James' World 2

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Five hundred years ago, writing in The Prince, Nicolo Machiavelli offered advice to leaders trying to grow their power. “It would serve [the Prince] to appear pious, faithful, humane, true, religious, and even to be so,” he wrote, “but only if he is willing, should it become necessary, to act in the opposite manner.”

In other words, don’t hold on tightly to your values, because no one else will either.

Centuries later, that passage still perfectly encapsulates a cynical world view. Cynics believe that human beings are fundamentally self-interested. This also means that interactions between people are at their core a ruthless, Darwinian struggle for survival, where the path to success requires stepping past, over, or on the people around you.

Many of us follow this bleak logic. More than half of parents believe that to succeed, their children should think of the world as harsh and dangerous. According to the legendary management professor Sumantra Goshal, MBA students are taught that “companies must compete not only with their competitors but also with their suppliers, employees, and regulators.” In Silicon Valley, where I work, brilliant but toxic leaders such as Steve Jobs are celebrated and — too often — emulated.

Following Machiavelli’s advice, cynics sacrifice relationships and principle to win. Instead, research demonstrates they lose. A wave of new behavioral science has found that, over the course of one’s career, cynical thinking stands in the way of success. Parents might think their kids will thrive if they see the world as competitive, but people with that mindset earn less money and report lower satisfaction at work.

Other research follows people over time, testing their cynicism at one point and following up years later to measure professional outcomes. The news here is clearer, and even worse for cynics. Over a decade-long span, their salary grows at barely a third the rate of non-cynics, and they are less likely to be elevated to leadership positions.

Why? Compared to their more trusting counterparts, cynics report a greater hunger for power and pursue it in different ways. Confident that others will take advantage of them if given the chance, they go on the offensive, manipulating others first. Machiavelli would be proud. He urges leaders to dominate others, preferring to be feared than loved. Researchdoes find that dominant actions, such as intimidating coworkers and kissing up to higher-ups, tend to build people’s power in the workplace. But so do communal actions, such as sharing generously with colleagues. Research on disagreeable people who share cynics’ competitive streak finds that they use only dominant strategies to get ahead. This leaves them isolated and eventually puts a ceiling on their success.

Put simply, cynics are playing the wrong game. Success is not a winner-take-all battle royale. People most often win by building trusting connections and alliances. And even if an individual manages to shove their way to the top, their team often pays the price. Psychologists recently analyzed levels of narcissism in NBA players’ tweets and found that teams with higher levels of narcissism won fewer games. Why? To compete at the highest level, teammates must first stop trying to outdo each other. If they hog the ball, narcissistic players cost their teams a cooperativeadvantage. As the NBA champion Bill Bradley put it, “the success of the group assures the success of the individual, but not the other way around.”

Cynicism can bleed workplaces of creativity, openness, and morale, and the bottom line. The good news is that cynicism is not a life sentence. Researchsuggests that barely a quarter of it is genetic, meaning that the social environment significantly shapes our willingness to give and earn trust. Through the right habits, cynics can build new mindsets and lean into connection.

As a research psychologist and author, I’ve studied the science of cynicism for years. I also work with organizations and leaders to help them fight cynicism and bring the cooperative advantage to their teams. Here are a few places to begin.

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We cover Mars mission updates, a new brain implant that shows promise for Parkinson’s, the latest on the mpox outbreak, and more in this week’s new roundup.

Happy Monday, listeners! Let’s kick off the week by catching up on the latest science news. For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman.

Last week, NASA’s Perseverance rover started a slow but steady slog. The bot landed in Jezero Crater when it first arrived on Mars back in February 2021. Now it’s busting out—but very slowly and cautiously. NASA says it will take Perseverance months to ascend the rough terrain of the crater’s western rim. The hope is that Perseverance will persevere (sorry) long enough to study a couple sites at the top of the crater.

Speaking of Mars, the Red Planet has really been popping off lately. Earlier this month, a study suggested that Mars might be hiding an ocean’s worth of water deep below its surface. Data from NASA’s late Insight lander revealed seismic signals of liquid water some six to 12 miles beneath the planet’s crust. Then, just a couple of weeks ago, a study showed that rock samples taken by Perseverance contained sulfates. That indicates they probably used to sit in salty water. And back in May, NASA’s tried-and-true Curiosity rover drove over and cracked open a rock that turned out to be packed with pure sulfur. Scientists can’t actually explain how sulfur would have formed in that area, which means there must be something about its past that they don’t know yet.

Now, let’s get into some health news. Last Monday, a study in Nature Medicine described an implant that acts like a pacemaker for the brain. The device builds on the idea of using deep-brain stimulation to treat Parkinson’s, and that generally works by delivering a constant electrical current. Instead, this new treatment uses algorithms to track symptoms, and it delivers brain stimulation only as needed. In a study of four people with Parkinson’s, the researchers said that the tech reduced each person’s most bothersome motor symptom by half when compared with conventional deep-brain stimulation.

Now onto weight-loss drugs. Now, most of the headlines about weight-loss drugs hype a growing number of proposed benefits, but a study out last week argues that doctors should be on the lookout for a troubling side effect. Researchers say that a statistical analysis flagged that people taking semaglutide, which is sold under the brand name Ozempic for diabetes and Wegovy for weight loss, have a higher chance of reporting suicidal thoughts than folks taking other kinds of medication. This was especially true for people who were also taking antidepressants. Now, this is, of course, a preliminary finding that doesn’t prove causation. But some experts say it’s smart to be cautious—especially if you start experiencing new feelings of depression after starting this medication. And honestly, that’s true for any medication and any new signs of depression. 

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Anaissa Ruiz Tejada/Scientific American

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I’m a full-time freelancer, which means I spend my days writing articles from my house. But once upon a time, I commuted to an office every day where I was bombarded with meetings, assignments, Slack channels, and project check-ins.

I like to give each task my full undivided attention, so when something ripped my focus away—like a Slack DM or a coworker walking by—I felt like I got major attention whiplash. I’d lose my flow, and it’d take me a few minutes to get back in it. For a long time, I felt like something was wrong with me because I couldn’t flip between tasks like some of my coworkers, who seemed gifted at doing multiple things at once. But I’ve since learned I’m not a freak (at least not in this way) and that human brains aren’t built for multitasking.

In fact, your brain can only really handle one thing at a time, so when you go through your inbox during a team meeting, you’re not really effectively doing both of these things at the same time. Instead, “your attention is switching—and if your attention is on email then you’re not paying attention to the Zoom meeting,” says Gloria Mark, PhD, Chancellor’s Professor of Informatics at UC Irvine and author of Attention Span and the Substack The Future of Attention. As a result, you’re not accomplishing as much as you think you are (and, most likely, even less than you could be if you were zeroed in on one thing).

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When it came time for Itzy Morales Pantoja to start her Ph.D. in cellular and molecular medicine, she chose a laboratory that used stem cells—not only animals—for its research. Morales Pantoja had just spent two years studying multiple sclerosis in mouse models. As an undergraduate, she’d been responsible for ­giving the animals painful injections to induce the disease and then observing as they lost their ability to move. She did her best to treat the mice gently, but she knew they were ­suffering. “As soon as I got close to them, they’d start peeing—a sign of stress,” she says. “They knew what was coming.”

Even though the mouse work was emotionally “very, very difficult,” Morales Pantoja remained committed to her research out of a desire to help her sister, who has multiple sclerosis. Three years after the project wrapped up, however, Morales Pantoja was crushed to find that none of her results would be of any direct help to people like her sister. An antioxidant she’d tested seemed promising in mice, but in human samples it was ineffective.

This was a disappointment but not a surprise. Around 90 percent of novel drugs that work in animal models fail in human clinical trials—an attrition rate that contributes to a $2.3-billion average price tag for every new drug that comes to market.

Today Morales Pantoja is a postdoctoral fellow at the Johns Hopkins Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing, where she is helping to develop lab-grown models of the human brain. The goal is to advance scientific understanding of neurodegeneration while moving the field beyond what some researchers see as an antiquated reliance on animal models.

Millions of rodents, dogs, monkeys, rabbits, birds, cats, fish, and other animals are used every year for research purposes worldwide. Exact numbers are hard to come by, but advocacy group Cruelty Free International estimated that 192 million animals were used in 2015. Most of this work occurs in four broad domains: cosmetics and personal products, chemical toxicity testing, drug development, and drug-discovery research.

Animal-based studies have contributed to important findings and lifesaving medical advancements. The COVID vaccines, for instance, were developed in animals, including mice and nonhuman primates. Animal models have also been critical in advancing AIDS drugs and in developing treatments for leukemia and other cancers, among many other uses.

But animal studies often fall short of producing useful results. They may weed out possibly effective drugs or miss toxicity in humans. They have failed to deliver breakthroughs in certain fields of medicine, including neurological conditions. A 2014 study estimated that candidate therapies for Alzheimer’s disease developed in animal models have failed in clinical trials about 99.6 percent of the time. “As questions about human biology and variability get more complex, we are bumping up against the limits of animal models,” says Paul Locke, an environmental health scientist and attorney at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “The thing you run into with animals—and there’s no way to get around this—is that animal biology is just too different from human biology.” Other species are no longer providing the insights about human biology—including at the cellular and subcellular levels—that scientists today need to achieve innovation.

A growing, multidisciplinary community of researchers around the world is investigating alternatives to animal models. Some are motivated by concerns about animal welfare, but for many, sparing the lives of millions of creatures is just an added bonus. They are driven primarily to create technologies and methods that will approximate human biology and variability better than animals do.

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If you’re looking to land a six-figure job or are asking yourself what jobs are in demand, look no further. FlexJobs analyzed its job database from February 1, 2024, through July 30, 2024, to find the most in-demand, fully remote jobs that offer high salaries. The list below features jobs that offer $100,000-plus annual salaries, according to Payscale.

Fully Remote Jobs With $100K+ Salaries

Are you looking to make a high salary, but not sure where to start? These in-demand jobs are a great launching point for your job search.

1. Senior Customer Success Manager

Median salary: $101,184

Senior customer success managers oversee the relationships between a brand and its clients, ensuring satisfaction, retention, and growth. These professionals work closely with sales and support teams to provide strategic solutions, address client needs, and help clients meet their goals with the company’s products or services.

2. Account Director

Median salary: $104,053

Account directors develop and execute strategies to meet clients’ business objectives, ensuring client satisfaction while driving revenue growth. This role often involves coordinating internal teams to manage key client accounts and deliver high-quality services.

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Source Photos: Artem Podrez/Pexels and Mackenzie Marco/Unsplash]

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