In my experience these situations are usually scams. I once saw the same person telling the same story on the same street corner two weeks after I first heard it. So either he was pulling a fast one or he was a terribly unlucky soul.
But the pull between cynicism and gullibility is constant. Do we trust people too little? Too much? There’s evidence on both sides. According to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, public trust in the federal government is at one of its lowest levels in half a century.
On the other hand, we’re just coming to terms with the price of our gullibility after Bernard Madoff and one of the biggest Ponzi schemes of all times.
The truth is that gullibility and cynicism are not opposites, but two sides of the same coin.
“I think cynical people are extraordinarily gullible,” said Stephen Greenspan, emeritus professor of educational psychology at the University of Connecticut and the author of “Annals of Gullibility” (Praeger, 2008). “They are gullible to ideas that reinforce their point of view.”
Now, gullibility is nothing new. Look at Adam, Eve and the serpent.
But you don’t have to go back to the Garden of Eden. We know many people who bought houses that they couldn’t possibly afford because they wanted to believe the myth that housing prices would never fall.
Professor Greenspan said he lost some money when he invested, through a third party, with Mr. Madoff. He feared, he said, that he would appear foolish if he didn’t invest in what seemed to be such a good opportunity, and he dismissed a friend’s warning as knee-jerk cynicism.
So is the answer to trust no one? To assume everyone is out for himself or herself?
Not at all. “No one wants to live in a world without trust,” said David Dunning, a professor of psychology at Cornell University. In fact, he said, there is a notable positive correlation between countries where people have greater trust — that contracts will be honored, that laws will work — and economic growth.
Professor Dunning has conducted experiments that show we often overestimate the cynicism of others — that “when people are contemplating whether they should rely on the kindness of strangers, they suspect those strangers will prove more selfish than actually is the case.”
In the experiments, a “truster” is given money that can be kept or handed to a completely random and anonymous stranger, the “trustee.” If the truster hands the money to the trustee, the amount of money is quadrupled ($5 becomes $20). The trustee can then either give half back to the truster or keep all of it.
When asked before the game, trusters said they believed that trustees would give half the money back only 45 to 60 percent of the time. But, in fact, that turned out to be true in 80 to 90 percent of the cases.
The numbers were pretty consistent in experiments in the United States, Germany and the Netherlands.
One of the problems, Professor Dunning said, is that people remember when their trust has been exploited, and then become more cynical. It is more difficult to draw a lesson from the opposite — there are few times when we learn in retrospect that someone we failed to trust was, in fact, trustworthy.
But, interestingly, Professor Dunning’s research found that participants in his experiment were much more likely to put their faith in other people than in the odds. When the experiment involved a game of chance, only 30 percent were eager to take the risk — half the number of those willing to believe that a stranger would split the money.
When asked why they trusted other people over chance, “our subjects didn’t have much insight into why they act the way they do,” Professor Dunning said.
It also seems that people actually trust more than they say they do. In the experiments, less than 40 percent predicted they would give the money to a stranger. But in fact, about 60 percent turned over the money.
This is the opposite of most psychological experiments in which people tend to make themselves look better on paper than they behave in real life, Professor Dunning said. “This contradicts every other type of study I’ve done in my lab in the past 15 years.”
Teasing out why and how people trust is a clearly a complicated undertaking. But it is important to stress that being trusting is not the same as being gullible.
“Gullibility is not a function of high trust, it’s a function of high trust where there are obvious signs that someone shouldn’t be trusted,” Professor Greenspan said. “So it’s foolish trust.”
A Japanese study found that contrary to common wisdom, those considered to be more trusting were shrewder in potentially risky social interactions than distrusters. This may be because those who fear betrayal avoid many situations, thus limiting their ability to learn and interpret social cues. They don’t know how to figure out whom to trust and whom not to, so they distrust everyone.
Which is pretty much the definition of a cynic.
Cynicism makes an unpredictable world more predictable, Marcia Angell wrote in her book “Science on Trial” (W. W. Norton, 1996), and “offers the illusion of understanding.” Dr. Angell, a senior lecturer at Harvard Medical School, said that both cynicism and gullibility produced “a penchant for magical thinking and the suspension of logic.”
The choice, though, is not simply between cynicism and gullibility. The middle ground is skepticism — someone who doesn’t accept things on faith but seeks out more information, said Paul Mihailidis, an assistant professor of media studies and public relations at Hofstra University.
“A cynic doesn’t trust and walks away,” he said. “A skeptic doesn’t trust and keeps asking questions.”
The danger is trying to teach skepticism and ending up with cynics, which can happen, Professor Mihailidis said, when educating students in how the media operates. A study of University of Maryland undergraduates who took media literacy found they were more able to understand, evaluate and analyze media messages, but they were also more cynical and negative about the media’s role in civil society — which was not the goal.
“It’s not enough to teach students how the message is slanted,” Professor Mihailidis said. “We need to teach how to become engaged and active citizens.”
The aim is, as much as possible, to question and learn. Nonetheless, all of us, at some point, will be duped or mistakenly distrust an honest man. But that doesn’t make us cynics or fools. It just makes us human.
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