Science Has Bad News for Cynical People
- Kevin Lankes
- Dec 28, 2025
- 8 min read
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/4-zUHQ9dVLQ
You’re are very probably imagining that we’re communicating in English right now, or the native language of your people, whatever that may be, if you’re using some kind of translation device or subtitles, but we’re actually communicating wholly in snark. So grab a translator if you need it, because there’s just no escaping snark anymore. You might be wondering, like, why can’t things just be, like, nice? Without any irony or protective buffer involved?
Just hop on social media, which, unfortunately, I do kind of automatically just about every second of every day, and every single post is just so snarky. Everyone is trying to out-snark everyone else. Unfortunately for, well, everyone, I found out recently that research is showing us that there are real consequences for marinating in this gravy bowl of cynicism all the time. Stick around to find out everything the data tells us about the culture of cynicism that’s taken a stranglehold over our lives, and what it’s doing to our brains and our society.
I’m Kevin Lankes, and I’m a recovering cynic. I am (checks watch) nine minutes sober from cynicism.
......I am zero minutes sober from cynicism.
Merriam-Webster defines a cynic as “a faultfinding captious critic. Especially: one who believes that human conduct is motivated wholly by self-interest.”
I think the current culture of cynicism is more about defensiveness that self-interest, though you could argue that defensiveness is self-interested, or certainly a form of self-protectiveness, though I think the psychological mechanism of coping is really what we’re talking about here. Just an unhealthy coping that’s kind of taken over the entirety of our social communication sphere. So that’s fun.
The biggest conclusion out of all of the available research is that the consensus tells us that the amount of time you spend online directly correlates with the amount of cynicism that’s stored up in your heart. You are not imagining this. The way people communicate with each other online is absurdly rude and offensive compared to how we talk to each other in real life. This is a well-known phenomenon called online disinhibition effect, and you can see the results any time you play a video game with an online lobby and some twelve-year-old kid starts making fun of your mom. The effect translates everywhere, it’s just ubiquitous. You find it on any and every app and comment section that you’ve ever used. Just look through the comments on some of my videos, especially the science and debunking ones. Social media is rife with hordes of slime goblins who hide behind their anonymity in order to be the worst humans imaginable.
And I want to do a future video with more of a deep dive here to figure out why this is something that happens to happen to people. Because I’m really fascinated in diving into ways we can reverse that.
And it’s this constant volatility that causes cynicism to increase in those of us who spend a lot of time online. One study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2020 found one key detail about how cynicism arises. First, they had to define cynicism, which they did by saying that it’s “the tendency to expect that others will engage in exploitation and deception, based on the perspective that people, at their core, are morally bankrupt and behave treacherously to maximize their self-interest.”
The study was called “Victims, Perpetrators or Both? The Vicious Cycle of Disrespect and Cynical Beliefs about Human Nature.” The researchers conducted multiple experiments to find out how cynicism forms in people, how it grows, and how cynical people are treated. When I think about cynicism, I think about online trolling and misanthropic hermits, but the researchers point out that there are actually entire global systems pushing particularly cynical viewpoints into our lives from just about every angle. Our current societal understanding of economics, for one, is based on the Chicago and Austrian schools, which are deeply cynical about human nature. Our global monetary policy is based entirely on the idea that human beings are innately selfish. This is a point that’s been argued by way more qualified fields than economics for thousands of years, from ancient chinese philosophers to the greek cynics, and into the modern day, and has been very much debunked over and over again. Our ancestors were very communally focused before the invention of money, when we had to cooperate in tight-knit groups for survival. I talked about that in the video I did about the real theories behind the invention of money, not the bullshit that you’re taught in school that has absolutely zero anthropological evidence behind it.
I probably don’t even need to get into how cynicism is rampant in the political sphere, but I always like to make sure what I’m throwing out is factual and backed up by research. So, we have a study from the University of Michigan that tells us that people are indeed extremely cynical now when it comes to politics, and online political discussions are furthering that divide. It tells us that this has directly led to overall trust in government collapsing to the lowest point in several decades.
Alright, cynicism is everywhere and we’re steaming in it like shriveling cabbage monsters, what is all this doing to our bodies? To our lives? Crazy enough we have studies that show us a lot of terrible things are happening to us because of this. One thing that’s weirdly directly contradictory to what you’d expect to see, is that a sense of Machiavellian cynicism actually correlates to someone having less income over the course of their lives. I don’t know entirely what to make of that but I can feel a sense of defeatism in myself sometimes when I think about my own cynical nature, so it’s possible that sometimes one just wants to kick up their feet and watch the end of the world traipse by outside the window, in a cozy armchair with some hot chocolate. Like apocalyptic hygge. In fact this is the name of my new album.
The other thing we know is that cynical people suffer from depression at higher rates than the general population. We have data from the Whitehall II cohort study that tells us about cynical hostility using a measurement called the Cook-Medley-Hostility-scale. I’m just going to quote from the abstract: “The psychosocial vulnerability model of hostility posits that hostile individuals, given their oppositional attitudes and behaviours, are more likely to have increased interpersonal conflicts, lower social support, more stressful life events and higher likelihood of depression.”
A big third thing that we have to contend with as a highly cynical populace is uh, well, death. This study was done on a big data set of middle aged men over several years, and the findings were that the more cynical someone was, the higher the chances of premature death from cardiovascular disease.
You’d think there’d be some kind of a tradeoff for all this sacrifice, right? Like, if we’re going to be so cynical, and it’s going to be so hard on us physically and emotionally, then there must be some social or evolutionary drive to be cynical so that it gets us somewhere. But it seems like there really isn’t any payoff anywhere.
We also have research for instance, that cynical people are way less likely to excel in a work environment, which relates to what we mentioned before about overall income levels. But cynical people aren’t promoted as often as others. Research published in the British Journal of Psyhology found that people who scored higher on a screening for cynicism were less likely that the norm to gain a leadership position over the following decade. The study also found that there was a 1% lower chance for those individuals to end up supervising others. Which might not sound like a lot, but it’s also the same lower chance that certain groups like immigrants and women have. So yeah, kind of significant for cynical people to be their own category in that grouping.
Interestingly, the study found that their investigation of cynicism led them to discover that cynical people had a much lower desire for power than they had a gigantic outsized fear of being exploited by others. And they’d developed a drive for social domination to compensate for that. Their study subjects were more likely than not to agree with statements like, “I enjoy bending others to my will.”
The very last thing I’ll bring up that cynics are going to have a really time with is the idea of this kind of hard-earned enlightened wisdom just sort of inherent in a cynical view of the world. And it turns out this is all kinds of bullshit. A study published in 2018 analyzed survey results from over 200,000 people in over 30 countries, and it debunked the crap out of the idea that cynics are intellectually superior to others. In fact, the study found that cynics actually perform worse at tasks demonstrating cognitive ability and academic proficiency. Here’s a direct quote from the abstract: “Cross-cultural analyses showed that competent individuals held contingent attitudes and endorsed cynicism only if it was warranted in a given sociocultural environment. Less competent individuals embraced cynicism unconditionally, suggesting that—at low levels of competence—holding a cynical worldview might represent an adaptive default strategy to avoid the potential costs of falling prey to others’ cunning.”
If, like me, you’re kind of hearing all this and starting to think that maybe you have a problem on your hands, I would point you to an essay I read no too long ago from John Green in his book The Anthropocene Reviewed, which is overall very good, but his essay about sunsets takes on this overt creeping cynicism into the global culture. To briefly summarize a bit in my own words, because this is also a phenomenon I’ve experienced time and again, there’s this sense that it’s somehow just uncool to like things that are good. He picked sunsets because it’s just so baseline. So cliche’. So universally sappy and romantic. But you know, why shouldn’t things be nice? Why shouldn’t we like things that are nice? I once wrote an essay for MapQuest during my freelance writing days about the ten best places to watch the sun set. It was my most viewed article from that time period. I absolutely hated that fact. Even saying it out loud now, I’m still wrestling with the idea. But it’s good, obviously it’s so good that people want to know about it, and sharing something good with people should make me feel good. We have to find a way to translate that feeling into our lives more.
The whole idea of this channel is to do some f*cking good wherever you personally can in the world. And you need to take care of yourself as you do that, in order to be effective for anyone else around you. So, you know, go see a sunset. Take someone you like. Or not, and rediscover why you like yourself. And get off the internet for a minute. If that means less money for me, that’s okay, research tells me I’m going to make less money anyway.
I’ll see you in the next video. If you want to know when that comes out, people make sure to subscribe to the channel. Like this video, too, because it’s a thing that’s hopefully good, and we just need so much more of that in our lives now.
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