Selfishness: Definition, Opposite, & Human Nature​

By Charlie Huntington, M.A., Ph.D. Candidate​
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. 
You have needs, and I care about them—but I will have an easier time caring and paying attention to you once I address this whole hunger thing.

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​

Technically, the opposite of selfishness is altruism, or doing things for others that do not seem to benefit the doer in any way (Oakley et al., 2011). Like selfishness, this behavior can be taken too far, as when people make decisions they believe are in others’ best interests and end up harming them instead. The histories of medicine and psychology are unfortunately littered with instances of people causing harm through altruistic motives, such as when the eugenics movement encouraged sterilization of people with disabilities and mental health disorders, or when the American Psychiatric Association classified homosexuality as a disorder (Oakley et al., 2011).

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

Philosophers and psychologists generally agree that selfishness is a critical part of human nature (Carlson et al., 2022; Fromm, 1939). Even though we often talk down about people who behave selfishly while also talking up the importance of being selfless, we need to be selfish to survive.​

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

Here’s one example of being selfish: I always jump in to be the first person to climb when my friends and I go climbing outside. Most of the time people seem totally fine with it, but do I ask everybody first? Not usually. I’m putting my own desire to get exercising before the possible needs of others.

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 idea that our genes are selfish developed mostly in the last fifty years (Dawkins, 1976). Rather than there being a single selfish gene, we can think of our genes in general as being selfish, in the sense that they are going to prioritize their own reproduction and that of closely related genes.

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

Narcissism is a trait that seems to be associated with higher rates of selfish behaviors (Sedikides & Hart, 2022). Narcissists may engage in more conspicuous consumption (in other words, buying and having many things) in order to appear successful and interesting to others. They fear having their self-image compromised by seeming inadequately financially successful, so they may put themselves before others until they feel that others will see them in this positive light (Pauletti et al., 2012).

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

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Books Related to Selfishness

If you’d like to keep learning more, here are a few books that you might be interested in.

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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