‘Wired for Connection’: The Science of Kindness, and Why Hope Outweighs Cynicism

So many people are jumping in to help neighbors, friends, even strangers affected by the L.A. fires. Volunteering, donating, hosting people who’ve evacuated, providing meals and organizing drives to collect toiletries and clothes.

Turns out, science shows we humans are actually wired for this kind of kindness, connection and empathy.

That’s what Dr. Jamil Zaki has discovered in the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab. He’s a professor of psychology and the author of Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness. He shared some data-driven reasons why we shouldn’t be cynical, even in really hard times. Zaki spoke about his research with The California Report Magazine’s host, Sasha Khokha.

Below are excerpts from their conversation, edited for brevity and clarity. For the full interview on The California Report Magazine, listen to the audio at the top of this story.

Sasha Khokha: What does the incredible outpouring of support for fire survivors show us about human kindness and human goodness?

Jamil Zaki: The last week in California has just been unthinkably tragic and difficult. And I don’t think it takes away anything from the suffering that many people are experiencing to also shine a light on the beauty that people are producing. It turns out that this is a perennial feature of disasters. Although they’re horrible in so many ways, they can also bring out people’s best. There is a lot of evidence throughout history and from the scientific literature that when people face disaster or trauma, oftentimes they respond not by falling apart but by coming together and by helping one another, stepping across lines of difference that sometimes divide them and trying to be there to support each other during the hardest times.

When people are at their most needy, when we’re all going through something together, there’s an urgent sense of togetherness. There’s an urgent sense that we all need to be there for each other. And so I think that’s what elevates these wonderful human tendencies during our darkest times.

Why can’t people show up for each other like this all the time, not just during disasters?

We already are. Most people I’ve surveyed believed that the pandemic caused a decrease in human kindness. But the evidence goes the other way, that actually, in 2020, compared to the years before, people volunteered more, they donated more to charity, and they helped strangers more. But that elevated level of kindness didn’t stop after lockdown ended. Global kindness has remained higher than it did the decade or the years before the pandemic occurred.

There is a sense that our world is more chaotic than it was several years ago. But in that adversity that we’re all facing collectively, I think there has been an elevated sense of social responsibility. I know that we don’t hear about this on the news all the time, but maybe we should hear about it more because it’s been there the whole time.

What does the science tell us about human goodness?

The science is pretty clear that there is a lot of goodness in human beings. In some ways we are wired for connection with each other, to help each other, to be there for one another. That’s frankly what makes our species who we are.

People tend to act kindly when they’re not thinking about it. So if you ask people to make decisions very quickly, they tend to make kinder decisions than if they spend a long time deliberating. Look at stories from the Carnegie Heroes Project, people who have risked their lives to save strangers. If you look at interviews with them, which have been coded by scientists, they often say, “I didn’t think about it. I just ran into the burning building. I wasn’t trying to calculate whether this would be good for my reputation or whether, you know, I would become a hero. I just did it.”

Another level of analysis comes from our biology. In my lab, we found that when people donate to charity or give money to somebody in need, the same parts of their brain are active as when they eat chocolate, for instance, or experience something else pleasurable. There is a lot about us that seems to lead us naturally towards acts of kindness, helping and togetherness.

One of the most powerful things about our species is that our response to suffering is to come together because that’s what we’re good at. If you think about us as animals, we’re not that impressive. Just medium-sized mammals. We can’t run that fast or swim that well. We certainly can’t fly. Our super skill is togetherness. That’s what has allowed us to hunt wooly mammoths and build suspension bridges and write arias. All of this comes from our ability to work together. And we do that most during difficult times.

People are struggling all around us all the time, and we are facing collective struggle all the time. So one thing to cultivate is what Viktor Frankl calls “tragic optimism.” Not shying away from, but looking directly into the pain that we are all going through at different times. Using that acknowledgment of our suffering as a way to keep us connected, to keep us showing up for one another the way that we do during awful disasters like this one.

We have this trope that it’s naive — or even privileged — to be optimistic or to be hopeful. That it’s cooler to be a cynic.

If you ask people who would be smarter, a cynic or a non-cynic, about 70% of people think that cynics would outperform non-cynics on cognitive tests, for instance. But the opposite is true. People who trust others more, who have more faith in people, tend to actually do better on those tests than cynical people.

We also find in research that cynicism is not radical at all. Cynics actually are less likely to vote, less likely to take part in social movements, and in fact, they’re more likely to embrace authoritarian leaders. Because if you don’t trust the people around you; if you think that people are generally awful, what do you need? You need somebody to protect you from your fellow citizens. So authoritarianism actually benefits from a cynical population. Totalitarians and propagandists have been using cynicism to pit people against each other for decades if not centuries.

If you want things to stay the same, one of the best things that you can do is encourage people to believe that nothing can get better.

Of course, a lot of people are feeling cynical about the divisions in this country. But your research shows we may not be as politically divided as we might think.

Absolutely. But first, let’s stipulate we are more divided than we were in the past. And something that’s really troubling about American division now is that it’s become personal. We’ve disagreed for decades about everything you can imagine. But now, people imagine that somebody they disagree with is stupid and evil, mean-spirited and violent. We hate the people we disagree with much more than we did before.

But what we imagine about the “other side” is wrong in basically every way that scientists can measure. For instance, Democrats think that a quarter of Republicans make more than $250,000 a year. The real number is 2%. We think that the average person we disagree with is much more extreme than they really are. Is twice as hateful, twice as anti-democratic and four times as violent as they really are. We also underestimate the amount of common ground that we have, even on specific issues.

I’m not saying that America is a harmonious nation or that we could easily snap into some type of kumbaya situation on a national level. But I do think that there’s much more that we share than we realize.

Your lab actually did a very cool project where you had about 100 Americans talk with each other across divides over Zoom.

We brought these folks together to talk about gun control, abortion and climate change. We prepared them and made sure that they really disagreed on all three issues specifically.

We asked them before the conversations, “How do you think this is going to go?” And on a 1 to 100 scale, where 1 is absolutely the worst conversation you could have and 100 is a delightful conversation. In general, people [predicted] somewhere between neutral and awful.

After the conversations, we asked them [to rate the conversation] again. The most common response we got was a 100 out of 100. They were shocked at how positive these conversations were, and how reasonable the person they disagreed with was. That’s not to say that they agreed. I want to be really clear that empathy and connection is not the same as condoning what other people feel or agreeing with them. But these people found that they could at least respect each other’s humanity and have productive dialogue.

Afterwards, they didn’t just feel better about the person that they talked with. They felt less prejudiced against outsiders in general. So Democrats felt better about Republicans. Republicans felt better about Democrats. And those effects lasted three months after the conversation. So we rarely have chances for dialogue like this, but when they occur, they are much better than we expect them to be.

In general, people don’t trust their fellow citizens, but they do trust the people who they see: their neighbors, their grocer, their bus driver. Generally speaking, the closer you get to humanity, the better you feel about it. And that, to me, is a really powerful data point.

You admit that you actually are kind of a recovering cynic yourself! 

For the last 20 years, I’ve studied empathy, kindness and connection. So people often assume that I must just go around blissed out by human goodness all the time. I really wanted to clarify right away in writing this book that that’s not where I’m coming from. I’m not some person who’s aspirational in terms of my inner life, and I’m going to teach you to be like me. I’m right there with you if you’re feeling cynicism.

What can people do on an everyday basis to fight cynicism? Tell us about your three-step plan.

Step one is to fact check our cynical feelings. Oftentimes, I’ll meet somebody and I’ll just kind of not trust them for no reason. It’s a pretty bold claim to say they’re a bad person, though you know nothing about them. What evidence do you have to draw this conclusion? Are you sure that this is a defensible position? Oftentimes, for me, at least, the answer is absolutely not.

Step two is to collect more data. I call this taking leaps of faith on people. Give people chances to show you who they are, just taking little chances on people and also paying attention to what they give back. One version of this is striking up conversations with strangers. The data are pretty clear. If you actually try to talk with strangers, people are way friendlier than we think they’ll be.

Step three is to monitor what we’re sharing. If we’ve had eight positive interactions during a day and then one person was sort of a jerk to us, who are we going to talk about later on? For me, it’s that jerk.

[A couple years ago] I was driving my kids to school and somebody cut me off in traffic. I started saying all sorts of things about them. And my daughter said, “Dad, you don’t talk about all the people who didn’t cut you off.” Ever since then, [my family has] been trying something called positive gossip. We all gather one example of human goodness from that day and share it in the evening. When you know that you’re going to share something, you start to look for it more. Positive gossip has sort of popped up an antenna where I now look for more instances of people being friendly or kind. And it turns out that once you’re looking for that, they’re not at all hard to find.