Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.

And I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with the fourth and final part in our series on cynicism.

There's been a light at the end of the tunnel, and we've finally reached it.

So in part one, we defined cynicism as the tendency to believe that people are bad, selfish, and untrustworthy.

And we distinguished this modern definition from other concepts like

the cynic philosophy of ancient Greece, which is a whole different thing, and from similar but

distinct concepts like pessimism. We also looked at research on the correlates of cynicism across

a bunch of domains of life, from health to career and all kinds of things,

and discovered that being highly cynical tends to have overwhelmingly negative effects on a person's

life. In part two, we focused primarily on the so-called cynical genius illusion. The short

version of this is that while people might not necessarily like

highly cynical people, for whatever reason, we tend to assume that they are smart and

competent in cognitive domains conforming to the Sherlock Holmes archetype. However,

experiments showed that this is not actually the case on average. Highly cynical

people are not smarter than everybody else. And if anything, the correlation usually goes the other way.

And so we talked about possible reasons for this effect and also talked about the question of

what, if anything, is the actual benefit of generalized cynicism? It seems like one

answer is that if you are not very skilled at telling the difference between a trustworthy

situation and an untrustworthy one, generalized cynicism may protect you from catastrophic

misplacements of trust, but again, at great cost to your well-being, and at the

price of many lost opportunities to benefit from trust and cooperation.

...