Selfishness: Definition, Opposite, & Human Nature
Selfishness is something we generally frown upon—yet everybody has their selfish moments. Might selfishness be a natural and even useful part of human nature?
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In observing the lives of my friends, family, and clients, as well as my own life, I have noticed a trend: Negative emotions and stress make all of us more selfish than we would otherwise be. Think of all the coffee mugs and T-shirts that say something snarky to the effect of, “I’ll be civil to you once I’ve had my coffee.” I’m not a coffee drinker, but that’s what starts to happen to me when I get hungry.
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Maybe you have your own examples of this: forgetting a friend’s birthday party during a stressful week; a coworker who monologues at you and never asks about your day; your siblings who would eat all the food off your childhood dinner table and leave you none unless you were an aggressive eater too. We slip into selfishness all the time! It must be something we do for a reason, right? Let’s look at the psychological research on selfishness and figure out how human it is to be selfish.
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What Is Selfishness? (A Definition)
Selfishness is the state of being very focused on one’s own needs and well-being with a correspondingly decreased focus on the needs and well-being of others (Raine & Uh, 2019). We should pay attention to the fact that this is a two-pronged definition; it is implied in the definition that when we are being selfish, we are not attending to the needs of other people in ways that we would normally be expected to.
This means the context of our behaviors matters in determining whether behaviors are selfish. If you are enjoying a fancy steak lunch at a downtown restaurant, are you being selfish? It depends on whether you have family members with more pressing needs for that money, a distressed friend who asked you to call them on your lunch break, or a work colleague whose next tasks are dependent on you sending them something in a timely manner.
Perhaps the purest form of selfishness is what scholars call egocentric selfishness, or focusing your attention entirely on your needs and self (Caporael et al., 1989). That sounds bad, right? But from a philosophical and evolutionary perspective, it does not have to be. We are designed by nature to pass on our own genes, and that makes our own survival our top priority; to the extent that being selfish extends our longevity and reproductive fitness, we could argue that it is very much a part of human nature (Caporael et al., 1989).
When selfishness directly causes harm to others, then we can consider it to be pathological (Caporael et al., 1989). Selfish behaviors of this nature are often considered antisocial or psychopathic. For example, sexually assaulting another person to satisfy one’s own sexual needs is pathologically selfish, and we can say the same thing about theft, especially when it involves physical aggression toward others. In fact, this degree of selfishness may be at the core of psychopathy; when people are solely focused on the rewards they will get from a behavior and care nothing for the negative consequences others will face, they are behaving psychopathically.
Opposite of Selfishness
This is not to say that altruism is bad. Just like with selfishness, it clearly pays to be altruistic. In fact, some people would argue that there is no such thing as a truly selfless action. Even behaviors that seem to provide us with no physical or concrete benefits, or that even inconvenience us, can still provide some kind of positive psychological meaning. Think of people who donate their hard-earned money or drive through rush hour traffic to volunteer—these generous acts likely come with some satisfaction at one’s own apparent selflessness.
Psychology of Selfishness
Psychologists think about and have defined selfishness in lots of different ways. But as we noted above, most of them involve some degree of self-focus and self-benefit as well as a lack of concern for others. This encompasses a really broad range of behaviors (Crocker et al., 2017); everything from complimenting somebody else’s outfit so they will acknowledge yours to stealing your roommate’s dark chocolate to driving away after you’ve hit a pedestrian can count as being selfish.
How do psychologists handle the fact that selfishness can look so different and occur in so many different contexts? One way is to describe selfishness as a frame that people use to analyze situations (Carlson et al., 2022). In other words, selfishness exists when and where we interpret a situation as involving selfishness. There are no inherently selfish or selfless acts—there’s only our interpretation of a certain situation.
Why would we develop this kind of interpretation? How is it psychologically adaptive? It seems that when we interpret a behavior as selfish, we get the opportunity to draw important inferences about the people involved (Carlson et al., 2022). If, for example, a family boards a plane and the father sits in business class while his wife and two children end up in the back of the plane, we might naturally interpret this as a selfish distribution of resources on the part of the father. Furthermore, we might then quickly make some assumptions about the relationship between the father and the mother as well as the father and the children. This might motivate us to be kind to the mother or dismissive of the father.
Selfishness and Human Nature
Here’s one example of how this shows up in my own life: I am only just recently changing my relationship with the idea of self-care. For many years, I saw any act of self-care that involved a significant investment of resources as selfish—in a bad way. Eating dinner out on my own, delaying a work task because I needed rest, or calling a friend for emotional support—all of these were behaviors I thought were inappropriately selfish. However, selfishness is an important part of our instinct toward self-care and self-preservation (Fromm, 1939) in the sense that it reflects a kind of self-love. (As you might have guessed, I have often had trouble loving myself, which only makes it harder to see any apparently selfish behaviors as positive.)
Examples of Selfishness
I have a similar difficulty restraining myself when my housemates bake desserts or bring home something tasty. There’s a part of me that wants to make sure everybody gets a chance to eat the cookies or cake, and there’s also a part of me that wants to enjoy as much of that sweet treat as I possibly can—and tough luck for everyone else.
Selfish Gene
The selfish gene theory suggests that I am more likely to collaborate with someone who shares more of my genes, because this way both that person and I will have a higher chance of surviving and passing on those genes. Think of the saying that “family is family”—how often do we prioritize taking care of family over everything else? The selfish gene theory tells us we do this not just out of a sense of obligation, but also because it is evolutionarily advantageous for us to prioritize the needs of our relatives.
In fact, the selfish gene theory suggests that I may even sacrifice myself so that multiple other people who share genes with me can carry on living and hopefully reproduce. From the selfish perspective of our genes, it is better for several of my family members to survive than for several of us to die, even if one person must be sacrificed along the way.
Finally, the selfish gene theory turns on its head the idea of adaptation occurring at an individual level (Gardner & Welch, 2011). Usually, when we talk about adapting to survive, we are thinking about how adaptation occurs within individual organisms over time: A trait makes a single organism more likely to survive, so it is passed on to the next generation. The selfish gene theory suggests that adaptation is driven by our genes, not our traits.
Selfishness in a Relationship
There is no selfishness outside of relationships, because to be selfish means to prioritize your needs over somebody else’s. People who behave selfishly more often in relationships tend to have lower-quality connections with other people; they experience more conflict and less relationship stability, perhaps because of their selfish behaviors (Crocker & Canevello, 2008).
Selfishness and Narcissism
Causes of Selfishness
The primary cause of selfishness, as we have seen, might just be that it promotes our own well-being and survival (Haidt, 2012). When we are selfish in ways that will clearly disadvantage or hurt others, it may be because we are too concerned for our own well-being to follow the moral principles laid out in most societies that limit our selfishness. If you still feel uncertain about the idea that selfishness can be healthy or good, I recommend watching this video:
Video: Selfishness Is Nature
Quotes on Selfishness
- “Selfish: a judgment readily passed by those who have never tested their power of sacrifice.” — George Eliot
- “Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil—or else an absolute ignorance.” — Graham Greene
- “Selfishness comes from poverty in the heart, from the belief that love is not abundant.” — Don Miguel Ruiz
- “Your conscience is the measure of your honesty of your selfishness. Listen to it carefully.” — Richard Bach
- “Good character consists of recognizing the selfishness that inheres in each of us and trying to balance it against the altruism to which we should all aspire. It is a difficult balance to strike, but no definition of goodness can be complete without it.” — Alan Dershowitz
- “Selfishness must always be forgiven, you know, because there is no hope of a cure.” — Jane Austen
- “It is interesting how the selfish, the ignorant, and the constantly angry all tend to be the same person.” — Wayne Gerard Trotman
- “Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.” — Oscar Wilde
Articles Related to Selfishness
Books Related to Selfishness
Final Thoughts on Selfishness
The tendency to take care of our own needs, which can seem selfish at times, is quite natural. The tendency to put our needs before others’ often has negative consequences; this is the kind of selfishness that we have come to see as morally wrong in most societies. I hope you can be gracious with yourself in those moments when you really need to meet your own needs while minimizing the moments when doing so makes things worse for others.
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References
- Caporael, L. R., Dawes, R. M., Orbell, J. M., & Van de Kragt, A. J. (1989). Selfishness examined: Cooperation in the absence of egoistic incentives. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 12(4), 683–699.
- Carlson, R. W., Adkins, C., Crockett, M. J., & Clark, M. S. (2022). Psychological selfishness. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 17(5), 1359–1380.
- Crocker, J., & Canevello, A. (2008). Creating and undermining social support in communal relationships: the role of compassionate and self-image goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95(3), 555.
- Crocker, J., Canevello, A., & Brown, A. A. (2017). Social motivation: Costs and benefits of selfishness and otherishness. Annual Review of Psychology, 68, 299–325.
- Dawkins, R. (1976). The selfish gene. Oxford University Press.
- Fromm, E. (1939). Selfishness and self-love. Psychiatry: Journal for the Study of Interpersonal Processes, 2, 507–523.
- Gardner, A., & Welch, J. J. (2011). A formal theory of the selfish gene. Journal of Evolutionary Biology, 24(8), 1801–1813.
- Haidt, J. (2012). The righteous mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion. Allen Lane.
- Oakley, B., Knafo, A., Madhavan, G., & Wilson, D. S. (Eds.). (2011). Pathological altruism. Oxford University Press.
- Pauletti, R. E., Menon, M., Menon, M., Tobin, D. D., & Perry, D. G. (2012). Narcissism and adjustment in preadolescence. Child Development, 83(3), 831–837.
- Raine, A., & Uh, S. (2019). The selfishness questionnaire: Egocentric, adaptive, and pathological forms of selfishness. Journal of Personality Assessment, 101(5), 503–514.
- Sedikides, C., & Hart, C. M. (2022). Narcissism and conspicuous consumption. Current Opinion in Psychology, 46, 101322.
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