Changing the Lens: How Our Beliefs About Human Nature Shape Reality and What We Can Do About It

There's a story we've been telling ourselves about human nature for centuries, and it's making us sick. The story goes something like this: humans are fundamentally selfish, civilization is a thin veneer covering our savage impulses, and left to our own devices, we'd descend into chaos. Rutger Bregman's Humankind: A Hopeful History systematically dismantles this story and reveals something both simple and profound: the lens through which we view human nature doesn't just interpret reality—it actively creates it.

What we believe about people becomes how people behave, including ourselves. This is the nocebo effect writ large, and understanding it might be one of the most important mental health interventions available to us.

The Nocebo Effect: When Negative Beliefs Create Negative Outcomes

Most people have heard of the placebo effect—when positive expectations lead to positive outcomes. The nocebo effect is its darker twin: negative expectations create negative outcomes. If you're told a harmless pill will make you nauseous, you become nauseous. If you're told a particular group is dangerous, you perceive threat where none exists. If you believe you're fragile, you become more fragile.

Bregman shows how this operates at the civilizational level. For centuries, Western thought has been dominated by the assumption that humans are inherently selfish and need to be controlled. This belief—what Bregman calls "veneer theory"—has shaped everything: our institutions, our parenting, our economic systems, our criminal justice, our education, even our therapy models. And here's the devastating part: when you design systems assuming people will cheat and shirk and harm, people actually behave worse.

The nocebo effect isn't just theoretical—it's measurable. Students cheat more when monitored because surveillance communicates distrust, which erodes intrinsic motivation. Employees are less productive under micromanagement. Prisoners reoffend more in punitive systems. Children become more aggressive when treated as naturally violent. The belief in human badness becomes self-fulfilling.

As a therapist, I see this nocebo effect operating constantly in individuals. Clients who believe they're fundamentally broken behave in more dysfunctional ways. Those who believe they're unlovable push people away. Those who believe people can't be trusted create relationships where trust becomes impossible. The lens doesn't just tint reality—it shapes it.

The Alternative Lens: Humans as Fundamentally Decent

Bregman marshals compelling evidence from anthropology, psychology, and history to argue that humans are actually the friendliest species, selected for cooperation and kindness. We survived not through being the strongest or fastest but through our extraordinary ability to collaborate, communicate, and care for one another. The veneer theory has it backward: civilization didn't suppress our savage nature; our cooperative nature enabled civilization.

This isn't naive optimism—it's what the data shows. In disasters, people overwhelmingly help each other rather than descending into chaos. Soldiers in war often can't bring themselves to shoot the enemy. Even in extreme circumstances like Nazi concentration camps, prisoners formed elaborate support networks. The baseline human response to others' suffering is empathy and the impulse to help.

But here's what makes this more than just a nice idea: when you design systems assuming people are decent, they behave better. Schools that trust students produce better outcomes. Workplaces with autonomy outperform those with control. Prisons focused on rehabilitation have lower recidivism. The placebo effect of believing in human goodness is powerful.

The question then becomes: if our beliefs about human nature are this consequential, how do we change them? How do we adjust the lens when everything around us reinforces the cynical view?

The Personal Nocebo: Your Beliefs About Yourself

Before we can change cultural lenses, we need to understand the personal nocebo effect—how your beliefs about yourself create your reality. This isn't positive thinking or affirmations; it's recognizing that your working theory about who you are shapes what you do, which shapes what happens, which confirms your theory.

If you believe you're socially awkward, you enter social situations anxiously, which makes you behave more awkwardly, which leads to uncomfortable interactions, which confirms you're socially awkward. If you believe you're untrustworthy, you don't trust yourself with responsibility, so you don't develop competence, so you make mistakes, which confirms you're untrustworthy. If you believe you're fundamentally selfish, you interpret your desires as problematic, suppress them until they explode, behave selfishly, and confirm your belief.

The therapeutic work is identifying these core beliefs—what I'll call "operating theories"—and examining whether they're actually true or whether they're nocebos creating the reality they claim to describe. Often, clients have taken temporary truths (I struggled socially as an awkward teenager) or survival adaptations (I became selfish to survive a neglectful childhood) and solidified them into permanent identity (I am socially awkward; I am selfish).

Bregman's framework offers a powerful reframe: what if the baseline assumption is that you're fundamentally decent? What if your struggles aren't evidence of core defect but normal responses to difficult circumstances? What if your "selfishness" is actually healthy self-preservation that got pathologized? What if your social anxiety is your system responding to actual social contexts that weren't safe, not evidence that you're inherently inadequate?

This shift from "I'm fundamentally broken" to "I'm fundamentally okay and struggling with real things" isn't just cognitive reframing—it changes what becomes possible. When you stop fighting yourself as the enemy, you can actually work with yourself. When you trust your impulses might be useful information rather than threats to control, you can listen to them. When you believe you're capable of growth rather than fixed in dysfunction, you actually grow.

Adjusting the Interpersonal Lens: Changing How You See Others

The nocebo effect operates powerfully in relationships. If you assume your partner is fundamentally selfish or your friend is unreliable or your colleague is incompetent, you'll interpret everything through that lens. Ambiguous behaviours become confirming evidence. You'll create the relationship you expect rather than the one that's possible.

Here's a practical exercise: For one week, adopt the working hypothesis that the people in your life are fundamentally well-intentioned. When someone does something frustrating, instead of assuming malice or selfishness, assume they're struggling with something, operating from limited information, or dealing with constraints you can't see.

Notice what happens. Your coworker who seems lazy—might they be depressed or dealing with something difficult at home? Your partner who seems critical—might they be expressing care clumsily or replaying patterns from their family? Your friend who cancelled plans—might they actually need rest rather than not valuing you?

This isn't naive—you're not ignoring patterns or accepting poor treatment. You're experimenting with a different interpretive lens. And here's what often happens: when you approach people assuming good intent, they often rise to meet that assumption. Your less defensive stance creates space for them to be less defensive. Your curiosity invites explanation. Your assumption of their decency calls forth their better self.

The nocebo version—assuming bad intent—creates defensive interactions where everyone is protecting against attack. The placebo version—assuming good intent—creates collaborative interactions where people can relax and actually be their better selves. Your lens doesn't just interpret the interaction; it shapes what kind of interaction becomes possible.

Cultural Lens Adjustment: Consuming Media Differently

We're swimming in media that reinforces the nocebo lens. News focuses on crime, corruption, and conflict because "man helps neighbour" isn't newsworthy. Social media amplifies outrage and division. Entertainment relies on villains and betrayal. True crime podcasts detail human depravity. Political coverage emphasizes bad actors and cynical motives.

This constant diet of human badness isn't neutral—it's training your brain to expect threat, to see selfishness, to assume the worst. It's a civilizational-scale nocebo, systematically teaching you that people are terrible. And then we wonder why anxiety, depression, and social isolation are epidemic.

Adjusting this lens requires intentionality:

Curate Your Information Diet: This doesn't mean ignorance about real problems, but balancing disaster with the much more common reality of people helping each other. Follow accounts that share acts of kindness, community organizing, scientific cooperation, artistic collaboration. Read long-form journalism that explores complexity rather than rage-bait. Seek out media that shows human struggle and human decency simultaneously.

Question Crime-Focused Narratives: Crime has been declining for decades, yet media coverage makes it seem like we're in unprecedented danger. This mismatch creates a nocebo where people feel unsafe in actually safe environments, which changes behaviour—less trust, more isolation, more surveillance, which actually does make communities less safe.

Notice Confirmation Bias: Your brain will find evidence for whatever you're looking for. If you're looking for human awfulness, you'll see it everywhere. Practice actively looking for evidence of decency, cooperation, and kindness—not to be Pollyanna, but to correct for the skewed information environment.

Reframe Disaster Coverage: When disasters happen, notice the helpers. Bregman shows that the dominant response to disaster is people helping each other, yet media focuses on rare instances of looting. Train yourself to see the background reality rather than the sensationalized exception.

The Workplace Lens: Redesigning Environments for Trust

Most workplaces are designed around veneer theory: people need to be monitored or they'll slack off, need to be incentivized or they'll do minimum effort, need to be controlled or chaos will reign. This creates workplaces that are miserable and, ironically, less productive.

Bregman documents alternatives: companies that eliminate time tracking and surveillance, schools that trust students with freedom, prisons that focus on rehabilitation. These "trust-based" systems consistently outperform control-based ones. When you treat people as fundamentally lazy, they become lazier; when you treat them as intrinsically motivated, they become more engaged.

If you have any influence over your work environment, you can experiment with trust-based approaches:

Replace Surveillance with Autonomy: Instead of monitoring every minute, focus on outcomes. Trust people to manage their time. Research consistently shows autonomy increases both satisfaction and productivity.

Assume Good Intent in Conflicts: When problems arise, approach from "What went wrong?" rather than "Who's to blame?" This creates psychological safety where people can acknowledge mistakes rather than hide them.

Design for Cooperation Over Competition: Ranking systems, forced curves, and competitive incentives often backfire, creating environments where people sabotage each other. Design for collaborative success instead.

Make the Implicit Explicit: If you're implementing trust-based approaches, name it. "We're operating from the assumption that everyone here wants to do good work and cares about outcomes. That means [specific policies]. It also means if something isn't working, we'll address it directly rather than implementing surveillance."

Even if you can't change the whole system, you can change your own management approach or how you relate to colleagues. Operating from the assumption of others' competence and good intent often creates a pocket of different culture that spreads.

The Parenting Lens: Raising Humans Who Trust Humanity

Children are born believing people are good. Then we systematically teach them otherwise: "Don't talk to strangers" (most people are dangerous). "You need to be disciplined" (you can't be trusted to manage yourself). "Watch out for bullies" (other kids will hurt you). "The world is competitive" (others are rivals, not collaborators).

Some of this is necessary—real dangers exist. But Bregman shows we've overcorrected massively. Stranger danger is statistically minimal; kids are safer now than in generations. Yet we've created childhoods of surveillance and structured activity where kids never learn to navigate unstructured social situations or trust their own judgment.

Adjusting the parenting lens might mean:

Trust Children's Social Instincts: Rather than assuming kids will be cruel without adult intervention, notice how naturally they cooperate, share, and care for each other when given space. Adults often create the conflicts they're trying to prevent through over-management.

Allow Unstructured Play: Kids learn to negotiate, collaborate, and resolve conflicts through free play without adult intervention. Constant supervision prevents the development of these crucial skills and communicates that they can't be trusted to work things out.

Reframe "Misbehaviour": Instead of assuming defiance or manipulation, get curious about what need the child is expressing or what skill they haven't developed yet. "You're hitting because you don't have words for big feelings yet" is different from "You're being bad."

Model Trust in Humanity: Let your children see you trusting people, helping strangers, assuming good intent, engaging in community. They're learning more from what you model than what you say.

Tell Different Stories: The stories we tell children shape their worldview. Balance the cautionary tales with stories of human cooperation, collective problem-solving, and ordinary kindness. Make sure they know that disasters bring helpers, that most people are trustworthy, that humanity has achieved remarkable things through collaboration.

The Self-Relationship Lens: Befriending Your Own Nature

Perhaps the most important lens adjustment is how you view yourself. If you've internalized veneer theory, you probably relate to yourself with suspicion: your desires are selfish, your needs are excessive, your impulses need control, your emotions are threats. You've set up an internal surveillance state, constantly monitoring for signs of the dangerous self that might emerge.

This creates exactly the dysfunction it's trying to prevent. When you don't trust yourself, you can't develop self-regulation—you're too busy controlling. When you pathologize your needs, they emerge in distorted ways. When you suspect your motivations, you can't act with clarity and confidence.

Adjusting this lens means experimenting with trusting yourself:

What If Your Needs Are Valid? Not in a "do whatever you want" way, but genuinely considering: what if when you need rest, you actually need rest, not discipline? What if when you want connection, that's healthy, not neediness? What if your desires are information, not enemies?

What If Your "Negative" Emotions Are Useful? Anger might be boundary violation detection. Anxiety might be important information about safety. Sadness might be processing loss. Instead of managing emotions as problems, what if you listened to them as messengers?

What If You're Actually Trying? Instead of assuming your struggles mean you're not trying hard enough, what if you're trying enormously hard but facing real obstacles? What if your "failure" to meet impossible standards is actually evidence that the standards are impossible?

What If You Don't Need Fixing? This is perhaps the most radical lens shift. What if you're not broken? What if your psychological suffering is normal response to abnormal circumstances, learned patterns from difficult situations, or understandable reactions to real problems? What if healing isn't fixing yourself but creating conditions where your inherent health can emerge?

This doesn't mean you don't need to change behaviors or develop skills. It means the starting assumption shifts from "I'm fundamentally defective and must be controlled" to "I'm fundamentally okay and can learn and grow." That shift changes everything about the process of change itself.

The Community Lens: Building Cultures of Trust

One of Bregman's most powerful points is that humans are intensely social—we become like the people around us. If you're surrounded by cynicism, you become cynical. If you're in cultures of trust, you become more trusting. This means changing your lens isn't just individual work; it's about finding or creating communities that operate from different assumptions.

Look for or help create:

Spaces with High Social Trust: Groups where people assume good intent, extend benefit of doubt, and respond to conflict with curiosity rather than judgment. These might be specific communities, friend groups, or online spaces that have strong pro-social norms.

Cooperative Rather Than Competitive Structures: Join or create groups organized around collaboration rather than competition. This might be community gardens, maker spaces, mutual aid networks, cooperative housing, or any structure where people's interests align rather than compete.

Places That Expect the Best: Organizations and communities that have high expectations alongside high support create environments where people rise to meet those expectations. This is different from demanding perfection; it's genuinely believing in people's capacity and creating conditions for them to succeed.

Conversations That Go Deep: Superficial interactions reinforce superficial assumptions about people. Create opportunities for genuine conversation where people can be seen in their complexity. This breaks down caricatures and reveals shared humanity.

The nocebo effect of isolation and shallow connection is powerful—it makes everyone seem alien and potentially threatening. The placebo effect of genuine community is equally powerful—it reminds you that people are, mostly, trying their best and capable of remarkable care.

Practical Exercises: Daily Lens Adjustments

Here are concrete practices for adjusting your lens:

Morning Assumption Setting: Each morning, set an intention: "Today I'm operating from the assumption that people are fundamentally decent." Notice throughout the day when you're interpreting from this lens versus the cynical one.

Generous Interpretation Practice: When someone does something frustrating, generate three generous interpretations before settling on an explanation. This trains your brain toward charitable assumptions and reveals how many explanations are possible.

Evidence Collection: Keep a note where you record evidence of human decency you witness. This counteracts confirmation bias and trains attention toward what's actually common but under-noticed.

Reframe Exercises: When you catch yourself in nocebo thinking ("People are terrible," "I'm fundamentally flawed," "No one can be trusted"), pause and reframe: "Some people in some contexts behave badly, but most people most of the time are pretty decent, including me."

Conversation Experiments: In conversations, practice assuming the person is well-intentioned but perhaps communicating poorly. Instead of "They're attacking me," try "They're struggling to express something that matters to them." Notice how this changes your response and their response to you.

Media Fasts: Periodically take breaks from news and social media, especially during high-conflict periods. Notice how your background sense of threat and cynicism shifts. Be intentional about what you consume when you return.

Self-Compassion Check-ins: Several times daily, notice your internal tone. Are you relating to yourself with suspicion and control, or with curiosity and care? Practice the latter deliberately.

The Resistance: Why Cynicism Feels Safer

As you experiment with these lens adjustments, you'll likely encounter internal resistance. Cynicism feels safer than hope. Suspicion feels more realistic than trust. Believing the worst about people and yourself protects against disappointment. If you don't expect goodness, you can't be hurt when it doesn't appear. This resistance makes sense—it's protective. Many people developed cynical lenses because they were hurt by trusting too readily. Others absorbed cultural messages that hope is naive and cynicism is sophisticated. Still others fear that seeing the good in people means ignoring real harm or making yourself vulnerable.

The work isn't forcing yourself to be naively optimistic. It's recognizing that cynicism itself causes harm—to your wellbeing, your relationships, your communities, and your capacity to create change. The lens that protects you from disappointment also prevents connection, growth, and possibility.

Bregman isn't arguing there's no selfishness, cruelty, or harm in the world. He's arguing that these are deviations from the baseline rather than the baseline itself. And more importantly, that our belief in them as baseline creates more of them. The question isn't whether bad things happen—they obviously do. The question is whether bad things are what's typical and expected, or whether they're aberrations from what's normal and good.

The Stakes: Why This Matters Now

We're living in a moment of cascading crises: climate change, political polarization, mental health epidemics, loneliness, social fragmentation. Many of these challenges require collective action, which requires trust, which requires believing that people are capable of cooperating for common good. If we're operating from veneer theory—humans are fundamentally selfish and need control—these problems become unsolvable. If we're operating from Bregman's evidence—humans are fundamentally cooperative and need the right conditions—solutions become imaginable.

The mental health implications are equally high-stakes. Depression, anxiety, and alienation are partly responses to environments that violate our social nature and operate from cynical assumptions. If we continue building institutions, relationships, and internal worlds based on distrust, we'll continue generating dysfunction. If we can shift the lens, we might address root causes rather than just symptoms.

This isn't about positive thinking or individual attitude adjustment. It's about recognizing that our collective beliefs about human nature are consequential—they shape institutions, cultures, relationships, and individual psychology. And if our beliefs are both wrong and harmful, changing them isn't naive; it's necessary.

Conclusion: The Choice of Lens

Bregman's work offers something rare: a genuinely different way of seeing that has practical implications for how we live. The nocebo effect of believing humans are bad is creating the world it claims to describe. The placebo effect of believing humans are decent might create something different.

This isn't a one-time decision but an ongoing practice. You'll slip back into cynical interpretation—it's the water we swim in. The work is catching yourself, adjusting the lens, and starting again. Each time you choose generous interpretation over suspicious, each time you trust instead of control, each time you assume good intent over bad, you're doing small-scale work that has large-scale implications. Because here's the thing: if Bregman is right, most people are already fundamentally decent. They're just operating in systems and cultures built on the assumption that they're not, which brings out their worst. Your choice to operate from a different assumption doesn't just change your experience—it changes the field. When you trust, others become more trustworthy. When you assume good intent, people rise to meet that assumption. When you treat people as capable of decency, they often show you they are.

The lens you choose doesn't just interpret reality—it participates in creating it. That's simultaneously sobering and empowering. Sobering because our cynical lens has caused real harm. Empowering because we can choose differently, starting now, in each interaction, including with ourselves.

The question isn't whether Bregman is completely right about human nature—scholars will continue debating that. The question is: which assumption leads to better outcomes? Which lens creates the world you want to live in? Which belief about people, including yourself, makes flourishing more possible?

The evidence suggests that believing in human decency isn't naive optimism—it's pragmatic wisdom. Not because all people are always good, but because our beliefs influence what's possible. Adjust the lens, and watch what becomes visible.