Hope for Cynics: How to Cultivate Kindness w/ Dr. Jamil Zaki

Summary

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Raising Good Humans – "Hope for Cynics: How to Cultivate Kindness"

Host: Dr. Aliza Pressman
Guest: Dr. Jamil Zaki (Professor of Psychology, Stanford University)
Date: September 26, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode dives into the science and practicalities of fostering empathy and kindness in children—particularly when cultural cynicism and anxiety about the future abound. Dr. Aliza Pressman speaks to Dr. Jamil Zaki about cultivating realistic hope, preventing empathy burnout, promoting kindness as a learnable skill, and why our evolving relationship to technology makes human connection all the more crucial.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Empathy Beyond the Tribe – The Role of Story ([00:04]–[07:00])

• Personalizing distant suffering: Dr. Pressman asks about whether telling individualized stories about distant or faceless people helps empathy.
  • Zaki: "Empathy in most animals is really powerful, but...hyperlocal...The amazing thing about human empathy is that we combine this ancient instinct for togetherness...with an unmatched ability for imagination...We can place ourselves in the lives...of people 5,000 miles away...the way we do that is through story and storytelling." ([03:04])
  • There's strong evidence that narrative and individuation make us care about distant or different others.
• Limits and risk of empathy overload: Dr. Zaki notes that while young people are exposed to far more stories today, this can lead to emotional burnout.
  • He cautions that "sometimes they're overloaded by it and being driven to this state of helplessness and anxiety by reading and seeing all this suffering and not being able to do anything about it." ([05:23])

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2. Empathy as Action, Not Just Emotion ([07:00]–[08:59])

• Empathy should trigger action: Dr. Zaki describes empathy as an evolutionary "trigger for action":
  • "Empathy, like so many emotions, is...a trigger for action...But when people are flooded...but don’t feel like they can act, it's kind of like that emotion curdles inside us and it turns into, well, burnout, exhaustion and anxiety." ([07:00])
• Think globally, help locally: His advice for students and his own children is to "think globally, but help locally and to hope locally as well." ([07:48])
  • Local action, like a beach cleanup, lets you channel overwhelming empathy into something tangible and positive.

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3. Kindness Benefits Both Others—and Ourselves ([12:18]–[14:20])

• Helping others is "one of the absolute most efficient things that you can do to better your own mental health, well-being, and even physical health." ([12:32])
  • Research from his lab shows you’re less stressed and less lonely on days you help others.
  • The motivation behind help matters: "Not just doing for others, but doing for others out of a deep sense of purpose and value is really one of the healthiest things that we can do..." ([13:36])

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4. Empathy Is a Skill—And It’s Built Early ([14:20]–[19:01])

• Is empathy innate or learned? Dr. Zaki is adamant: "Empathy is a skill. Absolutely." ([15:16])
  • Early deprivation (Romanian orphanages study) led to profound empathy deficits, but adoption into nurturing homes could restore empathy skills.
  • "The number one thing is to make children feel safe and loved...If you want somebody to learn to care, you need to show them care." ([16:46])
  • Model empathy: What parents do matters as much as what they say.
  • Celebrate kindness: "Make children aware...that kindness and empathy are also important by...celebrating them...when they care for others and show up for them." ([18:39])

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5. Temperament, Empathy, and Self-Compassion ([22:06]–[27:38])

• Some kids are more attuned than others: Differences in empathy are often temperament-based, but not destiny.
  • "There’s no temperament that’s correct or incorrect...all kids should be celebrated for who they are." ([23:39])
  • Find and celebrate each child’s moments of empathy or self-care ("self-compassion is for some people harder to learn than compassion for others—and just as important..."). ([25:39])
• Notable Moment: Playful Harry Potter analogies—using Sorting Hat wisdom to illustrate how kids’ empathy ‘types’ shouldn’t be judged as better or worse, but valued for their unique strengths. ([26:01]–[29:21])
  • "If we show people through our actions...that we believe in them, that we see their positive qualities, that's an honor that they receive and they're more likely to step up to meet those expectations." ([28:45])

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6. Family Traditions: Positive Gossip ([34:24]–[37:08])

• Dr. Zaki’s family’s "positive gossip": Sharing daily stories of kindness they've witnessed:
  • "It focuses us on this local environment...Positive gossip refocuses us on the local, where, again, I think hope really lives. It...acts as a counterweight to our own cynicism because we each get three stories of goodness that we wouldn't have heard without doing this practice." ([34:54])
  • This habit primes them to notice positive actions ("If you knew you were going to have to report to your family about a red car...you would notice many more red cars." [36:36])
• The science of gossip: We naturally gossip more about selfish or bad behavior than good, which skews perceptions.
  • "People gossip three times more about selfish behaviors than about kind behaviors. So positive gossip...is a hedge against a natural tendency...that drives everybody’s cynicism." ([37:23])

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7. Hopeful Skepticism vs. Cynicism ([39:43]–[41:27])

• Distinguishing hope from optimism: Dr. Zaki frames hope as an active, skeptical stance:
  • "Optimism is the belief that things will go well, that the future is bright...I also personally feel as though optimism is ridiculous at this moment in history. But hope is different. Hope is not the idea that the future will turn out well. It's the idea that things could get better, but that we have no idea. It's skeptical." ([39:43])
  • Both naive optimism and cynicism lead to complacency, but hope drives action: "A hopeful person says, oh man, things are really rocky, but they could get better...The future is unwritten, and I need to do something." ([40:48])
  • Social movements are "driven by people who have a fierce and hard-won hope..." ([41:24])

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8. The Future: Empathy & Hope Are Future-Proof Skills ([41:27]–[43:27])

• With technology and AI rapidly changing society, empathy and hope are what will set humans apart:
  • "The ability to be fully human with others will be a massive differentiator in our lives." ([42:55])
  • The future is uncertain and will bring progress and peril—so Zaki urges us to "hold on to hope, not optimism. And not pessimism." ([42:13])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Dr. Jamil Zaki:
  • "Empathy is a skill. Absolutely. I think a lot of us assume that you either have it or you don't. But the evidence is quite clear that our circumstances and the choices that we make shape our ability to connect with other people." ([15:16])
  • "Think globally, but help locally and to hope locally as well." ([07:52])
  • "Helping other people from a place of care is one of the absolute most efficient things you can do to better your own mental health, well-being and even physical health." ([12:36])
  • "If we show people through our actions...that we believe in them...they're more likely to step up to meet those expectations." ([28:35])
  • "A hopeful person says, oh man, things are really rocky, but they could get better...The future is unwritten and, and I need to do something." ([40:49])
  • "The ability to be fully human with others will be a massive differentiator in our lives." ([42:55])
• Dr. Aliza Pressman:
  • Playfully highlighting contrasting reactions to empathy in her own daughters and using Harry Potter houses to illustrate temperament differences. ([26:01]–[27:38])
  • "[Hope and empathy] are skills that are going to be incredibly powerful in this very uncertain world..." ([41:27])

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Suggested Timestamps for Reference

• [00:04] Introduction to Dr. Jamil Zaki & empathy as a skill
• [03:04] Narrative as a tool for global empathy
• [05:23] Empathy overload & potential harms
• [07:00] The role of empathy as a call to action
• [12:32] Benefits of prosocial behavior for mental health
• [15:16] Empathy can be taught, and is built in early childhood
• [23:39] Temperament and empathy: variation in kids
• [28:35] "Earned trust" and self-fulfilling prophecies in raising kids
• [34:54] Positive gossip as a family tradition
• [39:43] Defining hope vs. optimism vs. cynicism
• [42:55] Why empathy is a "future-proof" human skill

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Conclusion

This episode is a rich conversation threading practical and scientific insights on empathy, hope, and kindness—serving as a counterbalance to cultural narratives of cynicism and alienation. Dr. Zaki delivers actionable wisdom for parents and anyone looking to preserve a sense of agency, compassion, and joy—even in turbulent times.

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Transcript

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

The following podcast is a Dear Media production. Welcome to Raising Good humans podcast. I'm Dr. Liza Pressman and today I am here with Dr. Jamil Zaki, who's a professor of psychology at Stanford University. He is the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab, and he studies empathy and kindness in the human brain, which is just so cool because empathy and kindness have been on the decrease. But we know that it's so important and especially in this age where we kind of don't know our future and what the future holds for our children in terms of what jobs they're going to do and what the world's going to look like through the lens of technology. We know that kindness and empathy are pretty important skills to grow, but we don't want to grow them in a way that is inactive. And so we're talking about that. And we're also talking about even though there are very real reasons to feel cynical about the world, how can we adjust to feel hopeful skepticism? So thinking like a scientist who might be skeptical but open and hopeful versus someone who's kind of given up and is just cynical because those associations with mental health are very, very strong. And so these are things that are important to talk about. His research is pretty incredible. So I really hope you enjoy this episode and if you do, please write a little review in Apple Podcasts. It's just so helpful to get this word out. Thank you for listening and as always, you can reach me on at Raising Good Humans podcast on Instagram or my free substack doctoraliza pressman substack.com it sounds like, especially when you're thinking about developing humans even as old as adolescence. And I know you also have research on adolescents and young adults, so I want to hear about all of it. But is there, is there a benefit to simply continuing to personalize people who are not around us? Like thinking about individual stories, like something that's far away that happened. And so we're thinking these are strangers. We don't care about this. Even worse, we don't like them. But turning it into I want to tell you a story about Jamil, who you don't know, but I, you know, I had this really cool conversation and here's what his life experience has been in whatever. I mean, now my story is very boring sounding, but like, is there a benefit to trying to create since we can't change the world from what it's become in terms of, you know, it's like it's both bigger and smaller, Is there a benefit to kind of trying to create more personalized views of groups.

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[Dr. Jamil Zaki]

So this is, this has been studied for many years and think that there absolutely is a deep power to narrative. So you can think of empathy in most animals as really powerful, but pretty, let's say hyperlocal, right? I mean, a mouse will become distressed if its cage mate is in pain. You know, you move up to dolphins and chimpanzees and it's much more complicated, but still just within the tribe, it's within whatever other animals are right there in my line of sight. You know, the amazing thing about human empathy is that we combine this ancient instinct for togetherness and connection with a, an unmatched ability for imagination. You know, we can place ourselves in the lives and minds and hearts of people 5,000 miles away, of people who lived 5,000 years ago, of people who have not yet been born, but whose lives we are shaping now, and even fictional characters who will never live. And the way that we do all of that is through story and storytelling. And so absolutely there's a lot of evidence that individuation and narrative, when you turn a disaster that's happened halfway around the world from a statistic into a story, you drive up people's empathy. And I think that's a, that can be a beautiful thing in extending our care to folks who are different from us or might feel distant. I do want to add though that I think sometimes we have to ask ourselves, well, what are we going to do with that care? You know, a lot of people, when they learn that I study empathy, ask me if younger generations are less empathic and they think they already know the answer. They sort of, it's more, more of a comment than the dreaded comment instead of a question. And they tell me, you know, young people today, they just don't know how to empathize, do they? They're just so self centered and narcissistic. I try to shut that down as quickly as I can. You know, I have two children myself. I also teach college students. And so I'm around young adults and have been for many years.

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

They're not little monsters, as it turns out.

[Dr. Jamil Zaki]

I'd say quite the opposite. I would say that my students, Even over the 15 years that I've been teaching, have become more globally empathic than my students before. Not because my students before were unempathic monsters, but because the amount of access to stories that we have is just through the roof. And I think again, that can be a beautiful thing in driving a global consciousness. But when I think about young people today. I don't worry about whether they're experiencing enough empathy. I worry that sometimes they're overloaded by it and being driven to this state of helplessness and anxiety by reading and seeing all this suffering and not being able to do anything about it.

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

I'm so glad you brought that up, because I was going to ask you, like, at what point are we taking this beautiful thing of empathy and. And is it becoming harmful? And I was thinking about. Do you remember the case against empathy? Yeah, But I was just thinking about in. In that. The idea that sometimes this story of this one individual, and you keep hearing this story that you're becoming connected to and attached to and you're inundated with just the most gutting stories can leave you so flooded and helpless and overwhelmed that now I worry that we're getting stuck in that. So I want to hear more about what you've learned here.

[Dr. Jamil Zaki]

Well, first of all, Against Empathy by Paul Bloom happens to be a book that I really love, even though I, of course, disagree with him.

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

Yeah, I want to hear your take.

[Dr. Jamil Zaki]

Yeah. And I think that he's right that empathy can burden us. Of course it can. And the question is, what are we doing with that burden? I mean, one could argue that when people in your community are suffering, that burden is a gift because it moves you to act in ways that benefit them. I think that the issue with modern empathy is that it doesn't allow us to do anything. Right. It at least makes us feel like we can't do anything. Empathy, like so many emotions, is. It's supposed to be, if you think about it from evolutionary terms, a trigger for action. Right. Anger is supposed to be a trigger for action. It moves you towards a conflict. Fear is a trigger for action to get the hell out of wherever you are because something threatening is happening. Empathy is supposed to be a trigger for action in that you help somebody. And so when people are flooded, as you're saying, with these images and stories about suffering, but don't feel like they can act, it's kind of like that emotion curdles inside us and it turns into, well, burnout, exhaustion and anxiety. And so what I always tell my students, and my kids, too, is to think globally, but help locally and to hope locally as well. I mean, if what you're worried about is global climate change, my God, it's hard to really do much that makes you feel like you are personally making a dent in that problem. But you can, like, with, like, what I did with my kids, a while ago, do a beach cleanup, for instance, and just feel as though you are doing something with that emotion, finding some way to express that care. That's good in that you're actually helping other people, but it's also good in that you are doing something with one of the most beautiful feelings that evolution has gifted us.

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[Dr. Liza Pressman]

When you've found the sweet spot of the kind of empathy that actually activates you because you've, you, you're, you're teaching the, the way to activate that isn't like now we have to solve climate change globally.

[Dr. Jamil Zaki]

Yeah, this, this is actually one of my favorite parts of the science of empathy and of human connection more broadly is, you know, we tend to believe that, okay, we have these feelings of care for one another that inspires us to help other people. And that's great because humanity would fall apart if we didn't help each other. So it's an act of service and it's a way to be there for others, I hope. Poorly hidden secret is that doing for others is also one of the absolute most efficient things that you can do to better your own mental health, well being and even physical health. So in our lab, we once studied Stanford students and measured on a given day whether they had helped somebody else or not. And we found that on days that people helped others, they were less stressed, less lonely and happier. There's other research that finds that when you help others, your stress hormones actually decrease. And we further find that it's not just helping people, it's helping people from a place of deep connection and care. Right. I don't know about you, but I sometimes have helped people out of a sense of obligation. Like, you know, a friend asks you if they, if you can help them move. You're like, okay, fine, yeah, I'm happy to help you show up and they haven't even packed their stuff, come on. And sometimes helping if you don't feel a sense of connection is less helpful to you as well. So not just doing for others but doing for others out of a deep sense of purpose and value is really one of the healthiest things that. That we can do, that we can encourage our children to do as well.

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

Okay, so I want to go back to. To young children before they have capacity in bigger, more obvious ways. Can you talk a little bit about the research of kind of the early development of these connections and the earliest ways that we can promote. I don't know if. Do you call this a skill in any way?

[Dr. Jamil Zaki]

You mean empathy?

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

Yeah. Like, how are we throwing this out of the gate? And what part of it are we potentially. This is not the. The kind of question where I'm like, I'm telling you the answer in the question. I'm genuinely curious. Your approach to explaining our natural inclination of. To have this empathy starting in infancy and what parents can do to both promote and also accidentally prohibit its development.

[Dr. Jamil Zaki]

This is a great question. And let's be clear. Empathy is a skill. Absolutely. I think a lot of us assume that you either have it or you don't. But the evidence is quite clear that our circumstances and the choices that we make shape our ability to connect with other people. And that is nowhere as true as in early childhood, where the foundation of our connective abilities really is shaped. So there's a. I want to begin here with a. With a sort of scientific story. It's a tragic one, but for some of these kids, it did have a happy ending. So as you may know, due to many very terrible political circumstances, there was a generation of children in Romania who were institutionally raised. Right. They were raised in orphanages, and they were. They suffered what's known as relational deprivation. The idea here is that these kids had enough food, they had shelter, they had water, they had everything that you need to survive, but they didn't have deep connection. And the effect on them was profound. You know, in terms of their physical health. I mean, there's even something known as psychosocial dwarfism, which is the idea that children don't grow physically as much if they don't feel connection. They. The mental health and cognitive health of these kids was devastated, but so was their ability for empathy. So researchers measured empathy in these institutionalized children and found that their level of care was similar to that of people with psychopathy. Right. So really a very blunted ability to care and connect with other people, which might make you think, wow, those kids are doomed, except some of them weren't. Some of these children were lucky enough to be adopted into, quote, unquote, typical households. And in those Kids, their empathy returned to the level of, I suppose, somebody who doesn't have psychopathy like you and me. So I think this is one of the stories that, to me, most profoundly drives home the idea of, one, that empathy is changeable, and two, that childhood is the place where we have the greatest opportunity to change it. And so what can we do to foster it? I mean, the number one thing is to make children feel safe and loved, right? I mean, if. If you want somebody, human beings are deeply reciprocal species, right? And if you want somebody to learn to care, you need to show them care, meaning point it in their direction. Another two important things that we can do pertain to not just what we give to our children, but the way that we act around them, right? So you can tell your kids it's important to care all day long. And if you're rude to the waiter or waitress right after that, they're going to learn from your actions, not your words. And the last thing I'll say on this is that it also matters what we reward our children for. You think about schools, and they tend to, I mean, less these days than in the past. But certainly when I was a student, no one was giving me an A plus in. In kindness. They were grading me on calculus instead. And that's fine. But what we can do as parents is make children aware of the fact that kindness and empathy are also important by rewarding. Not just rewarding them, but celebrating them. Not just for when they act in ways that are smart or athletic, but when they care for others and show up for them.

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[Dr. Liza Pressman]

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[Dr. Liza Pressman]

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[Dr. Liza Pressman]

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[Dr. Liza Pressman]

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[Dr. Liza Pressman]

This is kind of a turn I didn't expect to take. But I wanted to ask you about how this interacts with temperament. Like, for more to sort of unpack, understanding the kids who might, like, bend more naturally toward empathy and nurturing those kids. And maybe they even need to be, like, helped out so that they're not sitting too far in the empathy versus the kids who maybe you're like, oh, God, do they even notice that somebody just fell and, like, scraped their knee? Because they're just, like, bopping around happy or grabbing, you know, like that you just think about the playground or even when you think about adolescence, and you just. You see your different kinds. You have multiple kids, right? You can see that some are naturally more inclined and some might not be. So for those parents who are, like, sometimes they come and say, I'm doing, I'm loving, I'm celebrating empathy. We live in this world through. Through such a compassionate lens, but that my kid just feels like they are very fine when somebody else is suffering. Not as a. Not because there's any sociopathy, just. That's just they're. They're just sort of not as moved or. I have one kid. I'm imagining somebody saying, like, I've got one kid who is so empathetic that they can't get through the course of the day. So can you address kind of temperament and empathy in that way?

[Dr. Jamil Zaki]

This is resonating with me so much. I have two daughters, and one of them, the other day, we're moving slowly through the Harry Potter books, and I was telling her, okay, let's make some time. I'm going to try to be done by work at this time. I just need to hurry a little bit, but then I can finish early and we can read. And she said, no, I don't want you to have to hurry. She's so concerned about me just working a little bit more efficiently. And I thought, wow, that's not something that my other kid would be worried about. So definitely hear you on differences in temperament. And I think, one, there's no temperament that's correct or incorrect. I mean, I think that all kids should be celebrated for who they are and not. We don't need to try to shoehorn anybody into a vision of how empathic they're supposed to be. So that's one point that I want to make right off the bat. Another is that temperament is not the same as destiny, the same way that personality is not the same as destiny. Right? I mean, look, Seattle is usually colder than Phoenix, but Seattle at noon in July is probably a lot warmer than Phoenix at 2am in February. So we each have these set points, but we move around these set points quite a bit. In fact, research in personality finds that people are more different from themselves across the day and the week than they are from each other. So no matter what your child's baseline is, they probably already move around that baseline quite a bit. So rather than trying to change who anybody is, which I don't think needs to be our mission, we can find those moments when kids express Something that's really beautiful for them. Right. Given their set point and celebrate those moments. I think that also you make a great point that some kids, we might want to emphasize the moments where they're noticing other people and caring about other people. For kids who seem like they're highly sensitive, like my daughter was worried about me working quickly, we might want to celebrate the moments that they're showing up for themselves as well. Self compassion is for some people harder to learn than compassion for others. And just as important to, to, to, to model and to encourage.

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

I want to get into self compassion. I also want to tell you that my, my oldest daughter's so obsessed with Harry Potter. She's 18. She, she's probably read Harry Potter since when she first started reading it more times than I care to mention, lest I think she's just totally ridiculous. But she takes deep comfort in Harry Potter. But she said the wildest thing to me the other day, which was she's like going to a Harry Potter party because they apparently have Harry Potter parties at her school. And she's like, I think I realized I'm a Slytherin. All this time I thought I was a Gryffindor, but I'm a Slytherin. And of course I was like. Because to me, I hear I lack empathy because I frankly have only read Harry Potter once. Loved it. But I'm not Like, I haven't read each one 27 times. Totally obsessed. And I had this moment of. But now to your point, she has plenty of beautiful moments of empathy, but is she as empathic as my younger child who notices every single detail? Absolutely not. She kind of intellectualizes things a little bit differently and has like more separation. But she pointed out to me that I was looking at Slytherin in this very terrible way. But actually it's, you know, like how Slytherin is not meant for bad. It just like comes across that way. This is such a weird thing to tell you, but since you've got a Harry Potter fan, I just want to.

[Dr. Jamil Zaki]

Warn you, hey, you know, since you're going there, I'm going to go right there with you and say that you may remember that the Sorting Hat wondered aloud whether Harry should be a Slytherin before putting him in Gryffindor. And it was because of some of his positive qualities. He's strong willed, ambitious. Right. And I don't think there's anything. Again, this goes right to the same point that we don't need to try to change who people are, but rather to celebrate the positive qualities that they already have. And I mean, and I think that when we do that, we make it more likely that they accentuate those qualities. Especially kids are so sensitive to what we see in them. There's something that economists call earned trust. The idea is, look, if you are cynical about somebody and you treat them as though they are selfish, if you treat a kid as though they, they are unfriendly or not very smart, for instance, they're going to step down to meet your expectations. You end up creating a self fulfilling prophecy, making them into the person you fear they will be. If instead we show people through our actions, through the faith that we put in them, that we believe in them, that we see their positive qualities, that's an honor that they receive and they're more likely to step up to meet those expectations. It's amazing. One economist told me once, if you assume the best about people or if you assume the worst about people, you'll turn out being right. Because either way you're going to influence that person towards whatever your expectations were. And I think that's important for all of us to understand, but especially for parents to understand.

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

Absolutely.

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[Dr. Liza Pressman]

There's a massive wave pool, a lazy.

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[Dr. Liza Pressman]

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[Dr. Jamil Zaki]

No, not at all. It's a great question. I wish that I had a better answer. I think that I find that a lot of people in the psychology and behavioral science space, some people in this space seem like beacons of whatever it is that they're studying. The happiness researcher, who's just blissed out all the time. The meditation researcher, who's. Who's approaching their nirvana adjacent already, you know? And I don't feel that way at all. I mean, that's part of why I wrote my last book. Because here I am studying kindness and human goodness, and I tend to be a pretty cynical person, you know, and I study empathy. I like to think that I. That I can connect with people. But I'm no paragon of care in every moment. I feel sometimes like the work that I do is more a backdrop for me to disappoint myself than to meet every ideal. But I'm at peace with it. I don't feel as though studying something means you have to embody it. And yet there are ways that I think we try to bring some of the science into our family. So I'll give you one example. We have a tradition of positive gossip that is at the end of the day, when we can. We don't always do this, but when we remember, we. We try to each share a story of human goodness that we've seen that day. Somebody who is kind or caring or forgiving or friendly or funny. And I find that this does two things. One, it focuses us on this local environment. It's really easy to spin out when you think about the horrible things that are happening at a national level, at a global level, and to draw conclusions about human beings writ large based on those terrible pieces of news. And by the way, if people feel cynical about the news, I'm right there with you. But that's not all there is to our species. And so positive gossip refocuses us on the local, where, again, I think hope really lives. It also sort of acts as a counterweight to our own cynicism because we each get three stories of goodness that we wouldn't have heard without doing this practice. And then finally, when you know that you're going to talk about something good that you saw that somebody did, it sort of pops up an antenna in your mind all day. You're sort of looking for that example and finding the best one. That you can. And what you realize when you look for things is that they're everywhere. You know, if you. If you knew that you were going to have to report to your family about a red car that you saw today, you would notice many more red cars. Yeah, that's great.

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

Oh, that's so good. I love that positive gossip. And just for. For listeners, what is gossip research like, how does that feed into cynicism while we're on gossip?

[Dr. Jamil Zaki]

Yeah, so gossip is so fascinating. It's, you know, these are conversations that we have that are social, you know, about ourselves and about especially other people. And there's this old quote attributed to many people, but nobody knows who said it, that great minds talk about ideas, mediocre minds talk about events, and small minds talk about other people. Right. That gossip is relatively frivolous, but it's not. I mean, gossip is actually. You can think of it as reputational policing. Right. In early societies when there was nothing, you know, any law, one of the ways to protect yourself from folks who would swindle or harm is to get the word out this person is not safe. And. And it turns out that many, in many studies, people who gossip about folks who are doing harm are not doing it because they're, you know, salacious or because they want to get clout. They're doing it because they want to protect their community. The issue is that because of that, we tend to gossip way more about selfish, harmful, corrupt people than we do about kind and helpful and virtuous people. In my lab, we found that people gossip three times more about selfish behaviors than about kind behaviors. So positive gossip is something we practice in our family, but it's also a hedge against a natural tendency that we have to point gossip in a negative direction that drives everybody's cynicism.

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

That is so cool. I haven't really thought about positive gossip before, but it's. It's another one of those. Like, we could do this outside of a lab. You're doing. I mean, that's so cool. What can we do sort of to. In this current climate, which is. I feel like every month it's another, like in this exceptionally stressful time where the news just feels like. It's just. It's hard to believe. Can you leave us with. Because I think you have. Well, people can read hope for cynics, but how do you go about growing that hope without being kind of like you said at the beginning of this, just sort of perceived as. Or actually just naive?

[Dr. Jamil Zaki]

So I think it's important to distinguish between Hope and optimism. Optimism is the belief that things will go well, that the future is bright. Optimistic people are pretty happy, but they also tend to be complacent. Right? I mean, if a wonderful future is on its way, you can kind of just sit on your couch and wait for it to arrive. I also personally feel as though optimism is ridiculous at this moment in history. But hope is different. Hope is not the idea that the future will turn out well. It's the idea that things could get better, but that we have no idea. It's skeptical. You see, it doesn't assume a positive or a negative future. And because we don't know, our actions matter. Right. So I often think of really cynical pessimistic people and really naive optimistic people as actually having a lot in common. They might not think that, but a very optimistic person says, things are going to be great, I don't have to do anything. A very cynical person says the future is going to be awful. I also don't have to do anything. It's like a dark complacency. A hopeful person says, oh man, things are really rocky, but they could get better. Things have been bad in the past and they have gotten better. The future is unwritten and, and I need to do something. And if you look at social movements in, throughout history and around the world, they're not driven by cynical people. They're also not driven by naive people. They're driven by people who have a fierce and hard won hope. Not necessarily hope in the system as it is, but hope in people like them who want to change it for the better.

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

When I hear hope, when I hear empathy, I think like, these are skills that are going to be incredibly powerful in this very like uncertain world. Especially as people are talking about, forget about like global problems, but AI and social media and just like how we don't really know what skills our kids are going to need. Hope and, and empathy feel like pretty good ones. Have you, are you, do you have any wisdom for us with regard to this?

[Dr. Jamil Zaki]

Oh man. I mean, this could be a whole other conversation, but I wanted to tease.

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

For getting you back again.

[Dr. Jamil Zaki]

Yeah, I mean, really briefly, I think that the amount of contact that we have with algorithms now, the amount of our lives that are going to be mediated through technology, is something to be hopeful and frightened of all at the same time. I mean, it's that the changes that we will undergo in the next generation are probably unimaginable for us. And I think it's critical for us to hold on to hope, not optimism. And not pessimism, to ask ourselves, what are the different possible futures here? And how do we put our thumb on the scale to try to get to a future that we think is more positive, given the inescapable fact that these technologies are coming? And then Empathy. My goodness. I mean, I think that in a world more and more dominated by AI, where algorithms can do so many things that people can do and can sometimes appear to have empathy, but of course don't actually have the capacity for empathy, I think that human connection will become a much more precious resource and a much more precious skill. I mean, not just for people's lives, but for their work as well. I think that the ability to be fully human with others will be a massive differentiator in our lives.

[Podcast Sponsor/Ad Reader]

I find that incredibly hopeful.

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

In case it's not abundantly clear, please note that this episode may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products and services. Individuals on the show may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to in this episode.