2023-08-16 06:00:10
LéA GIRARDOT / THE WORLD
This experience, with London and Manchester, UK, as cities to join, is cited in an article by the American University Harvard of 2011 on the role of naivety and cynicism in negotiations and competitive contexts.
The question has fascinated researchers in social psychology for several decades: what drives us, in a situation of uncertainty, to opt for mistrust, even if it turns against us?
Social psychology distinguishes different “software” of thought, which guide the way we assess situations and make our decisions. Naive cynicism, which was theorized in 1999postulates that it is natural to make decisions based on personal interests and that everyone proceeds in the same way, even if it means seeing conflict where there is none.
The question is being studied more and more. The role of distrust of others in our judgment processes has been highlighted in particular by an experiment conducted by three economics researchers, reported in January in the journal Cambridge University Press.
Why such a black vision of human relations, where each outstretched hand is perceived as a trap? The scientific literature offers several explanations. One of them is due to the asymmetry of situations. “When people are reluctant to trust themselves, they usually have little opportunity to learn that they have missed something”, relieves Chia-Jung Tsayan American researcher in decision psychology.
Conversely, when one finds oneself the victim of a betrayal, the injury to the ego is such that it is difficult to forget the episode. In other words, the deep scar of scams, felonies and other adulteries imprints itself so permanently in our memory that it hides all the times when our mistrust has caused us to miss out on a benefit, sometimes without our knowledge.
A pattern inherited from shortages
The other reason has to do with a widely held axiom: zero-sum thinking. This belief that all gain comes at the expense of someone else rests on the implicit assumption that a finite amount of goods exist in the world.
“The belief in this zero-sum game seems to be born in low-income countries, where resources are scarce”observe a Polish study from 2015. It remains very present in the rural world. In a situation of scarcity, it is easy to picture the image of a cake to be shared: whoever has the biggest share leaves smaller ones for others.
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