Survey: Opinions regarding cynicism

The survey was carried out in cooperation with Serhiy Dembitskyi, Doctor of Sociological Sciences, Deputy Director of the Institute of Sociology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine 

• Sociological group “Rating” conducted a survey of opinions regarding cynicism in Ukraine within our 15th national survey “Ukraine during the war”. The generalized results of this survey show that 55% of the respondents completely or mostly demonstrate opinions about the presence of cynicism in the society, 29% completely or mostly demonstrate undefined opinions about this issue, while 16%, on the contrary, completely or mostly demonstrate opinions about the absence of cynicism. 

• The majority of the respondents gave an affirmative answer to almost all of the indicators that test opinions regarding cynicism. In this sense, the strongest belief (by three-quarters of the respondents) is the belief in the ability of people to lie in order to get promoted. At the same time, the belief that people are only honest because they are afraid of being exposed in a lie is the exception: in this case, the share of people who disagree with this statement is almost equal to the share of those who agree with it. 

• Despite this mostly negative picture, positive changes have been observed in the estimates of the prevalence of cynicism in Ukrainian society for the first time over the years of research. First of all, this is demonstrated by the fact that the share of the respondents who completely or mostly believe in the prevalence of cynicism decreased by 12 percentage points (from 67% to 55%). The share of those who hesitate about their position has increased by the same amount (from 17% to 29%). 

• The positive dynamics is explained by the decreasing shares of the respondents who:

• believe in the ability of most people to commit dishonest acts for the sake of profit;

• believe that most people don’t like to burden themselves in order to help others. 

• In almost all socio-demographic groups, from 49% to 61% of the respondents say that cynical attitudes are completely or mostly characteristic of Ukrainian society. At the same time, the most significant differences are observed in the context of the financial situation. The poor group of the respondents believe in the cynicism of the society most of all: 77%, while among the well-off, this share falls to 47%. The group of women aged between 18 and 35 years old should also be singled out: these respondents most often (22%) say that cynicism is not inherent in Ukrainian society. 

Background: The cynicism scale is an additional scale of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI). The cynicism index reflects the degree of disdain for generally accepted values. 

Audience: the population of Ukraine aged 18 and older in all regions, except for the temporarily occupied territories of the Crimea and Donbas, as well as the territories where there was no Ukrainian mobile connection at the time of the survey.
The results are weighted using current data from the State Statistics Service of Ukraine.
The sample is representative in terms of age, gender and type of settlement. Sample population: 1000 respondents.
Survey method: CATI (Computer Assisted Telephone Interviews).
The error of representativeness of the study with the confidence interval of 0.95: no more than 3.1%. Dates: July 23-24, 2022.