If you feel certain your preferred candidate will lose the presidential election, that AI is coming for your job or that climate change is going to destroy humanity, then you have fallen prey to a cynical mindset, and you’re far from alone.

Over the past 50 years, cynicism has spread like a virus across American society, infecting us with the belief that other people can’t be trusted, the world is only getting worse and there’s nothing we can do about it. This potent mix of fatalism and hopelessness has led to a loss of faith in our neighbors, our institutions and our dreams for the future.

Shelf Help is a wellness column where we interview researchers, thinkers and writers about their latest books — all with the aim of learning how to live a more complete life.

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In 1972, 46% of Americans agreed that most people can be trusted according to the General Social Survey. By 2018, that percentage had fallen to 31.9%. This rise in collective cynicism is not just destroying our hope, it’s also affecting our health. Studies suggest that cynics suffer more depression, drink more heavily, earn less money and die younger than non-cynics.

But there may be an antidote to the cynical epidemic. In his new book “Hope for Cynics: The surprising science of human goodness,” (Grand Central) Stanford professor Jamil Zaki suggests that cynicism can be combated with a willingness to question our most cynical assumptions and corroborate them with facts.

If we would only look at the data, he writes, most of us would discover that people are more worthy of our trust than we imagine, that we have more in common with our political rivals than we think and that many of the problems we believe to be intractable may have solutions after all. He advocates for what he calls hopeful skepticism: Acknowledging that the future is mysterious, and we can’t know what will happen.

“There’s this idea that being hopeful is like putting on a pair of rose-colored glasses,” Zaki, who has spent 20 years studying kindness, connection and empathy said in an interview. “It turns out that most of us are wearing mud-colored glasses already. Being hopeful is not a matter of looking away, it’s a matter of looking more closely and more clearly.”

Here Zaki talks about the media’s role in creating a more cynical society, why so many of us mistake cynicism for wisdom and why trusting others isn’t only for the privileged among us.

Author Jamil Zaki. Photo by Vern Evans

(Photo by Vern Evans)

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How do you define cynicism?

I’m using a purposefully modern psychological definition: the theory that most people at our core are selfish, greedy and dishonest. That’s not to say that a cynic would be shocked if somebody donated to charity or helped a stranger, but they might suspect or impugn the person’s motives. They might say, “Yeah they donate to charity for a tax break, or to look good in front of other people.” So it’s a theory not about human action, but about human motivation.

How does cynicism relate to trust?

Cynicism relates very strongly and very negatively to trust. Trust is our willingness to be vulnerable to somebody else on the expectation that that person will honor your vulnerability. It’s loaning money to somebody because you think they’ll pay you back. It’s confiding in a friend because you think they’ll support you. It’s leaving your kids with a babysitter because you think they’ll care for the children. In all of these cases trust requires a bet on another person. It’s a social risk and cynics think that bet is for suckers. They don’t trust in a variety of contexts, whether it’s strangers, politicians or even family and friends, the way less cynical people do.

“Hope for Cynics” by Jamil Zaki. (Grand Central)

(Grand Central)

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You write that people often mistake cynicism for wisdom. Why is that?

Cynicism has the veneer of wisdom and people view it as a form of intelligence and a sign of experience. It turns out that if you look at the data cynicism is shockingly naive and much more similar to gullible trust than people realize. But cynics act like they know things and it turns out that acting like you know things is a great way to get people to believe you know things. So cynicism is somewhat rewarding to people in that it looks like wisdom. You are treated as a wise person if you are just very grim about everything.

Why did cynicism skyrocket in the past 50 years?

Two things come to mind. The first is inequality. Nations, states and counties that are more economically unequal are poisonous for trust, and the U.S. has become much more unequal in the 50 years when we lost faith in each other. Interestingly, unequal times are not only characterized by low trust among people with less means, but even wealthier people in unequal places are less trusting than well-heeled people in more equal places. Inequality puts us all in a zero-sum mindset where there is not enough to go around and whatever you get, I lose. When you’re in that frame of mind, it’s very easy to have mistrust as your default.

The second source we see is the media. People have something in our minds called negativity bias. We focus more on threatening information than on pleasant information. This ancient bias has been combined with a hyper-modern media ecosystem that feeds us whatever it takes to keep us clicking, scrolling and watching, which is not the same as information that would make us happy or hopeful, or even information that is accurate. You might think if you watch a lot of news you are more informed but it turns out that in many cases you are less informed. For example, people who watch lots of news believe that violent crime is on the rise, even when it’s on the decline.

Your book suggests that skepticism — not optimism — is the best antidote for cynicism. Why?

Cynicism and skepticism are often confused with one another but they are actually quite different. You can think of a cynic as a lawyer in the prosecution against humanity. They pick up on any and all evidence about human evil and conniving and explain away or ignore evidence of positive human qualities. Optimists, or naive trusters, think like lawyers as well but they are hyper-focused on any sign of human goodness and ignore any sign of harmful behavior. Skeptics think more like scientists. They don’t have blanket judgments about people that they default to. Instead, they try to evaluate the evidence whenever they find themselves with a new person or in a new situation. Because of that skepticism, often confused for cynicism, can be a great antidote for it.

In the summer of 2022 you invited Americans to join 20-minute Zoom calls with political rivals to discuss gun control, climate change and abortion. What did people learn about each other from those conversations?

If you look at the evidence there is incredible amounts of common ground even between Democrats and Republicans that most Americans don’t know about. So, what did people learn in these 20 minute conversations? One: that a randomly selected member of the other side is much more reasonable, much more open-minded and much less hostile than they imagined an outsider or rival to be. [Two], when they talked about issues they learned that they did have some common ground, and this immensely deescalated their outrage and hatred toward the other other side. Because now they were thinking of the real other side instead of the image we have in our mind.

I’ve often wondered if the ability to trust others is a sign of privilege. Depending on our race, class, gender and educational background some of us are more likely to be treated with respect and empathy than others. Where do you land on that?

It’s very easy to draw the conclusion that hope is a form of privilege and maybe even toxic — that it causes us to ignore our problems, or rather, ignore problems that we don’t have but other people do have. You might be surprised then, to find out that some of the least trusting and most cynical people are the ones with privilege and money and power. And actually, people who struggle in terms of their socioeconomic status tend to be more interdependent and reliant on trust. I realize I’m a bit of a broken record here, but one of the amazing things about doing the many thousands of hours of research for this book is that over and over again I found out that our assumptions aren’t just wrong, they are the exact opposite of right.

Do you think American society is capable of reversing our descent into cynicism?

I do think we’re capable of it, and one reason I think that is we’ve done it before. The 1890s and 1900s were a terrible time for social life in the United States. There was extreme mistrust, extreme polarization, backsliding on issues like race, the rise of Jim Crow laws. It was a horrible time culturally in all these different ways and that pain spurred what is called the progressive movement in the first couple of decades of the 20th century. There was all this labor organizing and social groups and movements that agitated from everything from public kindergarten to women’s suffrage to the FDA and the Parks Service. There was this sense of responsibility to one another. This growing value of connection. Could that happen again? Yeah, it could. Will it happen again? I have no idea.

What can we do as individuals to shift this trend?

There’s a few things. The first is to be more skeptical — to fact check our cynical feelings. I do this all the time. When I see myself suspecting people I try my best to to say, “You’re a scientist what evidence do you have for that claim?” And oftentimes the answer is, “I have no evidence to support this bleak assumption.” Once we have that mindset of being more curious about our own thoughts we can interrupt the cycle of cynicism.

A second thing we can do is take more social risks. Because of negativity bias, we miscalculate the upsides and downsides of social life. We overestimate how likely it is that if we trust someone they will betray us and we underestimate the likelihood that things will go well. So I try to recalibrate and say, “Based on the actual data of what people are like, I should probably trust them more.” Earnest Hemingway said that the best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them. I think he’s right, but it’s also true that when you trust people you bring out their best. So you don’t just learn about them, you change them. I try to give people many more opportunities than I used to to show me who they are, and often times they show me something really great.

Shelf Help is a wellness column where we interview researchers, thinkers and writers about their latest books — all with the aim of learning how to live a more complete life. Want to pitch us? Email alyssa.bereznak@latimes.com.

California officials have identified three new outbreaks of H5N1 bird flu in Central Valley dairy herds, bringing the total number of infected farms to six.

Wednesday’s announcement comes as health officials in Missouri are trying to determine how a human who had no connection to dairy or poultry farming became infected. It is the 14th human case reported this year.

According to a statement from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “while other novel flu cases have been detected through the country’s national flu surveillance system, this is the first time that system has detected a case of H5.”

The California Department of Food and Agriculture said the newly reported herds were in a “group targeted for testing due to elevated risks from their recent connections with the initial affected premises.”

Nationwide, 201 herds have been affected across 14 states. Another infected herd was identified in Michigan earlier this week.

A statement from the state agriculture agency said the finding of three additional herds was not unexpected, and was a testament to the agency’s surveillance methods, which are designed to find “affected farms as early as possible.”

Affected dairies have been quarantined and “enhanced biosecurity measures are in place to prevent the spread of the virus,” the agency said.

The risk of H5N1 remains low for the general population, and the state’s milk supply and dairy foods are safe and “not impacted by these events,” the statement said. Health officials say pasteurization inactivates the virus so there is no cause for concern for consumers of pasteurized milk or dairy products.

Steve Lyle, a spokesman for the state’s agriculture department, said none of the affected farms are raw milk farms.

There are at least four raw milk dairies in California. Three are located in the Central Valley, the fourth in Grenada, north of Mt. Shasta.

Mark McAfee, the owner of Raw Milk Farms — which operates farms in Fresno and Hanford — said he tests his milk regularly and so far, his herds are negative for the virus.

The kid question. It comes up over and over again in the form of family questions and expectations. It arises in conversations with peers, partners and new dates. It appears in the quiet times, sitting in the spaces where our wildest hopes and deepest fears collide.

American society feels more socially and politically polarized than ever. Is it right to bring another person into that?

In 2021 and 2022, I conducted a series of interviews on this topic with millennials and members of Generation Z, all of them people of color. Some grew up in low-income families and neighborhoods while others were from the middle- or upper-middle class. Some of them identify as queer, or their close family members and friends do, which shapes their sensitivity to discrimination against gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people.

These interviewees have more climate change knowledge than most people do. All of them are college-educated; most of them either grew up or have lived for some time in Southern California; and most have taken environmental studies classes, either as undergrads or in graduate school.

Their experiences as members of marginalized groups have shaped their experiences with climate emotions like anxiety, fear, and trauma — as well as hope and optimism. Paying closer attention to those emotions and mental health in communities of color, including how they shape reproductive plans, will become an increasingly important component of climate justice in the United States.

Bobby

Bobby, 22, considers himself an environmentalist. He recently graduated from college in Southern California with a degree in sustainability studies. His family is Guatemalan American.

Bobby is both confident that he will become a parent one day and also certain that he won’t bring his own biological kids into the world. His thoughts about the environment, the future, and parenting come into sharp relief through his current job at a restaurant, where he is unhappily employed. “There’s so much being wasted that could be returned to the earth.”

He connects these waste issues to carbon emissions and how he feels about having children. For Bobby, this is an ethical issue, a reason why he should not have biological children:

“I’m worried about what they would have to deal with growing up. I was already a young adult when I started to think about these things, but for them, at a young age they’re going to have to think about the environment and the fears that come along with pollution.

Students discard food into a bin as part of a lunch waste composting program at an elementary school.

(Associated Press)

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“This is why I’m leaning more toward a foster kid, and maybe eventually adopting them. Because it wasn’t my choice to have that kid, but I can help guide them to have a better life. … The environment is really the deciding factor for me.”

Although he always wanted to have children, his thoughts about fostering arose from taking environmental studies classes. “Going into college was the first time I was exposed to this information firsthand, and I realized for the first time, it’s not all rainbows and sunshine. I had never learned before … about things like food waste and carbon emissions. And that’s when the gears started turning in my head about the future and what I wanted to do.”

Victoria

Victoria is the same age as Bobby; she graduated from the same university and is also from an immigrant family, though hers is from Ghana. In Victoria’s house there were four siblings and half a dozen cousins who were always around. As a result, Victoria really cherished the closeness and security of a large family.

“I guess in the future, I would love to have children,” she says. “I’d really like to have a big family. I grew up in a big family, so it’s nice.”

Victoria is interested in perhaps adopting or fostering, and she also connects the desire for this to her undergraduate education in environmental topics.

“I got a degree in sustainability, and I’ve always questioned bringing people into an environment [where] so much is going on politically, socially, health-wise, all of that. I always thought I wanted to give birth, but the more I look at foster care, I realize that I don’t need to physically have children to experience being a mom… . It’s a little selfish on my end to think I’m going to have all these kids when there are already kids in the world who would probably make me a better parent.”

Protesters hold a “silent march” against racial inequality and police brutality that was organized by Black Lives Matter Seattle-King County in June 2020.

(Associated Press)

Victoria’s concerns about biological children are multifaceted: She worries about the future of healthcare access, wealth inequality, and whether her children would receive a low-quality education or be racially tracked in public schools. Ultimately it comes back to how racial inequality interacts with other social challenges to heighten her own sense of vulnerability and that of her potential future children.

“If I have children, they will be Black children,” she says. “It isn’t self-hatred. I love being Black, but the things I’ve gone through I wouldn’t wish on other children.”

This is a frequent topic of conversation among Victoria and her friends. They talk about whether they want to have children in the future. Most of them do not.

That feeling of being traumatized by an awareness of ongoing racial inequality shaped the perspectives of a group of Black women I spoke to. They were different ages, from their 20s to their late 30s, and they ranged from just starting out to having established careers. However, each perceived herself, and the prospect of becoming a mother, through the lens of vulnerability.

Rosalind

Rosalind, 38, is a Black woman of Caribbean origin living in Southern California. She has a graduate degree, a job as a scientific researcher, and is settled in a community she likes. Nevertheless, thoughts of the future are a heavy, ever-present burden. When I ask if there is one issue that feels like the primary reason for not having kids, she answers decisively: racism.

“With all of the anti-Black violence, and the police violence against us, it just seems so unsafe. And I see so many of my friends who do have children that are constantly stressed because of this, especially the ones who have teenage boys who are taller than average. They send their kids out there and then just spend their time worrying about whether their child is going to be targeted or harassed in some way, or potentially killed. I just don’t think I have the disposition to put up with that kind of stress.”

Melanie

Melanie, a 26-year-old Native American woman, was raised on the Navajo reservation and in Southern California. She idealizes having a big, happy family, but there are aspects of the world that give her pause, so she struggles with whether it’s morally OK to have children.

“ I think I may not have children although I do want them,” she notes. “Just because, with all of the things we see going on in the world, it seems unfair to bring someone into all of this against their will.”

Drought last year took a toll on Joshua trees at Joshua Tree National Park.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

Melanie’s feelings about climate change include a general sense of powerlessness and lack of control over other people’s actions, which directly translates into her fears about parenthood: “With climate change, we’re the driving force of things breaking down, but then also, the planet’s going to do what the planet’s going to do. … So … it almost feels, like, kind of shameful to want to have children.”

Juliana

Juliana, a 23-year-old Mexican American woman, is strongly aware of negative peer pressure from friends. She recently graduated from art school, and her friend circle is mainly composed of queer and transgender, anti-establishment artists. Most of them have no intention of having children of their own, which seeps into conversations with Juliana.

Her friends cite environmental and mental health concerns. Their anxiety tells them that they can’t properly take care of themselves, much less a child. They also struggle, as trans and nonbinary people, with the issues of access to fertility centers and the need to use reproductive technologies that feel out of reach.

Juliana feels that it may be unfair for her to consider having biological children. She tells me that these feelings are not entirely separate from how she feels about what her child’s racial upbringing would be.

The Borel fire devastated Havilah, a historic mining town in Kern County, in late July.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

As a dark-skinned Mexican woman, she regularly experienced racism growing up in Southern California— and given that her husband is white, any child she might birth would be biracial, which raises questions about whether and how they would navigate the world differently than she has. But Juliana is an optimist, and she does plan to have one child.

Elena

I spoke to several young women who are addressing the kid question with their dates, potential partners, and long-term boyfriends. Elena, 22, is one of the most certain people I’ve met: She is not having children.

She’s from a Salvadoran immigrant family in which she is one of four children, while her mother was one of 12. Her certainty that stems from both life experiences and climate fears:

“Me being interested in environmental policy cemented my decision to not have kids, but I do have some personal things that I’ve gone through in life that I wouldn’t want my kids going through, like not having a dad. So I feel like it’s best if I just focus on myself and take care of my mom. … I can also spend my time and energy focusing on someone that’s already here.”

Elena brings this conversation up on every first date with any new guy she sees. Given that most of them expect to have families in the future, Elena feels strongly that she does not want a relationship. This has been discouraging for her, but her mind is made up.

Like some of the other people I interviewed, Elena’s feelings about climate change were sparked by environmental studies classes. She says, “[I] started feeling like having kids is definitely not a sustainable thing to do. … I don’t want them to grow up and have to leave their home because of sea level rise. Or be worried because of really weird weather patterns.

“I know that things aren’t going to get better. So why would I want to put a child through that? Even when my sister gave birth to my nephew, I was like, Why? They’re gonna go through so much.”

A pump station sits idle near homes in Arvin, Calif., where toxic fumes from a nearby well made residents sick and forced evacuations in November 2019.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

Veronica

Elena’s close friend Veronica, a 22-year-old from Los Angeles, manages the cultural expectations of a large, immigrant family from Guatemala. “Because of my Hispanic background people are always like, when are you gonna have children, of course you’re having children. It is what it is, right? But now that I’m an adult, I think about it differently. Would my child have a good quality of life? Will they be able to survive?”

She wants to have a child, “but I also want to be mindful of that child. Because it’s not just about having it, it’s about raising it. And being able to sustain it as well.”

For Veronica the everyday environmental concerns link directly to the larger issues shaping climate change: power, who has it, and who doesn’t. Though seemingly distant, intergenerational power imbalances — and older generations’ legacies of generating the emissions that have caused climate change — make her feel that it is unfair for people her age to have to ask the kid question.

She says: “I just think that people in power, whether they believe in climate change or not, it’s not beneficial for them to really do something about it. Because they’re older, it’s not going to affect them the way it affects us. … They have so much money and power it doesn’t affect them the same way. They can buy protection from what the rest of us are going to have to deal with.”

Although these interviews focused primarily on the challenges young people face as they approach reproductive questions, many of them still wanted families of their own. For those who were certain about having children, the reasons were emotional: love, joy, happiness, and hope.

Bobby was clear that he doesn’t plan on having biological children, but he was happy about the thought of fostering in the future and was particularly excited at the thought of his sister having kids.

“I would love to be an uncle,” he said. “Just seeing the next generation, the reason why I’ve been more optimistic about having a foster child of my own, is about being able to see them grow.”

Victoria was excited at the prospect of adopting multiple children.

This 2019 aerial photo provided by ConocoPhillips shows an exploratory drilling camp at the proposed site of the Willow oil project on Alaska’s North Slope.

(Associated Press)

“I want to create a space where kids have loving, supportive parents. My parents aren’t perfect, but I know that I grew up in a loving home where they would do anything for my success and protection, and I want to create that for someone else.”

Her sentiments were echoed by Melanie, whose experience living in a racially and gender-diverse family inspires her to want to recreate the same.

She said: “When I look within my own family, we’re very diverse. We’re Black, we’re white, we’re Native American. We’re straight, we’re queer, we’re nonbinary. And we still have compassion for each other and that kind of spills over into compassion for other people that we don’t know. And I think, like, I don’t want to quit. I don’t want to let the bad things dictate how I make my decisions

“The idea of bringing someone into this world and growing them with compassion and love, and making sure they grow up knowing to stand up for other people and stand up for what’s right, that’s a little glimmer of hope.”