association of “cynical” and of “genius” which itself is not even defined as far as I saw. The association is essentially “People generally believe that people who have a propensity for cynicism are better at math, critical thought, and reading comprehension.”
The opposite finding actually seems much stronger, which is that most people strongly believe that non-cynics would be better at important social tasks like talking someone out of suicide.
People are under no illusion, as intimated by the title of the study, that cynics are geniuses, but instead they make the probably accurate assessment that someone who “scrutinizes motives behind others’ apparently selfless acts” (as opposed to someone who explicitly doesn’t) would be better at interpreting a complex diagram or ensuring they received correct change.
They seem to define cynicism as very, very different than what i was taught in school. I always understood the term to be a unconditional and holistic critique of human society arising from the belief that humans are capable of better behavior than we observe. the definition presented just seems to be a very specific type of pessimism.
>[...]according to insights from trust research (Fetchenhauer & Dunning, 2010), when people endorse a cynical stance concerning others and consequently forgo trust, they usually do not even get a chance to learn whether their untrustworthiness assumption was correct and being cynical thus spared them a “loss”—or whether it was incorrect and therefore denied them a “win.” In other words, cynicism often precludes the possibility of experiencing negative outcomes. As a result, it might be perceived as a smarter, more successful strategy and cynical individuals might be attributed higher levels of competence than their less cynical counterparts. After all, they are highly unlikely to be betrayed, deceived, and exploited, whereas it usually remains unknown whether their cynicism resulted in missed opportunities.
This seems to be the main point: a loss aversion regarding trust.
Ultimately, in order to really succeed at any big endeavor involving more than one person "trust" is essential.
At some point the experience of "betrayal" (or "rejection" in another social context) will be inevitable and without the resources (social/financial support) to build up trust again, this negative experience will only be amplified.
"Betrayal" is one of the main drivers of virtually every story, in dramatizations the "cynic" naturally becomes the all-knowing, but without trust (or suspension of disbelief from the audience) there would be no story to tell, no adventure undertaken.
In a sense being cynical is robbing oneself of the richness of possibilities in order to contain the subset of betrayals in them. Those can be very costly and in impoverished circumstances quickly a fatal choice. But in another more harmless contexts one just wants to avoid feeling "dumb" by feeling smart enough to see through the little signs of intrigue and deception all around .... blissfully discarding the whole set and with it the probability of actually doing a smart thing.
Da Vinci made a horse driven soldier and guard siccleshredder.. And most of his contraptions would not have worked. Hatred + hard work, make this a excellent example of a stupid cynic.
Worshipped as a genius for his "inventions", which contain loads of abstract amok, aka weapons designs harming all of humanity in the long run, because he obviously despised his society.
Meanwhile the actual average human gets run over by the descendants of these contraptions in Ukraine and elsewhere. The moral of the story :
If deterrence works for the boss it works for the peasant.
So why can't we all be more trusting asked the farmer the pigs? Why insist on using nuclear deterrence like I do, in this lawless World made by lawless people like me? Completely impossible that cynicism is a valid reaction to a enshitified world going down the drain?
This seems to be highly dependent on rhetoric, not the fundamental viewpoint. Just my observation. For instance, most people don't like the attitude that voting is not a very effective form of political action. However, they are likely to agree with the idea that voting rarely leads to adequate representation. (This is an observation of the liberals and conservatives re national electoral politics.) Merely centering the personal experience is likely to resonate with people more than dry observation.
> For instance, most people don't like the attitude that voting is not a very effective form of political action.
To me, this stance seems to be very US-centric. In Germany, this is an actually quite socially acceptable opinion (even though, of course, the "system press"/"lie press" (Systempresse, Lügenpresse; derogatory terms for the mainstream of newspapers and magazines, which are considered to be too attached to political parties) does not like such a stance). In the 60s and 70s, this attitude actually lead to the formation of the Außerparlamentarische Opposition (extra-parliamentary opposition) in West Germany:
One might argue that incompetent people are cynical because, without the insulation and support structures that foster education, they are more attuned with the one true cynical reality of the world.
Another might argue that incompetent people are cynical because, without sufficient intellectual capacity, they are susceptible to false ideas concerning the one true non-cynical reality of the world.
The hopelessness and hopefulness of reality can be endlessly debated, but ultimately, it's up to the individual to choose which of these to put their faith in. I agree that that an overall cynical view could be an adaptation to defend against the threat of being taken advantage of. One should weigh this against whether or not such a worldview truly works in your favor. Amazing advances have been made in this world over the past few centuries, and I can't accept the notion that these come about through cynicism rather than hope for the future.
Holding a position that rejects human progress requires one to believe that good is ultimately insignificant. Judging by the increasing suicide rates of young people, this seems to be a modern problem, and so perhaps the solution can be found if we look towards the traditions that have unified humanity in the past.