If you've been let down multiple times in your life, say by people who were supposed to love you or jobs that didn't work out the way you hoped, or repeated experiences being mistreated based on your identity or your socioeconomic status.

You might start viewing other people as inherently selfish, unreliable, even corrupt.

After all, if you never go out on a limb to trust anybody else,

you can't be surprised when another person makes the cut that plunges you to the ground.

The trouble is, cynicism doesn't actually protect us from getting hurt.

It just alienates us from sources of comfort.

From KERA in Dallas, this is Think.

I'm Chris Boyd.

Expecting the worst from everyone in every interaction can feel like a tough and radical worldview, in

that it inspires us to seek out and call out bad behavior by others. But if we believe

everybody is terrible and nothing will ever get better, we tend to not even try. Ironically,

that serves elites who want nothing more than to perpetuate a status quo that works better for them than for the rest of us.

My guest is a former cynic, now remaking himself into what he calls a skeptical optimist.

Jamil Zaki is professor of psychology at Stanford University and director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab.

His book is called Hope for Cynics, the

surprising science of human goodness. Jamil, welcome back to think. Thanks, Chris. It's great to be

back. Although this book is all about the downsides of cynicism, you do share here. It's an outlook

that comes pretty naturally to you as a result in part of an upbringing you describe as chaotic. Would you

say before you underwent these changes, your first instinct was to not look for the good in people?

I think that I wanted to look for the good in people, but there was, as you said, an instinct deeper than what I wanted,

which is what I feared. And as you mentioned, this is an old instinct for me that probably dates

back to my childhood. I think a lot of people with relatively chaotic home lives feel as though

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