Dr. Jamil Zaki

I think that we trust our gut instincts way too much a lot of the time.

I mean, our gut instincts also tell us that we should trust people who look like us.

or who have a similar background from us and not people who are different.

Those types of biases we know exist in our mind and we don't celebrate them.

We don't go with them unthinkingly.

For people with depression and anxiety, their gut instinct tells them that they're terrible or that everybody around them is judging them.

Cognitive therapy is about helping people not trust those instincts.

And it turns out that for the rest of us, we have something called negativity bias.

People pay lots more attention to evidence about threats and possible harms than they do to the good stuff in life.

This is really clear across dozens of studies.

So when our gut instinct drives us to think, huh, I think that I just shouldn't trust people, or I think that people in general are selfish, that might not be a trustworthy instinct.

It might be more like a bias.

So one thing that I encourage people to do is to be skeptical about your cynicism.

I'm not saying that you should trust or send your bank information to the prince who's going to wire you 14 million dollars, but it's good to be open to evidence as opposed to drawing sweeping conclusions before you've even had a chance to learn about people.

I think of human goodness as expressed through the actions that people take in their everyday lives to help each other.

We are a social species and we are a deeply pro-social species.

We show up for each other in a way that no other animal on the planet does.

And I think that one of the tragedies of cynicism is that it

cuts us off from seeing that everyday beauty of human positive actions.

And letting go of cynicism gives us a chance to witness it more clearly.