Why everyone is selfish and what to do about it

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

In fact, the reason is not in the actions of others, but in how we evaluate them.

What associations do you have with the word "selfishness"? I'm sure they are bad. Despite this, there is a hypothesis in psychology that people build relationships and make other decisions in life, guided only by selfish motives.

I want to tell you where the idea of the desire of others for personal gain comes from and what can be done to improve interaction with society.

Why do we think everyone is selfish

Each person at least once accused the other of being overly selfish. Mentally or aloud, it doesn't matter. The main thing is that we notice selfish behavior behind others much more often than we notice ourselves.

There is a scientific explanation for this - naive cynicism. This is a distortion of thinking that each of us has to varying degrees. Its definition from cognitive psychology sounds like this: a person naively expects others to behave more selfishly than they really are.

This effect was proved in 1999 by American psychologists Justin Kruger and Thomas Gilovich. They conducted the following experiment Naive cynicism in everyday theories of responsibility assessment: On biased assumptions of bias.

Psychologists put together groups of pairs of people: spouses, debaters, darts and video game players. The participants' task was to assess the degree of responsibility for good and bad events in a couple. To do this, each person was asked two questions.

1. « What do you think is your contribution to the good and bad events in a couple? " Most of the participants answered the same way. They said that they made approximately equal efforts and / or achieved success (won a game or argument, supported a marriage) and made mistakes equally.
2. "How do you think your partner will assess their contribution to good and bad events?" And here the most interesting began. Participants argued that their partners would certainly exaggerate their contribution to a victory or a happy marriage and downplay their responsibility for mistakes.

This expectation of selfish behavior from others is called naive cynicism. He is naive because people do not look for evidence of what they attribute to others. They just see others as selfish, especially those who disagree with them. Here is a classic description of the theory of naive cynicism:

• I am not biased.
• You are biased if you disagree with me.
• Your intentions / actions reflect your egocentric biases.

It is naive to believe that only disagreement with you makes people selfish. This is how small children behave. When mom does not give her son a chocolate bar before dinner, he thinks that the insidious mom wants to eat it herself and is acting selfishly, although in fact she cares about the child's health.

Like most distortions of thinking, naive cynicism is present in every person, but manifests itself to varying degrees. Someone stigmatizes everyone in a row as egoists and surrounds themselves with sycophants, and someone accuses others of greed only when they are captured by emotions.

Selfishness is not in the fact that a person lives as he wants, but in the fact that he forces others to live according to their own principles.

Oscar Wilde

How to overcome naive cynicism

To begin with, admit that we are all naive cynics. There are no people who would not try at least once to unfairly call those around them selfish. You could blame a partner who did something for himself and did not consult with you. Or a stranger in a store who managed to run faster than you to a free checkout.

Manifestations of naive cynicism should be viewed as a scale, at one end of which is a person who considers everyone to be egoists (regardless of the circumstances), and at the other end is a rational genius who always reasonably evaluates people's actions. Most of us are in the middle.

Do not try to objectively assess a person's contribution to a particular achievement. You still won't succeed. After all, the foundation of naive cynicism is comparing oneself with others. To shake it, three questions are enough:

• Is this person really selfish?
• Are there other explanations for his behavior?
• Maybe it is beneficial for me to consider him an egoist in order to justify myself?

The more often you ask yourself these questions and take the time to give complete answers to them, the less you will succumb to naive cynicism.

Another effective method was proposed by the authors of the mentioned experiment, psychologists Kruger and Gilovich. In their research, they noted that the best strategy to combat naive cynicism is to realize that collaboration has more benefits than single input.

Thus, a football team can win only if each football player interacts with other players, and a married couple will “live happily ever after” only if both partners strive for this.

Is a person selfish by nature? Scientists cannot yet give an unambiguous answer. But one thing I am sure: joint efforts bring more results than acting alone. And if we make these efforts, guided by the idea of common good, not selfishness, we will always achieve more.