The surprising downsides of being a cynic

A jaded view of human nature may render you more likely to suffer from disappointment and betrayal than those who see the world through rose-tinted spectacles. But there are ways to avoid being hoodwinked.

Imagine you've agreed to meet up with a new acquaintance, who – you hope – might become a good friend. You arrive at the bar but they fail to turn up at the agreed time. You sit, nursing your cocktail, feeling the tick of time passing with every fibre of your being. After half an hour, you give up and leave.

When you are on the road, you receive a message: "Sorry! My brother's just had a car accident and I need to help him. Can we rearrange for another day?"

Do you give them the benefit of the doubt, offer sympathy, and fix a new date? Or do you assume that they are lying, block them from your contacts and tell yourself the situation just confirms what you've always known: people are fundamentally unreliable?

Your instinctive reaction scenarios like this may be far more revealing than you imagine.

Over the past two decades, scientists have become increasingly interested in measuring people's trust in others and its wider consequences. Surprisingly, they have found that extremely cynical dispositions do little to protect people from lies and scams, but also have the added drawback of inhibiting the cynics' social lives.

While there is no foolproof way to tell who is and isn't trustworthy, the latest research offers some techniques to avoid being hoodwinked while maintaining our faith in humanity. From seeking out the good in others to shifting your mindset, read on to learn how you can protect yourself without the harm of cynicism.

In the late 1990s, psychologists began using the general trust scale to measure people's overriding opinions about others' nature. You can get a flavour of it here, by rating the following statements from one (completely disagree) to five (completely agree).

• Most people are basically honest

• Most people are trustworthy

• Most people are basically good-natured and kind

You may assume that the highest scorers would be easy to dupe – but this belief is largely unfounded.

Take a recent study in which participants were tasked with watching a series of recorded interviews before determining who was telling the truth and who was lying. Rather astonishingly, the participants' scores on the general trust scale had no influence over their ability to spot the bad actors: the most suspicious were no less likely to be duped than the most trusting.

What's more, the participants all made very similar mistakes, regardless of their opinions about humanity as a whole. In fact, the study confirmed previous research showing that most people have "truth bias", which is the natural tendency to assume that a claim is genuine – and the levels of general trust did not affect this.

Detecting lies from body language and facial expressions is, of course, notoriously difficult – even for police officers. "The behavioural signals distinguishing truths from lies are often too weak and unreliable to be learned or observed from everyday experience," says David Markowitz, a professor of communication at Michigan State University in the US, and a co-author of the research.

Timothy Levine, a professor of communication at the University of Oklahoma in the US, who led the study, puts it even more bluntly: "There is no signal to detect because signals are inconsistent from communicator to communicator."

My tell, in other words, will be very different from your tell – meaning that a stranger will struggle to read anything meaningful from our non-verbal behaviour, no matter how trusting or cynical they are.

Scams are a little different. If you receive an email from a foreign prince offering to offload a huge sum into your bank account, it's almost certainly too good to be true – even if you think that most people are honest. And you might be even less likely to believe them if you find that their email address is a series of digits that masks their true identity.

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