essay on human selfishness

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Are We Innately Selfish? What the Science Has to Say

One of the key reasons for the unparalleled success of our species is our ability to cooperate. In the modern age, we are able to travel to any continent, feed the billions of people on our planet, and negotiate massive international trade agreements—all amazing accomplishments that would not be possible without cooperation on a massive scale.

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While intra-species cooperation is not a uniquely human ability, one of the reasons why our cooperative behavior is so different from that of other animals is because of our willingness to cooperate with those outside our social group. 1 In general, we readily trust strangers for advice, work together with new people, and are willing to look out for and protect people we don’t know—even though there are no incentives for us to do so.

However, while much of our success can be attributed to cooperation, the underlying motivations behind this unique ability are yet to be understood. Although it is clear that we often display cooperative and pro-social tendencies, is cooperation something that we are naturally hardwired to do? Or is it that our first instincts are inherently selfish, and it is only through the conscious repression of our selfish urges that we are able to cooperate with others?

Indeed, these questions have been debated by philosophers for millennia. For the longest time, the pervasive view was one of pessimism towards our species—that is, that we are innately selfish.

Plato compared the human soul to a chariot being pulled by two opposing horses: one horse is majestic, representing our nobility and our pure heartedness, while the other is evil, representing our passions and base desires. Human behavior can be described as an eternal tug-of-war between these two horses, where we desperately try to keep our evil horse under control. 2

The moral philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer argued for a similar perspective, writing that “Man is at bottom a dreadful wild animal. We know this wild animal only in the tamed state called civilization and we are therefore shocked by occasional outbreaks of its true nature; but if and when the bolts and bars of the legal order once fall apart and anarchy supervenes it reveals itself for what it is.” 3

Adam Smith, the father of economics, also echoed this view, famously writing in  The Wealth of Nations : “It is not the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” 4

These philosophical beliefs about our selfish human nature inspired many of the teachings we encounter in everyday life. For instance, in Christianity, the Seven Deadly Sins and The Golden Rule teach us to repress our innermost selfish desires in order to think about others. Another example is in economics, where the very foundation of neoclassical economics is the idea that we are selfish, rational decision-makers.

You may be inclined to agree with these ideas. Everyone has heard of stories of cheating, lying, and stealing—all of which display the worst of our human nature, where our selfish impulses reveal themselves.

But despite the legacy of these beliefs carrying on into modern times, the idea of our innate selfishness is being increasingly challenged. Insights from the behavioral sciences are beginning to suggest that we have a cooperative instinct, and that our selfish behavior only emerges when we have the time and ability to form strategies about our decisions.

The interaction of System 1 and System 2 

Anyone remotely interested in psychology or economics has probably heard of the dual-systems theory of decision-making: the idea that our decisions are governed by two opposing cognitive “systems.” System 1 is the automatic and emotional part of our brain, and System 2, the slow and deliberative part. 5  

These two systems are very much related, and their interaction and relative levels of activation can determine our behavior. This means that certain stimuli can enhance or inhibit the influence of one system’s functioning in the decision-making process. For instance, making a decision when feeling overwhelmed with multiple tasks, time pressure, or mental and physical exhaustion can weaken an individual’s System 2 thinking and make them more reliant on their System 1 judgments. 6  

This should be unsurprising: when you’re mentally overwhelmed, you probably aren’t thinking things through, and you’re going to make decisions by impulse! In a similar fashion, facilitating System 2 thinking by giving people time to make decisions, or incentivizing people to think about things deeply, can suppress System 1 and enhance System 2 thinking.

Through this lens of the interaction between System 1 and System 2, researchers in psychology and economics have found a new way to answer this age-old question. By manipulating elements such as time pressure to enhance impulsivity in some subjects and promote deliberation in others, researchers have been able to differentiate the effects of System 1 and System 2 on our behavior to see whether we truly are instinctively selfish or cooperative.

The cooperative instinct

Experiments that require cooperation between participants are used to investigate instinctive versus calculated greed. Take the public goods game, for instance. In this game, players are placed in groups and given an endowment (typically around $10). They are asked to donate a certain amount of their endowment for a “public good,” where their donations will be doubled and subsequently split between the players. You should be able to spot an interesting dynamic in this game: by cooperating and contributing more to the public good, everyone will benefit. But by acting selfishly, you alone will benefit at the expense of the group.

What happens when you are asked to make this contribution to the public good when you are solely under the influence of System 1 (i.e. when System 2 is under stress from some form of cognitive strain)? It turns out, when required to make a decision within 10 seconds, participants in experimental groups acted more cooperatively. Participants who acted on impulse contributed more to the public good than those who had time to think about their contributions. 7  

What was also fascinating from this study was that, when participants were given time and encouraged to think about their decisions, participants opted to be greedier. Apparently, when relying on instinct, we are willing to cooperate, but when we are given a chance to think about the costs and benefits of our decisions, we think more about our own outcomes than those of others.

These findings also held true for the prisoner’s dilemma game, another activity that involves a cooperative dynamic (if you’re from the UK, this game is analogous to the “split-or-steal” situation in the game show “Golden Balls”). Similar results were also found when conducting these experiments in person rather than through a computer program.

These findings are certainly fascinating, but you might be thinking that behavior in a lab experiment may not be replicable in real life. Let’s say, for example, someone approached you on the street and asked you to contribute to a charity, and you had no time to make a decision (perhaps you’re late for work). Do you think you would donate? Perhaps more field research is necessary to confirm these findings in real-world scenarios.

Another approach to studying our cooperative instincts is to examine the behavior of babies. Intuitively speaking, babies should represent humankind in our most primal state, where we are most reliant on instincts to make our decisions. From a biological perspective, babies have underdeveloped brains and are extremely helpless at birth, which explains why we take a much longer time to mature in comparison to other animals. (We evolved this way because if our heads got any bigger, we would struggle to get out of our mother’s womb.) 8  So, investigating the cooperative/selfish tendencies of babies should theoretically reflect our true human nature.

And indeed, researchers have found that babies display a strong tendency to cooperate. Toddlers as young as 14-18 months are willing to pick up and hand you an object you accidentally dropped without any praise or recognition; they are willing to share with others; and they are also willing to inform others of things that will benefit them, even if it brings no benefit to the toddler themselves. 9  This is in contrast to chimpanzee babies, who do not display the same amount of cooperative tendencies at a young age. This showcases that perhaps it is a uniquely human ability to be instinctively cooperative.

Why are we instinctively cooperative?

So it seems that it’s possible the great thinkers of our history may have been wrong—perhaps we are not as selfishly wired as we think. The findings from the public goods game study and infant studies suggest that we may be actually instinctively cooperative rather than selfish. But what are the possible explanations for this?

From an evolutionary biology perspective, it could be that cooperative genes were selected for, because it was the best survival strategy. Those who were more innately cooperative were able to experience more advantageous outcomes and survive long enough to pass on their genes to their offspring. 10

But there are also many instances where our first impulse is to not cooperate, and many instances where, after much deliberation, we still decide to cooperate. We’ve all met people who simply seem less trustworthy, and we can all think of times where we ended up trusting somebody after having a long time to think about our decision—for example, after contemplating a business deal, or purchasing something expensive from someone else.

The social-heuristics hypothesis (SHH) aims to tie these ideas together. This theory predicts that variation in our intuitive and cooperative responses largely depends on our individual differences as well as the context we are in. 11  

Our intuitive responses are largely shaped by behaviors that proved advantageous in the past. For instance, imagine you’re playing for a basketball team. If you realize that working together with your teammates is advantageous for winning matches, you will gradually start to develop instinctive responses to cooperate with your teammates in order to continue winning games. But if you start to recognize that you are carrying the team and that trusting your teammates is actually hindering the team’s results, you will start to develop more instinctively selfish behaviors and not pass to them as frequently. 

With this perspective, our instinctive responses all depend on which strategy—cooperation or selfishness—worked for us in the past. This can explain why most participants in the public goods game chose to cooperate: cooperative behaviors are typically advantageous in our daily lives. 12

In our modern age, our lives are more interconnected than ever. There are over 7 billion of us now, where our experiences are easily shareable on social media and our businesses require close collaboration with partners in order to mutually benefit. Behaving in accordance with  social norms 13  is more important than ever, where we frequently require cooperation with others in our daily life and any self-serving behavior often leads to social criticism and damage to one’s reputation. We quickly learn to cooperate and adapt to these social norms, and this, in turn, hardwires our instincts towards more cooperative behaviors.

On the other hand, deliberation allows us to adjust to specific situations and override our intuitive responses if that intuitive response is not actually beneficial in the present context. In other words, deliberation allows us to strategize and suppress our individual instinctive desires in order to choose the most optimal choice, whether this be cooperation or noncooperation. When there are no future consequences, such as in the public goods game experiment, even though our instincts may be cooperative, deliberation will likely skew towards selfish behavior as we realize that strategic selfishness will make us better off and that we won’t be punished for free-riding. 

However, when there  are  future consequences, deliberation will favor cooperation or noncooperation depending on the individual’s beliefs about which behavior will be more strategically advantageous. Take the star basketball player example again: although his instinctive response is to go at it alone, given that his selfish behavior could lead to potential future consequences (e.g. unhappiness from his teammates, criticism from observers, being dropped by the coach), he may override his initial impulses and work with his team, since it would be strategically advantageous to do so. Our System 2 processes allow us to stop and think about our intuitions, and strategize accordingly.

Concluding remarks

So, there is compelling evidence against an idea that has shaped our teachings for millennia. The evidence seems to point to the conclusion that, in general, we have an innate desire to cooperate, and in fact, it is only when there are opportunities to be strategically selfish that we reveal our more undesirable tendencies. 

Understanding our instinctive human tendencies will be essential as our species encounters some of the biggest challenges that we will have ever encountered. Climate change, political tensions, and inequality are issues that threaten the very existence of our species, and can only be resolved through cooperation on a global scale. Within us, there lies an instinctive desire to cooperate. Knowledge of this fact could inspire new and creative solutions, in order to rally people into tackling these challenges together.

• Melis, A. P., & Semmann, D. (2010). How is human cooperation different?.  Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences ,  365 (1553), 2663–2674. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2010.0157
• Plato. (1972).  Plato: Phaedrus  (R. Hackforth, Ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781316036396
• Schopenhauer, A. (1851). On reading and books.  Parerga and Paralipomena .
• Smith, A. (1937).  The wealth of nations  [1776].
• Kahneman, D. (2011).  Thinking, fast and slow.  Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
• Loewenstein, G. (1996). Out of control: Visceral influences on behavior.  Organizational behavior and human decision processes ,  65 (3), 272-292.
• Rand, D. G., Greene, J. D., & Nowak, M. A. (2012). Spontaneous giving and calculated greed.  Nature ,  489 (7416), 427-430.
• Knight, M. (2018, June 22). Helpless at birth: Why human babies are different than other animals. Retrieved from:  https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2018/06/22/helpless-at-birth-why-human-babies-are-different-than-other-animals/
• Warneken, F., & Tomasello, M. (2006). Altruistic helping in human infants and young chimpanzees.  Science ,  311 (5765), 1301-1303.
• Robison, M. (2014, September 1). Are People Naturally Inclined to Cooperate or Be Selfish? Retrieved from: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-people-naturally-inclined-to-cooperate-or-be-selfish/
• Rand, D. G. (2016). Cooperation, fast and slow: Meta-analytic evidence for a theory of social heuristics and self-interested deliberation.  Psychological science ,  27 (9), 1192-1206.
• Rand, D. G., & Nowak, M. A. (2013). Human cooperation.  Trends in cognitive sciences ,  17 (8), 413-425.
• https://thedecisionlab.com/reference-guide/anthropology/social-norm/

About the Author

Tony Jiang is a Staff Writer at the Decision Lab. He is highly curious about understanding human behavior through the perspectives of economics, psychology, and biology. Through his writing, he aspires to help individuals and organizations better understand the potential that behavioral insights can have. Tony holds an MSc (Distinction) in Behavioral Economics from the University of Nottingham and a BA in Economics from Skidmore College, New York.

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Debunking the myth of human selfishness, two new books explore the far-reaching science of cooperation..

Are humans inherently and universally selfish? When and why do we cooperate?

Two recent books, both by Harvard professors, seek answers to these timeless and essential questions, though they approach them from different perspectives. In SuperCooperators , Martin Nowak, a professor of biology and mathematics, and acclaimed science writer Roger Highfield argue that cooperation is an indispensable part of our evolutionary legacy, drawing on mathematical models to make their case.

In The Penguin and the Leviathan , on the other hand, law professor Yochai Benkler uses examples from the business world and the social sciences to argue that we ultimately profit more through cooperation than we do by pursuing our own self-interest.

Taken together, the books provide strong and complementary accounts of the far-reaching science of cooperation.

SuperCooperators is an overview of Nowak’s ambitious, groundbreaking research challenging a traditional take on the story of evolution—namely, that it’s one of relentless competition in a dog-eat-dog world. Rather, he proposes that cooperation is the third principle of evolution, after mutation and selection. Sure, mutations generate genetic diversity and selection picks the individuals best adapted to their environment. Yet it is only cooperation, according to Nowak, that can explain the creative, constructive side of evolution—the one that led from cells to multicellular creatures to humans to villages to cities.

Life, his research suggests, is characterized by an extraordinary level of cooperation between molecules. Indeed, Nowak devotes one chapter to cancer, which is nothing less than a deadly breakdown of cooperation on the cellular level.

So how has cooperation been so important to our survival? The first half of SuperCooperators answers this question as Nowak and Highfield outline five ways that cooperators maintain an evolutionary edge: through direct reciprocity (“I scratch your back, you scratch mine”), indirect reciprocity/reputation (“I scratch your back, somebody else will scratch mine”), spatial selection (clusters of cooperators can prevail!), group selection (groups comprised of cooperators can prevail!), and “kin selection” (close genetic relatives help each other).

SuperCooperators not only chronicles what Nowak has discovered during his exciting academic journey but the journey itself—it is his scientific autobiography, as well as a biography of the field and its most pre-eminent characters. For the uninitiated in math and the natural sciences, the book might feel a bit technical in a few places. Yet it is a readable and stimulating book overall, particularly rewarding for readers interested in the evolutionary roots of cooperation or an insider’s view of the world of science.

In The Penguin and the Leviathan , Benkler also reviews research at the intersection of evolution and cooperation, citing Nowak’s work at times. Yet Benkler draws more heavily on research from the social and behavioral sciences—namely history, technology, law, and business.

The title of the book comes from Tux the Penguin, the logo of the free, open-source operating system software Linux. Tux symbolizes the inherently cooperative, collaborative, and generous aspects of the human spirit, and according to Benkler “is beginning to nibble away at the grim view of humanity that breathed life into Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan.” The book aims to debunk “the myth of universal selfishness” and drive home the point that cooperation trumps self-interest—maybe not all the time and not for everyone, but far more consistently than we have long thought.

Benkler recounts that in any given experiment where participants have to make a choice between behaving selfishly and behaving altruistically, only about 30 percent of people behave selfishly, and in virtually no human society studied to date have the majority of people consistently behaved selfishly. Furthermore, as he points out, the cues in a situation can be more powerful than personality traits in predicting cooperation: In one study where participants played a game in which they could cooperate or compete, only 33 percent of them cooperated when the game was called the “Wall Street Game,” whereas 70 percent did so when it was called the “Community Game.”

In an easy-flowing, conversational style, Benkler elaborates on the key ingredients that make successful cooperation possible, such as communication, empathy, social norms, fairness, and trust. We learn, for example, that when study participants play a game in which they can cooperate or compete, levels of cooperation rise by a dramatic 45 percent when they are allowed to communicate face-to-face. The research on social norms is especially compelling: When taxpayers are told that their fellow citizens pay their fair share of taxes, or that the majority of taxpayers regard overclaiming tax deductions as wrong, they declare higher income on their taxes.

But Benkler doesn’t just limit the book to reviewing scientific studies. He also provides plenty of real-world examples that bring the science to life, making the book read like a handy guide to designing cooperative human systems. From kiva.org to Toyota to Wikipedia to CouchSurfing.org and Zipcar, he shows how organizations relying on cooperation—instead of incentives or hierarchical control—can be extraordinarily effective.

Neither Nowak nor Benkler are naïve about the prospects for cooperation. They remind us that there will always be selfish people, and that the cycles of cooperation will perpetually wax and wane. Besides, being “good” and “cooperative” are not necessarily synonymous—unspeakably cruel, inhumane acts have been committed by people who were deeply “cooperative” (think of Nazi Germany, the USSR, the Rwandan genocide).

Yet both authors are optimistic about the power and promise of cooperation, and agree that the world needs cooperation now more than ever: The gravest problems of our era—such as climate change, natural resource depletion, and hunger—can only be solved when people set self-interest aside and work together. Both SuperCooperators and The Penguin and the Leviathan leave us with an appreciation for the centrality of cooperation to life—and should inspire us to try to harness the science of cooperation for the greater good.

About the Author

Pelin Kesebir

Pelin Kesebir, Ph.D. , has a degree in Social Psychology and Personality and works as an assistant scientist at the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. She studies happiness and virtues, and the different ways in which well-being can be improved.

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Very timely releases, but I won’t be holding my breath waiting for the world to change. The global oligarchy that has the rest of humanity and the ecosystem by the throat is not going to let go voluntarily. We live in an age of cooperation, alright: cooperation among apex predators extracting as much wealth as possible from the global economy, irrespective of long-term social and environmental costs.

Don’t believe me? The governance and economics of the United States provide a perfect illustration. Wall Street bankers walked away from the wreckage of the global economy, their personal portfolios fattened by fabulous bonuses for a job well done, and need have no fear of ever being prosecuted for the most severe and systematic financial fraud ever perpetrated. The government that they captured set in place a legislative framework and lax regulatory environment that allowed them to turn the world into a private casino. And that government continues to give them special tax breaks, makes sure that even the states can’t prosecute them for mortgage fraud, and continues to prop up an ever-more concentrated financial sector with supportive monetary policies.

Sorry about the rant, but this is the reality of human cooperation in our time. The people who need to read these books - to have the message seared into their prefrontal cortex - are spitting out their champagne in laughter.

Higher Plane | 8:33 am, September 14, 2011 | Link

Higher Plane is critical of contemporary American society, but his critique is not directly relevant to the issue.  The underlying issue is whether life on our planet is the human species’  DESTINY, or merely our species’  TESTING-GROUND preparatory to the Afterlife.  The latter view may strike some readers as absurd, but those who think it is absurd have not read the traditional religious literature on the topic; and do not realize the extent to which this literature dominates the thinking of a large segment of the morally-concerned population.    The first item of awareness, for those concerned about the condition of our planet as a human habitat, is to discover the continuing predominance of regarding the Afterlife central, and life on Earth peripheral, in global religious doctrine.

Observe/Reflect | 4:05 pm, September 27, 2011 | Link

Observe/Reflect - If your point is that religious fundamentalists are ignoring environmental degradation here on earth because they are far more interested in passing through the pearly gates, then your critique and mine are more closely related than you might think. (I say “if” because it is not entirely clear whether you approve or disapprove of this tendency, and I hasten to add that one does not have to be religious to be moral.)

As Kevin Phillips explained at great length in “American Theocracy,” the child-like belief of evangelical Christians that God will make everything alright in some final reckoning leads them to look askance at the environmental movement. This plays right into the hands of the greedy corporations for whom heaven is a bulging bottom line. The presidential candidacy of Michele Bachmann embodies this alliance with breathtaking clarity and ugliness.

Does this unholy alliance of interests represent cooperation? Absolutely, unless we want to split hairs about the extent to which all parties are consciously aware of their choices. The religious fundamentalists may not be thinking about the political or economic consequences of their beliefs (though Republican primary voters might well be). When politics is the primary avenue through which human beings cooperate in the attainment of social goals, and when so much is at stake, the political arena is a superb testing ground for any hypothesis about human selfishness or altruism.

Higher Plane | 5:50 pm, September 27, 2011 | Link

Higher Plane,   There is indeed a synergy between the forces of the profit-focused corporate executives and of the Afterlife-focused religious traditionalists.  One helps the other achieve their short-term goals, at the expense of the global viability of our species.  Between the lines of both our messages is the need for an action program beyond feeling good about human cooperativeness, an action program to break up the synergy described above. Perhaps other readers here can reflect on the steps involved in such an action program—a program that should be the focus of a constructive response to the problem.

Observe/Reflect | 9:47 pm, September 27, 2011 | Link

This was a very timely topic. This week I unwittingly turned to a conservative talk radio station, they were asking people to say how they used denial to deal with unpaid bills. The bit was hillarious! Of course I was disgusted when I realized they were a right-wing station, but I then thought what a shame they are normally hostile. They could use their obvious humor to get both “sides” talking. This is indeed a complex topic.

I think it’s a mistake to start out with a comparison to the natural world. For one, “survival of the fittest” is being seriously modified, and even if it’s valid, the comparison to humans is a bit of useless anthropomorphizing.

Here’s why - wildlife are not just cute things running around. They are part of the biosphere - a layer of Earth just like the atmosphere or lithosphere.

“Cooperation” of molecules is more like chemical reaction. It’s also about ecological niche - what fits.

Human pack mentality (the fact that we naturally want to belong to a group and are social animals) could be compared to wolves or dogs, but not really to molecules or the biosphere. Those things work together mostly because of chance and chemical reactions.

Emmy | 6:58 pm, September 29, 2011 | Link

interesting review it worth reading

Asala mp3 | 11:11 am, November 11, 2011 | Link

quite an interesting review, well worth the read.

Easytether | 12:32 pm, December 5, 2011 | Link

Good stuff. I love it! Thanks for the information.

Jesus Pictures | 4:11 pm, January 4, 2012 | Link

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When It's OK to Be Selfish

A new scale for measuring healthy selfishness..

Posted November 7, 2022 | Reviewed by Kaja Perina

• Society has a taboo of selfishness.
• It's important to distinguish between healthy selfishness and unhealthy selfishness.
• We created the Healthy Selfishness Scale (HSS) to investigate the correlates of healthy selfishness in the real world.
• Healthy selfishness is correlated with higher levels of well-being, life satisfaction, and genuine motives for helping others.

“Modern culture is pervaded by a taboo on selfishness,” wrote Erich Fromm in his 1939 essay " Selfishness and Self-Love ." "It teaches that to be selfish is sinful and that to love others is virtuous." Fromm notes that this cultural taboo has had the unfortunate consequence of making people feel guilty for showing themselves healthy self-love and has even caused people to become ashamed of experiencing pleasure, health, and personal growth.

What if the way we are socially conditioned to think about selfishness is misguided? What if there is great value in cultivating healthy selfishness? Inspired by Fromm's essay, the humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow argued for the need to distinguish between healthy selfishness , which is rooted in psychological abundance, and unhealthy selfishness , which is rooted in psychological poverty, neuroticism , and greed.

“For our part, we must not prejudge the case," notes Maslow. "We must not assume that selfish or unselfish behavior is either good or bad until we actually determine where the truth exists. It may be that at certain times, selfish behavior is good, and at other times, it is bad. It also may be that unselfish behavior is sometimes good and at other times bad.”

Both Maslow and Fromm held that healthy self-love requires a healthy respect for oneself and one’s boundaries , and affirmation of the importance of one’s own health, growth, happiness , joy, and freedom. Self-actualizing people have healthy boundaries, self-care, and the capacity to enjoy themselves.

Drawing on both Fromm and Maslow's writings, I was inspired to create a " Healthy Selfishness Scale " (HSS) and investigate its correlates in the real world. I defined healthy selfishness as having a healthy respect for your own health, growth, happiness, joy, and freedom. Here are the items on the Healthy Selfishness Scale

• I have healthy boundaries.
• I have a lot of self-care.
• I have a healthy dose of self-respect and don’t let people take advantage of me.
• I balance my own needs with the needs of others.
• I advocate for my own needs.
• I have a healthy form of selfishness (e.g., meditation , eating healthy, exercising, etc.) that does not hurt others.
• Even though I give a lot to others, I know when to recharge.
• I give myself permission to enjoy myself, even if it doesn’t necessarily help others.
• I take good care of myself.
• I prioritize my own personal projects over the demands of others.

Our findings may surprise you. They definitely go against the grain of the cultural narrative that all forms of selfishness are necessarily bad. In terms of benefits to self, we found that healthy selfishness was a strong positive predictor of high self-worth , well-being, and life satisfaction, and was a strong negative predictor of depression . We found that the Healthy Selfishness Scale predicted adaptive psychological functioning above and beyond other personality traits that have traditionally been studied in psychology (e.g., the Big Five personality traits ).

Healthy selfishness was positively related to a sense of self-competence (the perception that one is reaching one's goals in life) and authentic pride for one's accomplishments. Healthy selfishness was not correlated with hubristic pride , or a motivation to aggressively dominate others on the way to the top.

Along similar lines, healthy selfishness was negatively correlated with unhealthy selfishness , which we defined as a strong motivation to exploit others for your own personal gain, and healthy selfishness was negatively correlated with vulnerable narcissism and toxic altruism (the tendency to help others for one's own selfish gain). It’s clear that healthy selfishness can be distinguished from pathological self-love and even pathological self-sacrifice.

Interestingly, we found that healthy selfishness was negatively related to intrusive and overbearing child-rearing practices. Perhaps healthy selfishness develops as the result of being able to express one's needs as a child in a healthy manner.

Individuals with high levels of healthy selfishness also tended to show themselves greater self-compassion . We are often so cold to ourselves, and self-compassion offers a valuable tool to help free ourselves from ourselves. As Fromm put it , “People are their own slave drivers; instead of being the slaves of a master outside of themselves, they have put the master within.”

Finally, it may seem paradoxical, but we also found that people who scored higher in healthy selfishness were more likely to care about others and report genuine motives for helping others ("I like helping others because it genuinely makes me feel good to help others grow"). Healthy selfishness was negatively related to more neurotic motives for helping others ("A major reason why I help people is to gain approval from them"; "I often give to others to avoid rejection").

Erich Fromm conceptualized love as an attitude , a way of being in the world where you have a healthy respect for the health, growth, happiness, joy, and freedom of others. Our research suggests that the light of love can shine in any direction— outside to others but also inside to help develop one's own self.

Love is love. Full stop.

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Kaufman, S.B., & Jauk, E. (2020). Healthy Selfishness and Pathological Altruism: Measuring Two Paradoxical Forms of Selfishness . Frontiers in Psychology .

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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Healthy selfishness and pathological altruism: measuring two paradoxical forms of selfishness.

• 1 Department of Psychology, Columbia University, New York, NY, United States
• 2 Clinical Psychology and Behavioral Neuroscience, Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany
• 3 Department of Psychology, University of Graz, Graz, Austria

Selfishness is often regarded as an undesirable or even immoral characteristic, whereas altruism is typically considered universally desirable and virtuous. However, human history as well as the works of humanistic and psychodynamic psychologists point to a more complex picture: not all selfishness is necessarily bad, and not all altruism is necessarily good. Based on these writings, we introduce new scales for the assessment of individual differences in two paradoxical forms of selfishness that have lacked measurement in the field – healthy selfishness (HS) and pathological altruism (PA). In two studies ( N 1 = 370, N 2 = 891), we constructed and validated the HS and PA scales. The scales showed good internal consistency and a clear two-dimensional structure across both studies. HS was related to higher levels of psychological well-being and adaptive psychological functioning as well as a genuine prosocial orientation. PA was associated with maladaptive psychological outcomes, vulnerable narcissism, and selfish motivations for helping others. These results underpin the paradoxical nature of both constructs. We discuss the implications for future research, including clinical implications.

“ Any pleasure that does no harm to other people is to be valued. ”– Russell (1930)

“ What we value so much, the altruistic ‘good’ side of human nature, can also have a dark side. Altruism can be the back door to hell. ” – Oakley et al. (2012)

Introduction

We tend to think of altruism as unselfish and beneficial, with minimal tradeoffs, and selfishness as generally bad and glutinous, negatively impacting on others. Reality points to a much more complex story. There are many examples across human history of the unintended negative consequences of altruism on the self and others, despite the best intentions. Oakley et al. (2012) refer to this as “pathological altruism” and note that “some of human history’s most horrific episodes have risen from people’s well-meaning altruistic tendencies” (p. 3). They use the example of Oliver Wendell Holmes, a well-respected American Supreme Court justice, whose well-intentioned rhetoric supported eugenic forced sterilization. On the flip side, Maslow (1943/1996) noted that “healthy selfishness”— a healthy respect for one’s own health, growth, happiness, joy, and freedom— can have a positive impact both on the self and on others.

While there has been some theory and indirect evidence (e.g., vignettes and historical examples) of these paradoxical forms of selfishness, there is a dearth of empirical evidence systematically investigating individual differences in healthy selfishness and pathological altruism. We believe this is due, in large part, to the lack of reliable and valid scales to capture these constructs. In the current study, we present new scales of both healthy selfishness and pathological altruism and distinguish them from related constructs in the field. By doing so, we hope to add more nuance to both the concepts of “selfishness” and “altruism” and offer new research tools for researchers to further investigate individual differences in these understudied topics, which have important societal and clinical implications.

Healthy Selfishness

In his 1939 essay “Selfishness and Self-Love,” Erich Fromm opened by declaring that “Modern culture is pervaded by a taboo on selfishness. It teaches that to be selfish is sinful and that to love others is virtuous.” In his essay, Fromm argues that this cultural taboo has had the unfortunate consequence of making people feel guilty to show themselves healthy self-love, which he defines as the passionate affirmation and respect for one’s own happiness, growth, and freedom.

Fromm argues that the form of selfishness that society decries— an interest only in oneself and the inability to give with pleasure and respect the dignity and integrity of others— is actually the opposite of self-love. To Fromm, love is an attitude that is indiscriminate of whether it is directed outward or inward. In contrast, Fromm argued that selfishness is a kind of greediness: “Like all greediness, it contains an instability, as a consequence of which there is never any real satisfaction. Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction” ( Fromm, 1939 ).

Inspired by Fromm’s essay, Maslow (1943/1996) wrote an essay in which he argued for the need to clearly distinguish “healthy selfishness” from unhealthy selfishness, as well as the importance of distinguishing healthy and unhealthy motivations for one’s seemingly selfish behavior.

Defining selfishness as any behavior that brings any pleasure or benefit to the individual, Maslow argued that: “For our part, we must not prejudge the case. We must not assume that selfish or unselfish behavior is either good or bad until we actually determine where the truth exists. It may be that at certain times, selfish behavior is good, and at other times, it is bad. It also may be that unselfish behavior is sometimes good and at other times bad.” Maslow goes on to note that “a good deal of what appears to be unselfish behavior may come out of forces that are psychopathological and that originates in selfish motivation” (p. 110).

Calling for the need for a new vocabulary that incorporates the notion of healthy selfishness, Maslow noted that in the process of psychotherapy it is sometimes necessary to teach people at certain times to engage in a “healthfully selfish manner”— to have a healthy respect for one’s self that stems from abundance and need gratification— that “comes out of inner riches rather than inner poverty” (p. 110).

A recent meta-analysis of the literature on communion supports these early ideas. Le et al. (2018) found that communally motivated people who care for the welfare of others and their close relationship partners experience greater relationship well-being. However, personal well-being was maximized only to the extent that people were not self-neglecting in their communal care . Therefore, while the health and relationship benefits of promoting the well-being of others has been well-documented ( Crocker and Canevello, 2008 , 2018 ), the role of healthy selfishness in contributing to well-being and relationships may have been neglected in the literature.

Pathological Altruism

According to Crocker and Canevello (2008 , 2018) , humans evolved two systems: an “egosystem” that is motivated by a desire for positive impressions from others, and an “ecosystem,” which is motivated by the promotion of the well-being of others by fostering their thriving and avoiding harm to them. Critically, Crocker and Canevello (2018) argue that sometimes people who are motivated by the egosystem can act in prosocial ways “not because they genuinely care about others’ well-being and want to be constructive and supportive, but instead as a strategy to manage others’ impressions” (p. 52).

While intriguing, this idea has not been tested extensively in the psychological literature. The study of altruism has mostly focused on the positive benefits of altruism, and how humans are wired to care for the welfare and suffering of others ( Keltner, 2009 ; Vaillant, 2009 ; Ricard, 2013 ). However, as Bachner-Melman and Oakley (2016) note, “Western societies have become so focused on its benefits that its flip side has been virtually ignored” (p. 92). Examples of pathological altruism range widely from genocide, suicide martyrdom, to codependency ( Oakley et al., 2012 ).

Early psychoanalytical writings focused on the dark side of altruism, and the selfish motives that can underlie it. Anna Freud introduced the concept of altruistic surrender to describe a situation in which a person who is unable to achieve direct gratification of instinctual wishes can achieve vicarious gratification through a proxy ( Freud, 1946 ). Anna Freud saw a prime illustration of altruistic surrender in the drama character of Cyrano de Bergerac; a poet of exceptional talent, but unblessed in physical appearance. Cyrano is in love with his beautiful cousin Roxane, but afraid of her rejection, and thus surrenders his own desires to another man, helping him to win Roxanes’ heart by writing love letters.

While Anna Freud thought of altruism as mostly synonymous with altruistic surrender, later work in psychoanalytic theory acknowledged the healthy functions of altruism. Vaillant (1977) argued that altruism is one of the healthiest defense mechanisms and found that it predicted lifelong positive relationships and personal fulfillment. Nevertheless, Vaillant’s clinical examples of altruism were similar to Anna Freud’s description of altruistic surrender, a compromise of need deprivation resulting in finding a proxy in whom to satisfy one’s own impulses and fantasies ( Seelig and Rosof, 2001 ).

More recent psychoanalytic theory has more carefully and explicitly distinguished between healthy altruism and pathological altruism ( Seelig and Rosof, 2001 ). Presenting a more comprehensive system of classification, Seelig and Rosof (2001) argued that mature and healthy altruism —“the ability to experience sustained and relatively conflict-free pleasure from contributing to the welfare of others” can be distinguished from pathological altruism , “a need to sacrifice oneself for the benefit of others.” They argue that the individual with healthy altruism can gratify their needs directly, regulate their affect, and also enjoy enhancing the good of others.

A big boon to the understanding of the science of pathological altruism came with the publication of the edited volume “Pathological Altruism” in 2012 ( Oakley et al., 2012 ). In this book and a subsequent article ( Oakley, 2013 ), the authors make a call to subject altruism to more systematic scientific inquiry. Oakley et al. (2012) brought a wide variety of perspectives to bear on pathological altruism, from sociology to evolutionary biology to clinical psychology. As Oakley (2013) put it, “it is time for dispassionate exploration of how altruism and empathy themselves can inadvertently bias our efforts to create truly co-operative modern, complex societies.” (p. 2)

In a later book chapter, Bachner-Melman and Oakley (2016) defined pathological altruism as “the willingness of a person to irrationally place another’s perceived needs above his or her own in a way that causes self-harm” (p. 92). They argued that major motivations in healthy altruism are openness to new experiences and a desire for personal growth, whereas the major motivation for individuals with pathological altruism is to please others, gain approval, and avoid criticism and rejection. They gave examples of individuals with eating disorders, codependency in relationships, political extremism, and even cancer caregiving (“those whose care for cancer patients reaches self-harming extremes turn out, interestingly, to be unable to comfortably receive care themselves”, p. 93).

Bachner-Melman and Oakley (2016) also linked pathological altruism to narcissism, arguing that “narcissism and altruism may in fact represent two sides of the same coin” (p. 99). In particular, they linked pathological altruism to “hypervigilant narcissism” (more commonly referred to in the modern scientific literature as vulnerable narcissism; see Kaufman et al., 2018 ). According to the researchers, at the core of the inner world of those with pathological altruism is a deep sense of shame related to their secret wish to display themselves and their needs in a grandiose manner. Stemming from a lack of a sense of self, attention is continually directed toward others, reading, anticipating, or attempting to guess others’ needs and giving them priority over their own real needs.

Developmentally, Bachner-Melman and Oakley (2016) drew on the work of Heinz Kohut, who argued that healthy development requires having one’s needs appreciated or “mirrored” in the eyes of significant others. Kohut argued that if such mirroring is not met early in life, an exaggerated need for responsiveness from others develops, and a healthy sense of self-esteem is less likely to be established ( Kohut, 1971 ). Such children may grow ashamed of their desire to be seen and valued, and ashamed of their dependence on others for support. They may attempt to lighten that burden and shame by being as undemanding as possible and a brittle facade of self-sufficiency sets in as a result. Underneath the facade, however, often lies anger, frustration, and resentment at having to sacrifice so much and receive so little in return.

It’s an interesting and open question whether a reliable and valid scale of pathological altruism would show strong correlations with vulnerable narcissism as well as with the early developmental experience of having to substitute one’s own needs for the needs of others.

Current Studies

To construct new scales of pathological altruism and healthy selfishness, we mined descriptions of these concepts from Fromm (1939) , Maslow (1943/1996) , Oakley et al. (2012) , Oakley (2013) , and Bachner-Melman and Oakley (2016) . Based on the theoretical arguments of these writers, we could make some predictions.

In terms of healthy selfishness, we expected healthy selfishness to show moderately negative correlations with pathological altruism, but to not simply be the opposite of pathological altruism. In particular, we predicted that healthy selfishness would be more strongly tied to sociality, positive relationships, and other dimensions of well-being than pathological altruism. To highlight the paradoxical nature of healthy selfishness, we also predicted that healthy selfishness would be positively correlated with prosocial traits (e.g., the light triad; see Kaufman et al., 2019 ) and prosocial motivations (a genuine satisfaction for helping others), and to be distinct from other forms of unmitigated agency (overdominance and control over others; Helgeson and Fritz, 1999 ) such as measures of narcissism and other forms of unhealthy selfishness.

We expected pathological altruism to be fundamentally motivated by selfish concerns, but for those selfish concerns to be primarily about a fear or rejection and fear of losing emotional intimacy stemming from low self-esteem rather than the more grandiose narcissistic motives for exploitation, power, and control over others. In particular, we predicted that pathological altruism would be correlated with low self-esteem and high vulnerable narcissism as well as higher levels of communally oriented aspects of narcissism including self-sacrificing self-enhancement ( Pincus et al., 2009 ) and communal narcissism ( Gebauer et al., 2012 ), but show weaker correlations with grandiose narcissism overall and more exploitative selfish motivations (which we refer to as “unhealthy selfishness”). Due to the pathological nature of the construct, we also expected pathological altruism to be more strongly tied to negative outcomes such as depression than the abundance of well-being.

Finally, we expected both healthy selfishness and pathological altruism to show ties to unmitigated communion ( Helgeson, 1994 ; Fritz and Helgeson, 1998 ; Helgeson and Fritz, 1999 ). Fritz and Helgeson (1998) demonstrated that unmitigated communion—over-involvement in the problems and suffering of others— is distinct from communion in terms of a negative view of the self, turning to others for self-evaluative information, and psychological distress. They found that those scoring higher in unmitigated communion tended to show higher levels of psychological distress due to their reliance on others for self-esteem and validation, which led to overinvolvement with others and a neglect of the self. They also found that those scoring high in unmitigated communion scored higher in intrusive thoughts about the problems of others, pointing to a compulsive nature of unmitigated communion.

Considering that the Unmitigated Communion Scale includes a mix of items relating to self-neglect (“I always place the need of others above my own”) and an overconcern with the problems of others (“I worry about how other people get along without me when I am not there”; Fritz and Helgeson, 1998 , p. 140), we expected that pathological altruism would show a strong positive correlation with unmitigated communion and healthy selfishness would show a moderate negative correlation with unmitigated communion. However, we expected that pathological altruism and healthy selfishness would predict important outcomes above and beyond unmitigated communion.

One criticism of the Unmitigated Communion Scale is that it does not adequately differentiate between different underlying motives for self-sacrifice ( Bassett and Aubé, 2013 ). Indeed, Helgeson and Fritz (1999) admit this when they write that “some unmitigated communion individuals’ involvement in other people’s problems may be motivated by a need to have control over relationships, as relationships can be a source of self-esteem” (p. 155). Bassett and Aubé (2013) attempted to distinguish between self-sacrifice that is motivated by concern for others versus self-sacrifice that is motivated by concern for the self. They gave participants the Unmitigated Communion Scale and then asked them to rate their underlying motive for their answer to each item. They showed that it is possible to score high in unmitigated communion for different reasons: it’s possible to score high in unmitigated communion for self-oriented reasons (being motivated by a desire to feel affirmed or valued by others) or score high in unmitigated communion for other-oriented reasons (being motivated by a genuine care and concern for the well-being of others). They found that other-oriented motives for unmitigated communion predicted higher levels of secure attachment whereas self-oriented motives for unmitigated communion were related to a preoccupied attachment style (which consists of negative views of the self and a positive view of others) and shame.

Their study highlighted the importance of considering the motivation underlying behavior rather than just the behavior itself. In the current study, we expected that pathological altruism would be more clearly related to selfish motivations for helping others as well as maladaptive psychological adjustment (e.g., fear, depression) than unmitigated communion, and that healthy selfishness would be more clearly tied to prosocial motivations for helping others as well as healthy sociality and overall psychological adjustment (including positive relationships and life satisfaction) than unmitigated communion.

Study 1: Scale Development

The aim of Study 1 was the item selection and initial validation of the healthy selfishness (HS) and pathological altruism (PA) scales, especially concerning measures that are closely conceptually related. We selected items on the basis of conceptual considerations, psychometric characteristic, and exploratory factor analysis. Validity was assessed with respect to conceptually related constructs, particularly unmitigated communion, and indicators of adaptive and maladaptive psychological adjustment (low levels of life satisfaction and high levels of depression).

Participants and Procedure

An online sample of N = 370 (171 female) English-speaking participants was acquired via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform. Data from participants who failed our attention checks were removed from further analysis. The large majority of participants (76%) reported residing in the United States during the time of testing. The mean age was 37.67 years ( SD = 12.29). Among the full sample, 70.3 % self-identified as Caucasian, 8.1% as Hispanic, and 4.9% as African American; the rest did not disclose their ethnical origin. Concerning educational status, one participant (0.30%) did not complete high school, 27.80% of participants completed high school, 71.80% had a bachelor’s degree or higher. Participants gave written informed consent to the study, took part on a voluntary basis, and received monetary compensation. The study was approved by the ethics committee of the University of Pennsylvania.

The main aim of Study 1 was item selection for the HS and PA scales. For this, we administered an initial pool of 16 candidate items designated to assess HS, and candidate 19 items for the assessment of PA. The items were constructed by the first author on the basis of conceptual considerations outlined in the introduction section. Participants answered the items on a five-point scale ranging from “Disagree strongly” to “Agree strongly.”

Additionally, participants completed measures of unmitigated communion (original 8-item unmitigated communion scale; Helgeson, 1993 ), the light triad of personality (12-item scale assessing Kantianism, Humanism, and Faith in Humanity which can be scored as a general light triad factor; Kaufman et al., 2019 ), life satisfaction (5-item The Satisfaction with Life Scale; Diener et al., 1985 ), and depression (20-item Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression scale, CES-D ( Radloff, 1977 ). We used those latter two scales as proxies for adaptive and maladaptive psychological adjustment, paralleling the more comprehensive analyses in Study 2 (see below).

Additionally, we also administered seven newly devised items measuring underlying motivations for helping others (e.g., “A major reason why I help people is to gain approval from them”) and two newly devised items assessing possible childhood antecedents that might differentiate between HS and PA (e.g., “As a child, I was often encouraged by my family to substitute my own needs for their own”). The percentage of missing data in this pilot study was low, not exceeding 1% on any single variable.

Item Selection

Almost all items from the initial HS and PA item pool displayed psychometrically satisfactory difficulty between p = 0.20 and 0.80 (0.21 < p < 0.74; see Table 1 ); we excluded one PA item which did not meet this criterion ( p = 0.19; “my helping sometimes causes others harm”).

Table 1. Principal component analysis and item-level statistics of the Healthy Selfishness and Pathological Altruism scales in Study 1.

The HS items displayed high initial item-scale correlations (0.43 < r i–s < 0.68), with the exception of one item ( r = 0.37; “I notice when there are problems in my relationships and I try to fix the situation”), which we excluded. We further excluded five items which were conceptually less clear and distinctive than the others (e.g., “I ask for help when I’m feeling low” or “I look after myself so that I can better help others”). The remaining item-scale correlations were 0.51 < r i–s < 0.69 (see Table 1 ). The internal consistency of the 10-item scale was α = 0.88. The scale skewness indicated a long left tail ( z = −5.34, p < 0.001), which means that a greater number of people show higher than lower HS in the present scale. The scale kurtosis conformed to a normal distribution ( z = 1.72, p = 0.08).

Among the PA items, item-scale correlations were also high (0.49 < r i–s < 0.71). Again, we excluded items that were conceptually less clearly related to PA, albeit correlated (e.g., “I try very hard to look attractive, even if I have to sacrifice my own health to do so”). After exclusion of eight items, the final 10-item scale (paralleling the length of the HS scale) displayed item-scale correlations between 0.53 < r i–s < 0.70 (see Table 1 ), similar to the HS scale. The overall internal consistency was α = 0.88, just like the HS scale. The scale skewness conformed to normality ( z = −1.97, p = 0.05), and scale kurtosis indicated a platykurtic distribution ( z = −3.45, p < 0.001).

Factor Structure

We conducted a principal components analysis to validate the intended factor number of the HS and PA scales. Velicer’s (1976) original and revised ( Velicer et al., 2000 ) MAP test indicated a two-factor solution. The first principal component accounted for 35.82% of variance, the second for 13.30%. The component correlation after Promax rotation was r = −0.45, indicating that the components underlying HS and PA are moderately anticorrelated. The components clearly distinguished HS and PA items, with intended loadings ≥ 0.48 and cross-loadings ≤ 0.21 (see Table 1 ). Thus, the analysis clearly confirms the intended two-factor structure of the HS and PA scales (a further confirmatory analysis is provided in Study 2).

External Validity

Table 2 displays the correlations between HS and PA, demographical variables, and other variables assessed in this study. HS displayed a slight positive association with participants’ age, PA displayed a negative association. None of the two forms of paradoxical selfishness were associated with participants’ sex.

Table 2. Descriptive statistics and correlations of Study 1 variables.

HS and PA were moderately negatively correlated, paralleling the principal components correlation reported above. We expected PA to be positively correlated with unmitigated communion, whereas HS should be negatively related. HS and PA should further display opposing relationships with the light triad, life satisfaction, and depression. As expected, PA displayed a high positive correlation with unmitigated communion, while HS displayed a negative relationship. HS was further positively correlated with the light triad, highly positively correlated with life satisfaction, and highly negatively related to depression. PA displayed a slight negative association with life satisfaction, and a rather strong positive association with depression.

We had a-priori interest in the predictive power of the HS and PA scales on measures of adaptive and maladaptive psychological adjustment (in Study 1: life satisfaction and depression). To investigate the incremental validity of the HS and PA scales beyond unmitigated communion, we conducted hierarchical multiple regression models for the prediction of life satisfaction as an indicator of adaptive psychological functioning, and depression as an indicator of maladaptive functioning. We used unmitigated communion and HS/PA as predictor variables and investigated the effects of unmitigated communion alone (step 1: equals zero-order correlations from Table 2 ), steps 2a, b: unmitigated communion and HS/PA, and step 3: unmitigated communion, HS, and PA).

Table 3 displays the results. In step 1, unmitigated communion displayed a slight negative relationship with life satisfaction and a strong positive association with depression. When we entered HS in step 2a, we found HS to be a strong predictor of life satisfaction and depression, and the effects of unmitigated communion were still significant. When entering PA in step 2b, we observed no significant effects on life satisfaction. PA was the only significant predictor of depression. This pattern was reflected in step 3, which shows that when all variables are considered simultaneously, HS is the only predictor of life satisfaction, and PA is the strongest predictor of depression (though HS is also a strong predictor, although in the opposite direction).

Table 3. Hierarchical multiple regression models for the prediction of psychological functioning indicators in Study 1.

These results demonstrate first evidence for the incremental validity of (HS and) PA above and beyond unmitigated communion, which is important as these are conceptually and empirically related. While these results yield first evidence for convergent and discriminant validity, Study 2 will consider a larger set of external validity measures, more finely differentiating the motives associated with HS and PA.

Study 2: Scale Validation

The aim of Study 2 was to validate the structure of the newly devised HS and PA scales using confirmatory factor analysis as well as external validity measures in a large sample. To this end, we included a manifold of conceptually related variables to test convergent and discriminant validity. Findings from Study 1 were replicated using more fine-grained measures of the respective constructs. Moving beyond Study 1, we also included an interpersonal circumplex measure to assess the relations of HS and PA with agentic and communal orientations and included a broader array of criterion measures for adaptive psychological adjustment (a multidimensional scale of well-being in addition to life satisfaction) and maladaptive adjustment (a multidimensional scale of fears in addition to depression).

We acquired an online sample of N = 891 (472 female, 2 non gender-identified) participants via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Data from participants who failed our attention checks were removed from further analysis. The large majority of participants (89%) resided in the United States during the time of testing. The mean age was 37.12 ( SD = 11.30) years; 0.80% (seven participants) did not complete high school, 42.30% completed high school, 56.90% had a bachelor’s degree or higher. The research reported here is part of a larger project on personality; part of the data were previously published and the study procedure was described in greater detail ( Jauk and Kaufman, 2018 ). The study was carried out in accordance with the relevant guidelines and regulations. The protocol was approved by the Ethics committee of the University of Pennsylvania. All subjects gave written informed consent in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. Participants received monetary compensation.

We used the same pool of HS and PA items as in Study 1. Analyses are based on the item selection of Study 1 resulting in 10 items per scale (see Table 1 ). As in Study 1, we assessed life satisfaction (The Satisfaction with Life Scale; Diener et al., 1985 ), a modified scale of unmitigated communion that distinguishes self- and other-oriented unmitigated communion (18-item Two-Dimensional Unmitigated Communion Scale, TUCS; Bassett and Aubé, 2013 ), and depression (CES-D; Radloff, 1977 ). Additionally, the validation study encompassed a brief measure of the Big Five (Ten-Item Personality Inventory, TIPI; Gosling et al., 2003 ), a measure of self-esteem (16-item Self-Liking/Self-Competence Scale-Revised Version SLCS-R; Tafarodi and Swann, 2001 ), pathological selfishness (Selfishness Questionnaire, SQ; Raine and Uh, 2018 ), the Light Triad (Light Triad Scale; Kaufman et al., 2019 ), grandiose and vulnerable narcissism (Five Factor Narcissism Inventory Short Form FFNI-SF; Sherman et al., 2015 ), the Self-Sacrificing Self-Enhancement subscale of the Pathological Narcissism Inventory (PNI; Pincus et al., 2009 ), communal narcissism ( Gebauer et al., 2012 ), the core motives of achievement, power, affiliation, and intimacy (Unified Motive Scales UMS; Schönbrodt and Gerstenberg, 2012 ), authentic and hubristic pride ( Tracy and Robins, 2007 ), psychological well-being (42-item version of Ryff’s Psychological Well-Being Scale; see for instance Abbott et al., 2006 ), and fear (fear of failure, rejection, losing control, losing emotional contact, and losing reputation from the Unified Motive Scales UMS, which can be aggregated to a composite index; Schönbrodt and Gerstenberg, 2012 ). We assessed the interpersonal circumplex scales using the International Personality Item Pool–Interpersonal Circumplex (IPIP-IC; Markey and Markey, 2009 ). Lastly, as in Study 1, we administered the same set of items assessing motivation for helping others and childhood antecedents of HS and PA.

Data-Analytical Strategy

We first re-assessed the factor structure of the HS and PA scales using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). We then examined correlations to validity measures and to the Interpersonal Circumplex. As the sample is large and almost all correlations are significant at conventional levels, we focus on effect sizes rather than significance levels in the interpretation of results. Next, we investigated the validity of the HS and PA scales on measures of adaptive psychological adjustment (psychological well-being, life satisfaction) and maladaptive adjustment. To this end, we tested the incremental validity of the HS and PA scales above and beyond the Big Five and conceptually related constructs, namely unhealthy selfishness, unmitigated communion (self- and other-directed), and communal narcissism, on the criterion variables psychological well-being, life satisfaction, fear, and depression. These criterion measures tap into the positive and negative poles of general psychological functioning.

We expected that that HS scale would be more predictive of positive psychological adjustment (well-being, life satisfaction), whereas the PA scale would be indicative of psychological maladjustment (fear, depression). Lastly, we investigated the relations between motivation for helping others and the childhood antecedents of HS and PA across both studies.

Confirmatory Factor Analyses

We conducted CFAs separately for the HS and PA scales and jointly for both scales. Since the results for the single models and the joint model were very similar, we only present the joint CFA of both scales here. The model converged to an admissible solution and displayed acceptable fit to the data (χ 2 (167) = 850.38, p < 0.001; RMSEA = 0.07; CFI = 0.82; SRMR = 0.05). While the χ 2 test was significant, which might be due to its high sensitivity in large samples, the other indices can be deemed acceptable 1 . As Figure 1 shows, factor loadings were high and consistent. The explained variance in the single indicators was significant for each item ( p < 0.001). We specified one residual correlation per scale to account for unique variance between the items. Importantly, there were no substantial cross-loadings of items or residual correlations between scales (i.e., specifying such effects would not have improved model fit substantially). This confirms the EFA results of Study 1. The latent correlation between the HS and PA factors was r = −0.57, also conforming to the result of Study 1.

Figure 1. Confirmatory factor analysis model of the Healthy Selfishness and Pathological Altruism scales. Error variables are not displayed.

Descriptive Statistics and Intercorrelations

Figure 2 displays the distributions of the HS and PA scales. As in study 1, the HS scale displayed a long left tail, indicating that the majority of participants displayed higher rather than lower HS. The PA scale, also as in Study 1, displayed a platykurtic distribution. Table 4 displays the descriptive statistics and correlations between the HS and PA scales with demographic variables, Big Five personality dimensions, conceptually related personality constructs, and indicators of adaptive and less adaptive psychological functioning. The means and SD s of the HS and PA scales were almost identical to Study 1. Also, the correlations to age and sex, unmitigated communion (overall), life satisfaction, and depression were highly similar to those obtained in Study 1. Among the Big Five personality traits, HS was positively associated with extraversion and agreeableness, whereas PA was, albeit to a lesser extent, associated with neuroticism and disagreeableness. Both showed weak associations with conscientiousness in opposing directions.

Figure 2. Density distributions of the Healthy Selfishness and Pathological Altruism scales in Study 2. N = 891.

Table 4. Descriptive statistics and correlations of Study 2 variables.

Among the further effects displayed in Table 4 , it is interesting to note that HS was substantially positively related to self-esteem (particularly the self-liking facet) whereas PA was negatively related to both facets of self-esteem (self-liking and self-competence). Neither HS nor PA were markedly associated with pathological selfishness, suggesting that HS and PA are both independent from an exploitative form of selfishness.

Also as expected, PA was strongly related to unmitigated communion (somewhat stronger with self-oriented unmitigated communion), whereas HS was negatively related to both self-oriented and other-oriented motivations underlying unmitigated communion. To further disentangle these effects, we conducted complemental regression analyses using self- and other-oriented unmitigated communion as predictors of HS and PA. These show that when both motivations underlying unmitigated communion are considered simultaneously, there was a strong negative effect of self-oriented unmitigated communion on HS (β = −0.45, p < 0.001), whereas other-oriented unmitigated communion had only a weak effect (β = 0.10, p = 0.03). A similar picture emerged for PA, where self-related unmitigated communion was a strong positive predictor (β = 0.55, p < 0.001), whereas other-oriented unmitigated communion was not (β = 0.10, p = 0.011). The predictive validity of PA and unmitigated communion will be evaluated below.

As in Study 1, HS was correlated with the Light Triad Scale, whereas PA was not. HS was not related to overall narcissism and only weakly correlated with grandiose narcissism, which provides evidence for its conceptual distinctiveness, and, as expected, was negatively correlated with vulnerable narcissism. On the contrary, PA was moderately related to overall narcissism, which was mainly due to the strong correlation with vulnerable narcissism. This is in line with the correlations of PA with neuroticism and disagreeableness (antagonism) observed among the Big Five. However, as we did not expect the correlation between PA and vulnerable narcissism to be so high, we conducted an exploratory analysis between PA and the 15 FFNI subscales. The highest correlations emerged between PA and the subscales Need for Admiration ( r = 0.53, p < 0.001), Shame ( r = 0.47, p < 0.001), and Entitlement ( r = 0.36, p < 0.001). Of note, PA was weakly negatively correlated with a Lack of Empathy (r = −0.10, p < 0.001). PA was also substantially correlated with the Self-Sacrificing Self-Enhancement Scale ( r = 0.45, p < 0.001) of the PNI ( Pincus et al., 2009 ). Further, HS and PA were both significantly related to communal narcissism ( r HS, communal = 0.21, p < 0.001; r PA, communal = 0.29, p < 0.001). Taken together, the pattern of correlations shows that PA taps more into vulnerable narcissism and communal-oriented aspects of narcissism than overall grandiose narcissism, while HS is negatively related to vulnerable narcissism and only slightly positively related to more grandiose forms of narcissism.

Among the core motives, HS was moderately positively associated with achievement, power, and affiliation, whereas PA displayed no pronounced associations with the core motives. Paralleling the finding of an independence of HS from narcissism, HS was strongly associated with authentic pride, but not with hubristic pride. In contrast (and also in line with the narcissism findings), PA was negatively related to authentic pride and even displayed a small positive association with hubristic pride.

Concerning indicators of psychological functioning, as expected, HS was positively related to adaptive functioning in terms of psychological well-being and self-esteem, whereas PA was negatively related to those indicators. PA was, instead, positively associated with indicators of maladaptive functioning in terms of fear and depression. Complemental facet-level analyses for fear yielded largely homogeneous correlations with HS and PA. When we controlled for the shared variance among the different fears using multiple regression models, HS displayed a negative relationship with fear of rejection (β = −0.39, p < 0.001), and, to a lesser extent, failure (β = −0.17, p < 0.001), and losing control (β = −0.10, p = 0.02), whereas it was positively associated with fear of losing reputation (β = 0.20, p < 0.001). PA displayed positive associations with fear of losing control (β = 0.21, p < 0.001), losing emotional contact (β = 0.20, p < 0.001), and rejection (β = 0.15, p < 0.001). Incremental validity of the HS and PA scales on measures of adaptive and maladaptive functioning beyond other personality constructs will be tested below.

Interpersonal Circumplex

Figure 3 displays the associations between HS and PA and the scales of the interpersonal circumplex. The HS scale displayed the strongest associations with social vitality ( r = 0.33), and, negatively, quietness and reservedness ( r = −0.20). HS was thus associated with a friendly assertive interpersonal style. PA was less clearly associated with a particular interpersonal style. Consistent with the paradoxical nature of PA, we observed the strongest positive associations with arrogant/calculating ( r = 0.18) and social dominance ( r = 0.13), and the strongest negative association with cold-heartedness ( r = −0.14). However, note that all of these associations were rather weak. Taken together, it can be concluded that HS is associated with a friendly assertive interpersonal style, whereas PA was less clearly linked to the interpersonal circumplex.

Figure 3. N = 891. Correlations of Healthy Selfishness and Pathological Altruism to the Interpersonal Circumplex scales. Axes range from r = –0.5 to r = 0.5. Correlations greater r = 0.07, r = 0.09, and r = 0.11 are significant at p = 0.05, p = 0.01, and p = 0.001, respectively.

Incremental Validity Analyses

We tested the explanatory power of the HS and PA scales in separate regression models predicting indicators of adaptive psychological functioning (well-being, life satisfaction) and less adaptive adjustment (fear, depression) above and beyond the broad Big Five traits and personality traits which are conceptually related to HS and PA (unhealthy selfishness, unmitigated communion, communal narcissism). We split unmitigated communion into self- and other-directed aspects as different associations can be expected based on previous findings ( Bassett and Aubé, 2013 ). We set up separate models for HS and PA as we did not have a-priori interest in controlling the two constructs for their respective counterparts, they were moderately anticorrelated, and including them in a model with many predictors might evoke complex suppression effects.

Table 5 displays the hierarchical multiple regression models. For every criterion variable, we first entered the Big Five in step 1, followed by unhealthy selfishness, self-/other-oriented unmitigated communion, and communal narcissism in step 2, and finally HS/PA in step 3a/b, respectively. We will focus on the results in step 3 here, as we were interested in the predictive power of the HS and PA scales above and beyond a complete set of theoretically related constructs. Steps 1 and 2 are displayed for a complete picture of the relative importance of the single predictors.

Table 5. Hierarchical multiple regression models for the prediction of psychological functioning indicators in Study 2.

HS was a strong predictor of well-being and life satisfaction and had greater explanatory power than any other variable included in the models. Also, HS was the strongest negative predictor of depression. HS had, however, only low predictive power for fear. Instead, the strongest predictor of fear was a self-oriented motivation for unmitigated communion. Taken together, HS was a strong predictor of adaptive psychological functioning beyond the Big Five and conceptually related personality constructs.

PA also significantly negatively predicted adaptive functioning, but the effects were weaker than for HS. Instead, PA was the best predictor of depression among all of the variables. Importantly, PA displayed a stronger effect on depression than a self-oriented motive for unmitigated communion when simultaneously considered in a model (despite these variables being strongly related; see Table 4 ). PA was also predictive of fear, but, here, self-oriented unmitigated communion displayed the stronger effect. Taken together, we conclude that PA is more indicative of maladaptive than adaptive adjustment, particularly depression. To this end, PA demonstrated higher predictive power than conceptually related personality constructs.

Motivations and Childhood Antecedents

As an additional exploratory analysis, we investigated the relations of HS and PA to a set of newly devised items on motivation for helping others, overly nurturant, other-harming helping behavior, and possible childhood antecedents that might discern HS from PA.

Table 6 shows the item-level correlations across both studies. HS was consistently negatively associated with items that assess helping others for self-oriented motives (items 1−4; e.g., “A major reason why I help people is to gain approval from them”), whereas PA was strongly positively associated with these items. To this end, approach-driven self-oriented motives (“gain approval”) displayed similar correlations as avoidance-driven self-oriented motives (“avoid rejection”). The notion that these motives can be regarded as self-oriented is substantiated by the finding that they relate more strongly to self- than other-oriented unmitigated communion. Accordingly, controlling for self-oriented unmitigated communion (Study 2) lowered the correlations between items 1−4 and PA substantially (partial correlations: 0.17 < r < 0.22), but controlling for other-oriented unmitigated communion did not (partial correlations: 0.23 < r < 0.43).

Table 6. Correlations of Healthy Selfishness and Pathological Altruism scales with items for motivation and childhood antecedents across both studies.

Helping motivation items 5–7 are more strongly related to HS than PA across both studies. These items target growth and an intrinsic satisfaction from helping (e.g., “A main reason why I help others is a desire for personal growth,” “I like helping others because it genuinely makes me feel good to help others grow”) rather than receiving positive feedback or avoiding negative feedback from others. Also, they are more related to other- than self-related unmitigated communion, albeit the relationships with unmitigated communion are not as strong as those reported above.

Taken together, it can be tentatively concluded that helping others for instrumental, self-oriented reasons (gain approval, avoid rejection) is more related to PA, whereas helping others for intrinsic, other-oriented reasons (self-actualization and growth) is more related to HS.

This is also reflected in the correlations with two items assessing overly nurturant, potentially other-harming altruistic behavior 2 (“My helping sometimes causes others harm,” “People often tell me to stop helping them, because they are overwhelmed with my constant helping”): while these items were unrelated or only weakly negatively related to HS, they were substantially positively associated with PA across both studies, and, to a lesser extent, also self-oriented (but not other-oriented) unmitigated communion. Taken together, this demonstrates that PA is not only associated with self-oriented motives for helping others, but is also associated with helping behaviors that can be harmful to others.

Finally, the two items on childhood antecedents show that substituting one’s own needs for those of others (family, cultural environment) is a powerful predictor of PA (and, to a lesser extent, self-oriented unmitigated communion) and at the same time negatively associated with HS. This, again, underpins the notion that PA is mainly driven by self-oriented motives, which might have been deprived early in people displaying high PA.

The main aim of the current investigation was to construct new measures to reliably and validly measure individual differences in two forms of paradoxical selfishness that have lacked measurement: healthy selfishness and pathological altruism. A secondary aim was to look at the different nomological networks of these two constructs. We predicted that measures of these constructs could be differentiated from related constructs in the field, and that each construct would be paradoxical in their correlations with other variables. In particular, we predicted that healthy selfishness would be related to higher levels of personal well-being as well as prosocial motivations for helping others, and that pathological altruism would be related to selfish motivations for helping others and maladaptive psychosocial outcomes as well as helping behaviors that tend to be harmful to others. We largely found support for our predictions.

Healthy selfishness was negatively related to unmitigated communion, suggesting that those with a healthy form selfishness tend to report less self-neglect and overconcern with the problem of others. Healthy selfishness had additional prediction value above and beyond unmitigated communion, however, particularly in its prediction of psychological well-being.

While healthy selfishness was related to a variety of indices of adaptive psychological adjustment—including life satisfaction, positive relationships, self-esteem, and authentic pride— it was independent from pathological selfishness (“I know I love rewards in life, even if there is a cost to others”; Raine and Uh, 2018 , p. 513) and hubristic pride. Healthy selfishness was negatively related to vulnerable narcissism, and was only weakly positively correlated with grandiose narcissism and communal narcissism. From the perspective of the interpersonal circumplex, healthy selfishness was associated with a friendly assertive interpersonal style.

In line with our predictions, healthy selfishness was paradoxically related to greater prosociality across a number of dimensions. For one, healthy selfishness was significantly correlated with Big Five agreeableness and the Light Triad, a personality trait reflecting a loving and beneficent orientation toward others ( Kaufman et al., 2019 ). Also, healthy selfishness was positively associated with growth-oriented and intrinsically enjoyable reasons for helping others, and negatively predicted self-oriented motivations for unmitigated communion.

This positive relationship between self-care and care for others is consistent with the work of Crocker and Canevello (2008 , 2018) . While they argue that the “compassionate goals” that are activated by the “ecosystem”— goals that are supportive, constructive, and do not harm others— are primarily about the genuine well-being of others, their research found that compassionate goals are significantly correlated with several facets of self-compassion , including mindfulness, self-kindness, and a sense of common humanity ( Crocker and Canevello, 2008 ). Their research, along with the research we conducted, suggests that self-care and other-care may be strongly tied to the same overall system of care, an intriguing area for further research to explore.

As Crocker and Canevello (2018) note, “A key characteristic of goals in the ecosystem is that they are good for the self and others; any goal that requires people to sacrifice their own well-being for the sake of others is probably not motivated by the ecosystem, because it is not sustainable over time and is not good for the self and others” (p. 80).

In contrast, and as expected, pathological altruism was strongly positively correlated with unmitigated communion, particularly self-oriented reasons for unmitigated communion. However, pathological altruism displayed a much stronger prediction of pathological outcomes such as depression than unmitigated communion (unmitigated communion was more tied to fear within the normal range).

Also in line with our predictions, the underlying motivations of those scoring higher in pathological altruism reflected socially related fears rather than a willfully exploitative motivation. While pathological altruism was positively correlated with overly nurturant and potentially harmful helping behaviors, pathological altruism was independent of pathological selfishness. Nevertheless, in line with the old adage “the road to hell is paved with good intentions,” we found that pathological narcissism was significantly positively associated with the following items: “My helping sometimes causes others harm” and “People often tell me to stop helping them, because they are overwhelmed with my constant helping.”

Pathological altruism was particularly associated with aspects of vulnerable narcissism — including the need for admiration and a high frequency of shame— as well as fear of rejection, losing emotional contact, and losing control. These fears were reflected in the reasons for helping others: those scoring higher on pathological altruism were much more likely to report that they help others to avoid rejection and criticism and to gain approval and to please others. This was also reflected in the moderate correlation between pathological altruism and the self-sacrificing self-enhancement facet of the Pathological Narcissism Inventory ( Pincus et al., 2009 ), and with the positive (although weaker) correlation with communal narcissism ( Gebauer et al., 2012 ). Developmentally speaking, we found tentative evidence to suggest that these adult motivations may be rooted in the early childhood experiences of constantly being asked by one’s family and the overall culture to substitute one’s own needs for the needs of others, consistent with predictions made by prior researchers ( Kohut, 1971 ; Bachner-Melman and Oakley, 2016 ).

Pathological altruism was less clearly associated with the interpersonal circumplex compared to healthy selfishness. This finding parallels prior findings showing that unmitigated communion is not as neatly placed on the interpersonal circumplex as unmitigated agency ( Helgeson and Fritz, 1999 ). Helgeson and Fritz (1999) suggest that it may be difficult to locate unmitigated communion on the interpersonal circumplex “because unmitigated communion is theoretically associated with a lack of personal agency (i.e., focus on the self) rather than a lack of interpersonal agency , which is what the interpersonal circle measures” (p. 155). The same reasoning may apply to pathological altruism. Indeed, we found that pathological altruism was uncorrelated with the introversion-extraversion dimension of personality.

Alternatively, our findings may simply point to the conclusion that pathological altruism is more paradoxical than healthy selfishness, being tied to motives that may work at odds with each other, such as a drive to help others along with selfish motivations. In this sense, those with higher levels of pathological altruism may experience more inner conflict than those with healthy selfishness, but that is an issue for further investigation.

Also notably, we did not find any significant sex differences in either healthy selfishness or pathological altruism. This is interesting considering that prior research has found women tend to be more altruistic than men in dictator games and on self-report questionnaires, whereas men tend to be more selfish than women on these measures ( Rand et al., 2016 ; Brañas-Garza et al., 2018 ; Kaufman et al., 2019 ; but see Balliet et al., 2011 ). Our findings may just be another indication of the distinction between altruism and pathological altruism on the one hand and selfishness and healthy selfishness on the other hand. It is possible that sex differences are much more minimal, if nonexistent, on these more paradoxical forms of selfishness. This could be a promising line of further research.

Limitations and Future Directions

This study has some limitations. For one, we relied exclusively on self-report measures. Future studies should also assess other-reports and behavioral correlates, such as in interpersonal interactions, of both constructs, and look at the stability of these traits over time. What’s more, future studies should include more external measures of clinical outcomes (e.g., actual history of diagnosis) as well as indicators of well-being, resiliency, and life experiences. We only took a very tentative look at some potential developmental experiences that might underlie these paradoxical forms of selfishness, but future research would benefit from looking at a wider array of developmental experiences that have an impact.

Also, while both constructs were moderately negatively correlated with each other, there is still plenty of room for one’s mix of healthy selfishness and pathological altruism to vary at a within-person level of analysis. It might be fruitful to look at whether different clusters or latent classes predict important variables of interest above and beyond simply looking at the between-person level of analysis.

Regarding the associations between PA and the interpersonal circumplex scales reported here, one might have expected a stronger association with the communion-axis of the circumplex. However, upon closer consideration, such associations might emerge with interpersonal problems ( Horowitz et al., 1988 ) rather than interpersonal behavior per se (as also reflected in the items measuring overly nurturant behavior in this study), which could be included in future studies. Also, the significant link between pathological altruism and both neuroticism and vulnerable narcissism ( Miller et al., 2017 ) would not be reflected in the interpersonal circumplex.

Another potential limitation of the current study may be the wording of the items of the scales. We devised items on the basis of conceptual considerations, using common phrases from natural language. These depict prototypically high expressions of HS and PA. While an advantage of this naturalistic approach is that HS and PA are readily relatable to one’s own experience and behavior, a disadvantage may be that low expressions are not unambiguously defined in each case. For instance, while the high pole of PA item No. 6 “I have little time to myself because I am too busy helping everyone” is clearly related to PA, the low pole is not unambiguously related to low PA.

To check for potential nomological network validity differences along the trait dimensions, we conducted complementary median-split correlation analyses for the variables listed in Table 4 . The validity profiles between high and low trait expressions of HS and PA were generally very similar. Media-split HS profiles correlated at r = 0.81, PA profiles r = 0.94. Thus, it can be tentatively concluded that nomological networks are highly similar between high and low trait expressions. However, future studies could directly address the question of content validity using qualitative techniques such as think-aloud protocols while participants are thinking through their responses to the items.

Finally, the concepts and scales presented here have arisen in a western cultural context, which puts stronger weight on independent than interdependent orientation ( Singelis, 1994 ). Not all of the findings reported here might thus generalize to more interdependent contexts, which might be particularly true for the associations between overly altruistic behavior and indicators of psychological maladjustment.

Clinical Implications

The strong association of pathological altruism to depression and social fears suggests there may be clinical implications of these constructs. Recent research has pointed out the clinical implications of narcissism, particularly vulnerable narcissism ( Jauk and Kaufman, 2018 ; Kaufman et al., 2018 ). Since we found a strong correlation between pathological altruism and vulnerable narcissism, the same recommendations that apply for vulnerable narcissism may also apply here, such as helping those scoring high in pathological altruism have a more stable self-esteem, increase healthy assertiveness of one’s own needs, and increase psychological flexibility (the opposite of experiential avoidance; see Hayes et al., 1999 ).

Our results suggest an additional path by which those with high levels of pathological altruism may not only decrease their levels of depression and fear but also increase their well-being: increasing their levels of healthy selfishness . Helping those who suffer from high levels of pathological altruism learn that it’s health and even growth-fostering to take care of oneself and enjoy life’s little pleasures may go a long way in helping these individuals feel less shame when thinking about themselves and their own needs. We think this could be a promising avenue for future research.

Here, we presented new scales for two understudied forms of selfishness: healthy selfishness and pathological altruism. The scales display good reliability and validity with respect to related constructs. Importantly, validity analyses underpin the paradoxical nature of both constructs as they show that not all selfishness is necessarily bad, and not all altruism is necessarily good. Healthy selfishness is largely associated with indicators of adaptive psychological functioning and genuine prosocial orientation, whereas pathological altruism is associated with maladaptive functioning, vulnerable narcissism, and helping behaviors that might be harmful to one’s self and to others.

Data Availability Statement

The datasets generated for this study are available on request to the corresponding author.

Ethics Statement

The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by the University of Pennsylvania’s institutional review board. The participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study.

Author Contributions

SK conceived of the study idea, designed the experiment, set up the study, and ran the study. SK and EJ contributed to the generation of hypotheses, the collation of the results, the data analysis, and the writing of the manuscript.

This research was supported by a grant from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF): J 4344.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Barbara Oakley for her helpful feedback on earlier versions of the pathological altruism scale.

• ^ We note that the CFI is rather low, which is likely to the high number of indicators. Nevertheless, we refrained from reducing the number of indicators (by means of parceling, for instance) as we wanted to evaluate the factor structure for the full set of items which were selected on the basis of exploratory factor analyses in Study 1.
• ^ These two items were originally part of the initial PA item pool, but were not included in the scale as they not only had high item difficulty, but also go beyond the proposed construct definition. Nonetheless, we consider these items important validity indicators for the PA scale.

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Keywords : selfishness, vulnerable narcissism, pathological altruism, depression, well-being

Citation: Kaufman SB and Jauk E (2020) Healthy Selfishness and Pathological Altruism: Measuring Two Paradoxical Forms of Selfishness. Front. Psychol. 11:1006. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01006

Received: 18 December 2019; Accepted: 22 April 2020; Published: 21 May 2020.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2020 Kaufman and Jauk. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Scott Barry Kaufman, [email protected]

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Selfishness And Selflessness: This World Needs The Human In You

Contributing Writer

Many people distinguish selfish people as those who take and selfless people as those who give. Generally speaking, “selfless” gets a warmer welcome and is more widely accepted as “good”, however I challenge both generalizations. Neither selfishness nor selflessness is good or bad. In fact, the two concepts are intricately linked.

Here’s my take on it: You can be both selfish and/or selfless; we all are. We may be selfish in some areas, yet completely selfless in other areas.

Let's look at the word: ‘alone’. When you hear the word ‘alone’, do you picture someone sitting in a large room feeling sad and lonely? Perhaps, but what if it doesn't mean that at all? Picture a young mother reading on the beach by herself. Imagine that it is the first hour she has had to herself all day. To her, alone isn't lonely at all, but in fact, peaceful. In other words, we can create a new perspective and meaning for the word ‘alone’.

It works the same way with selfishness. We could describe a selfish person as one who is self-assured, clear about one’s goals, conscious of oneself, speaks up for oneself, and knows what one needs to do to be successful. He or she begins each day with a clear-cut list of what has to be done and how it could be accomplished. In a world like today's, without being selfish and taking care of ourselves, we can’t stand anywhere for ourselves. In a society that deems selflessness as the ultimate form of kindness, we often allow our personal well-being to suffer in order to put others needs before our own, but what we need to realize is that it's necessary to be selfish and take care of ourselves first. How else will we be able to be selfless?

We could also describe a selfish person as someone who disregards the feelings of others. We can be so self-absorbed with our own life and our own plans that we forget to look around and realize how many other people are suffering and could use a little help. We comment hateful things to strangers on social media accounts. We flip off people for driving to slow for our own liking, we get angry at the waiter because we asked for water and he forgot to bring it. We are all guilty of doing something that we aren’t necessarily proud of. We completely forget that we are human and can be selfish in those ways too.

It works the same way with selflessness. Being selfless opens the world to a person. The more giving one becomes, the more one understands people who are different from one's self. The heart and mind become more open, rather than the tunnel vision selfishness can bring. When you’re selfless, you embrace and care for others. If you embrace and care for others, you understand and appreciate yourself. It's a beautiful selfish and selfless cycle of everlasting love.

Think about the pleasant feeling you get from giving a well-received compliment, food to a hungry stomach, or your time to community service. We feel more than just good. We feel human, and one cannot live a human life without acts of selflessness. Being kind, loving, and compassionate makes you who you are and that without a doubt makes you an extraordinary selfless person. However, without the ability to take care of yourself and your own needs before worrying about everyone else’s, you jeopardize the most important person of them all: you.

So, remember the importance of being selfish is equivalent to the importance of being selfless in living a human life. The latter is not possible without the former. Much of our modern world is an existence that forces people to forget that they are human. We often live like parasites, taking all that is necessary from others for our own individual gain. It is when we begin to selfishly love ourselves and selflessly love others that we become in touch with our humanity.

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Psychopathy to Altruism: Neurobiology of the Selfish–Selfless Spectrum

James w. h. sonne.

1 Department of Health Professions, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, United States

Don M. Gash

2 Department of Neuroscience, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, United States

The age-old philosophical, biological, and social debate over the basic nature of humans as being “universally selfish” or “universally good” continues today highlighting sharply divergent views of natural social order. Here we analyze advances in biology, genetics and neuroscience increasing our understanding of the evolution, features and neurocircuitry of the human brain underlying behavior in the selfish–selfless spectrum. First, we examine evolutionary pressures for selection of altruistic traits in species with protracted periods of dependence on parents and communities for subsistence and acquisition of learned behaviors. Evidence supporting the concept that altruistic potential is a common feature in human populations is developed. To go into greater depth in assessing critical features of the social brain, the two extremes of selfish–selfless behavior, callous unemotional psychopaths and zealous altruists who take extreme measures to help others, are compared on behavioral traits, structural/functional neural features, and the relative contributions of genetic inheritance versus acquired cognitive learning to their mindsets. Evidence from population groups ranging from newborns, adopted children, incarcerated juveniles, twins and mindfulness meditators point to the important role of neuroplasticity and the dopaminergic reward systems in forming and reforming neural circuitry in response to personal experience and cultural influences in determining behavior in the selfish–selfless spectrum. The underlying neural circuitry differs between psychopaths and altruists with emotional processing being profoundly muted in psychopaths and significantly enhanced in altruists. But both groups are characterized by the reward system of the brain shaping behavior. Instead of rigid assignment of human nature as being “universally selfish” or “universally good,” both characterizations are partial truths based on the segments of the selfish–selfless spectrum being examined. In addition, individuals and populations can shift in the behavioral spectrum in response to cognitive therapy and social and cultural experience, and approaches such as mindfulness training for introspection and reward-activating compassion are entering the mainstream of clinical care for managing pain, depression, and stress.

Introduction

In the mid-1800s, the French Philosopher Auguste Comte constructed the word altruism from the Latin alteri (“others”) to name his vision of a moral call to place the needs of others over one’s self-interests. Altruism has since been defined in many senses, including an extreme selflessness in undertaking actions benefiting others without evident self-benefit and incurring personal risk. The conundrum created by Comte’s concept continues to reverberate through social debate, philosophy, theology, and biology, highlighting complex issues in the spectrum of behavior ranging from extreme selfishness to extreme selflessness ( Ricard, 2015 ). The very concept of altruism raises important issues underlying two sharply divergent views of natural social order.

Philosophical, political and biological arguments on whether humans are naturally selfish or unselfish have flared for centuries and continue today. Thomas Hobbes contending in his work Leviathan printed in 1651 supporting strong Monarchist governments and running through current culture in Ayn Rand’s popular works assert there is a natural “universal selfishness” manifest in humans, with all behaviors characterized as altruistic being in reality actions that in some measure were in the actor’s best interest. Rand’s continuing influence on political discourse can be seen in the powerful American Speaker of the House and former Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan’s attribution of Rand’s Atlas Shrugged as formative in developing his political principles ( Weiner, 2012 ). In Biology, the Oxford University Lecturer and popular science author Richard Dawkins has proclaimed, “We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes” ( Dawkins, 1976 ).

Sharply alternate opinions more supportive of Comte’s vision have also resonated for centuries and continue unabated. Two highly influential 18th century philosophers David Hume and Jean Jacques Rousseau argued that by nature humankind is unselfish. A contention strongly supported today by the prolific neuroscientist and popular science author Richard Davidson ( Davidson, 2015 ). A middle position emphasizing a dual nature for humankind was presented in the 15th century essay by Pico della Mirandola Oration on the Dignity of Man , asserting that we can shape our own destiny by freely choosing whether to descend into brutish behavior or rise to the superior orders of the divine. This is a vision expanded upon by the Dalai Lama who wrote that “the most important thing in this existence of ours is to do something that can be of benefit to others. What we need more than anything is to develop an attitude of altruism – that is really what gives meaning to life” ( Dalai Lama, 2007 ).

The second debate invariably accompanying any discourse on altruistic behavior is what is due to nature versus nurture. To better understand the scientific basis for addressing such profound social and philosophical issues, here we examine the biology and neurological basis of human altruism. We analyze the neural systems and the role of heredity, both genetic and neuron-based (cultural and social), in the development of behavior in the selfish–selfless spectrum, with the goal of discovering how and why portions of the population experience dramatically differing levels of empathy and compassion that strongly influence their worldview and role in society.

Evolution of the Prosocial Brain

The term “altruism” has meant many different things in different times and places. Since Comte’s moral call to place the needs of others above one’s own needs, different disciplines have applied different definitions, and the semantics are themselves a necessary starting point ( West et al., 2007 ). Group selection theory explains behavior such as kin sacrifice in terms of gene survival as opposed to individual survival ( Simon et al., 2013 ; Gardner, 2015 ). Therefore, according to this evolutionary theory, related individuals will be more likely to perform altruistic acts and decrease their own survival if it benefits the survival of a related individual that carries many of the same genes. This theory is supported by extensive evidence in the literature of preferential treatment of kin ( Madsen et al., 2007 ), while others argue that group selection is an emergent property of natural selection by individual fitness ( Zhang et al., 2014 ; Kennedy et al., 2018 ). One question is how kin-preference is identified and conferred by an organism. Kin-preference may be a function of the extensive time spent with and proximity to the relative as opposed to an ability to identify genetic relatedness, as argued by cases of cronyism and altruistic preference for close friendships ( Stewart-Williams, 2008 ). From an evolutionary biology perspective, “altruism” or empathic acts could be selected for culturally as a sign of fitness ( Taborsky et al., 2016 ), as attested to by examples of prosocial behavior for non-relatives across the animal kingdom ( Field and Leadbeater, 2016 ; Wilkinson et al., 2016 ). A more semantically “true” form of altruism may have its roots in the parental instinct to care for offspring, and may explain why empathic behavior is more commonly observed in species with protracted periods of pre-adult growth ( Preston, 2013 ) requiring extended rearing and the resultant passing of learned behaviors, called acquired cognitive learning, as well as “neuron-based heredity,” including social and cultural factors that may have genetic and cognitive elements ( Gash and Deane, 2015 ), to come into play. Thus, the importance of passing to kin the learned behaviors promoting culturally selected traits of compassion may counterbalance the selective value of genes promoting extreme selfish behavior ( Bell et al., 2009 ).

The concept of altruism as an enhanced parental instinct relies on the evolution of several factors in both the altruist and the recipient: signaling of kinship status and need for compassion, recognition by kin of the signals, and donation-behavior by the kin ( Sinervo et al., 2006 ). While this behavioral signaling mechanism may underlie parental instinct and compassion which is probabilistically directed toward kin, it is possible that simple parental behaviors – such as offspring retrieval, sustenance and shelter sharing, and emotional comforting – are behavior patterns of signaling-recognition-action that have been enhanced by evolutionary mechanisms ( Preston, 2013 ) resulting in broader altruistic behavior from prosocial brains with greater capacity for receiving and passing on experience and acquired information. And as recent studies have shown, parenting-associated prosocial helping behaviors not only enhance the survival of the offspring, but also promotes better health, slower decline in functioning levels and lower risk of mortality for care-givers ( Brown and Brown, 2015 ). Collectively, the evidence indicating prosocial altruistic capability provides for complex interactions that have come to form the foundation of our civil, societal interactions ( Matusall, 2013 ). Social interactions often extend not only to members of our families, but to other members of our own social species, and often to members of other domesticated species on which we depend for our survival and social well-being.

The Selfish–Selfless Spectrum

Human evolution, especially since the separation from the last common ancestor shared with the great apes, is posited to have been driven by bipartite hereditary processes involving genetic and neuron-based systems (social and cultural heredity) ( Gash and Deane, 2015 ). The development of large interactive social groups that share resources and work cooperatively toward accomplishing common goals distinguishes humans from the other great apes. The survival and success of large cooperative societies requires most of their members to mute their innate selfish drives and strengthen their selfless behavior. Converging evidence that will be reviewed here strongly supports that complex combinations of genetic and neuronal factors, including parenting, underlie the spectrum of selfish–selfless behaviors. Given the gaps in knowledge in this multidisciplinary area of research, we propose the spectrum be initially plotted as an inverted U-shaped curve with the x -axis representing the range from extreme selfishness to extreme selflessness and the y -axis representing the percent population at each point ( Figure ​ Figure1 1 ). We also propose that the extreme selfishness end of the spectrum is exemplified by callous-uncaring psychopaths and the extreme selflessness end by zealous altruists that take extreme measures to help others. We hypothesize that the landscape and peak of the curve shifts for given populations based on social and cultural factors (neuronal-based heredity) and genetic makeup.

Selfish–selfless spectrum. The spectrum of human behavior from extreme selfishness to extreme selflessness is plotted here as an inverted U-Shaped curve. Social and cultural factors influencing perceptions are posited to shift the curve for individuals and populations to the left (e.g., racial hatred) or the right (e.g., compassion training). Illustrated by Matt Hazard.

Cultural and Biological Influences on the Selfish–Selfless Spectrum

Differences in degrees of altruistic and prosocial behavior have long been noted between cultures. In one classic study published in 1975 that observed children’s behavior across six different cultures, it was found that 100% of children between the ages of 3 and 10 exhibited altruistic or prosocial behavior in Kenya, contrasted with only 8% in the United States ( Whiting et al., 1975 ). Furthermore, this difference was linked to a cultural difference between the groups, especially in family function. Prosocial children were correlated with families where the women contributed economically and where the children were assigned tasks within the home. Supporting these observations is a study by Eisenberg and Mussen (1989) that found that Mexican children, Hopi children, and Israeli children were more prosocial than middle-class American children ( Eisenberg and Mussen, 1989 ). Finally, Robarcheck and Robarcheck (1992) compared two cultures in environmentally similar conditions but with drastically different cultures, the cooperative Semai in the Malaysian rainforest and the individualistic and war-like Waorani from the Amazon ( Robarcheck and Robarcheck, 1992 ). The Semai people exhibit prosocial and altruistic behavior, whereas the Waorani behave selfishly and reportedly save themselves if faced with danger as opposed to helping members of their society or family. These and other studies implied that societies that tend to focus on individual achievement and “success” result in children that are less prosocial and that exhibit fewer altruistic tendencies. Using the Price equation, researchers mathematically estimated that culture (neuron-based heredity) has more than one order of magnitude greater influence than genes on altruism and prosocial behavior at the population level ( Bell et al., 2009 ).

Some studies have attempted to identify how the depth of social interactions an individual has is reflected in the gross anatomical structure of the human brain. For instance, a positive correlation has been recorded between the number of individuals a person regularly interacts with and the size of their amygdala bilaterally (adjusted for total intracranial volume), but not the hippocampus. This correlation also held true for the number of different social groups to which a person belongs, not just the number of friends with whom an individual interacts ( Bickart et al., 2011 ). The amygdala is responsible for many automatic processes that influence social cognition ( Adolphs, 2009 ) ranging from the more mundane such as fear, vigilance ( Whalen, 1999 ) and alertness ( Whalen, 2007 ) to the parsing and evaluation of facial features ( Adolphs et al., 1994 ; Winston et al., 2002 ; Adolphs et al., 2005 ; Schiller et al., 2009 ) in conjunction with the fusiform cortex ( Hadjikhani and de Gelder, 2003 ; Britton et al., 2008 ). The amygdala may play a central role in regulating an individual’s aversion to or propensity for social interaction based on the activation of the brain’s reward mechanisms during the reading of facial expressions and the subsequent regulation of comfort in social situations.

An interesting sub-population is political orientation, which is increasingly recognized as having a genetic as well as a social and cultural influence ( Kandler et al., 2012 ; Hatemi and McDermott, 2012 ), including dopamine neurochemical receptor variant expression ( Settle et al., 2010 ). In these sub-populations we again see the role of the amygdala in making social-based snap judgments when presented with images of faces. Bilateral amygdalar activation recorded by fMRI positively predicts a participant’s snap decision to vote for a person based solely on appearance, a phenomenon that was observed across cultures ( Rule et al., 2010 ). Schreiber et al. (2013) found increasing brain activity in the right amygdala amongst Republican voters versus increased anterior insular activation in Democrats, suggesting different limbic processes are involved in reaching decisions in a risk-taking task. These findings were supported in separate studies by Kanai et al. (2011) reported that the gray matter volume of the right amygdala was observed to be larger in individuals self-described as more conservative, contrasted with those self-described as more liberal who exhibited greater gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC).

The ACC is involved in many executive level brain functions, including reward-based decision making, error detection, and conflict monitoring. An example of a task that activates the error detection/conflict monitoring function of the ACC is the “Stroop task” ( Pardo et al., 1990 ). In this task the name of a color is written in a different color of ink, for example the word “RED” is written in blue ink, and the subject is asked to name the word and ignore the color of the ink (or vice versa). This task activates the ACC. The ACC also may serve as an evaluative role after effortful error commission, producing emotional distress associated with the act of producing an error ( Bush et al., 2000 ). Thus, the ACC is thought to be responsible for adapting behavior in response to the production of errors ( Luu and Pederson, 2004 ). The perigenual region of the ACC may also play a role in modulating the reward mechanisms in a way perceived as gratitude at the relief of a stressor ( Fox et al., 2015 ) and as the result of positive social interactions ( Van den Bos et al., 2007 ). As a part of the social species, these functions may be critical in maintaining alliances and raising offspring through a protracted stage of dependency.

In one study ( Christoy-Moore, 2016 ), subjects’ donations to individuals based solely on profiles listing socio-economic status were recorded (called the Dictator Game) and then activity levels in the subjects’ brains were measured by functional magnetic-resonance imaging (fMRI) while observing video of a human hand being punctured by a hypodermic needle, touched by a cotton swab, or static without stimulation (called the Needle Test). Subjects’ offers to low socio-economic status players in the Dictator Game were positively correlated with the subject’s own Empathic Concern score determined by questionnaire. A correlation was also observed between offers and blood-oxygen level dependent increases in fMRI activation of the primary somatosensory cortex and other associated areas during the observation of the painful hand stimulation, supporting a hypothesis of empathic behavior as a form of “self-other resonance” as a result of “neural resonance” between individuals. While undergoing fMRI the subjects were then asked to imitate faces that were displayed to them. The subjects who donated more money to low socio-economic players tended to exhibit greater levels of BOLD increases in fMRI in the left amygdala and also the left fusiform cortex which is a region responsible for facial processing and implicated in empathy.

Kim et al. (2010) observed a genetic variation on the oxytocin receptor gene OXTR at rs53576 between cultures ( Kim et al., 2010 ). In individualistic European Americans a guanine (G) is more prevalent at this position, but in collectivist East Asians an adenine (A) is more common. Oxytocin is a neurohormone that is primarily involved in stimulating contractions of the uterine wall during childbirth and the milk “let-down” reflex of lactation during nursing. Oxytocin also acts on the central nervous system for brain development and to regulate behavior including maternal behaviors such as infant response and protection, and other social behaviors including bonding, trusting, and encouraging generosity ( Yang et al., 2013 ). Nasally administered oxytocin reduces fear and anxiety ( Kirsch et al., 2005 ), increases trust ( Kosfeld et al., 2005 ), reduces xenophobic outgroup rejection ( Marsh et al., 2017 ), increases monogamous behavior ( Scheele et al., 2012 ), increases empathy ( Sheng et al., 2013 ) and conformity with in-group members ( Stallen et al., 2012 ). Some benefits of oxytocin beyond promoting positive social interactions include anti-inflammatory effects and indications for quicker wound healing ( Gouin et al., 2010 ). It is being investigated as a treatment for the social deficits of autism ( Dadds et al., 2014a ), however, the efficacy reported in initial studies has been mixed with results ranging from modest benefits to no observed improvements ( Young and Barrett, 2015 ).

Vasopressin has also been identified as a possible regulator of compassionate behavior. Human studies of individuals that exhibit strong sibling bonding ( Bachner-Melman et al., 2005 ) and pair bonding ( Walum et al., 2008 ) have identified that increases in the length of vasopressin 1a receptor repeat sequences 1 and 3 are linked to these behaviors in these sub-groups. Vasopressin, also called antidiuretic hormone or arginine vasopressin hormone (AVP), is a neurohormone that controls the antidiuretic effect through water reabsorption in the kidneys’ nephrons and by controlling the constriction of blood vessels. In terms of social behavior, central vasopressin receptors AVPR1a in the ventral pallidum of the prairie vole are necessary for pair bonding and partner selection ( Lim and Young, 2004 ) by activating the reward circuitry during mating ( Pitkow et al., 2001 ). This and other central AVP receptors have been shown to play critical roles in social recognition and interpretation of social cues as well as related stress pathways in knockout mouse models ( Bielsky et al., 2004 ; Wersinger et al., 2004 ).

In addition to the strong evidence in animal studies that oxytocin and vasopressin are two neurohormones which play important roles in social behavior and the resultant reward and stress pathways that support those behaviors, there is increasing research supporting the hypothesis that genetic variants of OXTR and AVPR1a are predictive of humans displaying greater degrees of altruistic, empathic and compassionate behavior traits within population sub-groups. For example, Poulin et al. (2012) have reported that the amount of individual involvement in charitable activity and civic duties correlated with genetic variants. As expected, it was found that those with the OXTR rs53576 G to A variation or AVPR1a RS1/RS3 long to short variation were more likely to exhibit “prosocial” behavior by being more trusting of strangers, contributing more to charitable activities and participating in more civic duties.

Extreme Selfishness: Criminal Psychopathy

Callous-unemotional criminal psychopaths epitomize extreme antisocial behavior. These individuals are characterized by aggression and violence with a long criminal record and frequent incarceration. Their core behavioral pattern of pervasively violating the rights of others without remorse can begin as early as 3 years of age and continue into adulthood ( Hare, 2006 ; Gao and Raine, 2010 ; APA, 2013 ). In the United States, they are estimated to represent 16% of male prisoners ( Kiehl and Hoffman, 2011 ). In England and Wales, the estimates are lower, close to 8% of men and 2% of women ( Coid et al., 2009b ), perhaps due to cultural differences between the countries. Serial killers fall into this category. However, by maintaining an outwardly normal persona, they can often evade detection and arrest for periods running into decades.

The spectrum of personality disorders classified as psychopathic is much broader than those on the extremist criminal end. Psychopaths can be separated into two groups – unsuccessful and successful ( Gao and Raine, 2010 ). The unsuccessful are the callous-uncaring criminals. Successful psychopaths are a more diverse group ranging from ruthless con artists to leading statesmen ( Dutton, 2016 ). Both unsuccessful and successful psychopaths can exhibit varying combinations of traits, which collectively predict their behavioral patterns. With the legal and societal problems created by criminal psychopaths, most research has been focused on defining their psychological features and neurobiology. The current criteria for determining if someone is a criminal psychopath is the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised ( Hare, 2003 ; Babiak and Hare, 2006 ), which is crafted for clinical and legal use, emphasizing antisocial and criminal behaviors. It is used worldwide and its influence is seen in the gold standard for clinical diagnosis, the 5th Edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders ( APA, 2013 ) where psychopathy is described as a synonym for Antisocial Personality Disorder (see Table ​ Table1 1 ).

PCI-R: psychopathy criminal focus ( APA, 2013 ).

As Hare developed his PCL-R as a research tool based largely on his experience in analyzing criminals, its use more broadly in formulating public policy, in business and in conducting unbiased social research is controversial ( Skeem et al., 2011 ). Also, it has raised a major scientific issue. Is psychopathy a monolithic disorder (qualitative), or is it a syndrome with multiple interacting factors determining the extent and phenotypic expression (quantitative)? To more fully evaluate the hypothesis of multiple interacting factors, an alternate rating scale to the PCL-R has been developed, the Psychopathic Personality Inventory-Revised (PPI-R, see Table ​ Table2 2 ) designed and validated to measure more affective and interpersonal traits and to be used in both criminal and non-criminal populations without a priori assumptions of antisocial and criminal behavior ( Skeem et al., 2011 ; Dutton, 2016 ; Sorman et al., 2016 ).

PPI-R: psychopathy positive and negative features ( Skeem et al., 2011 ; Dutton, 2016 ).

While the two different rating scales overlap in measures such as meanness (e.g., callous and unemotional, coldhearted), antisocial behavior (e.g., pervasive dishonesty, Machiavellian self-interest) and poor planning skills, PPI-R includes the positive traits of boldness (social dominance, immunity to stress and fear).

While all unsuccessful psychopaths are by definition criminals, as mentioned before, successful psychopaths on the PPI-R scale are found in politics, medicine and business. Their actions range from criminal to courageous, as evidenced by the high PPI-R scores of national leaders of World War II: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Adolph Hitler ( Dutton, 2016 ). Roosevelt and Churchill were powerful leaders whose bold, hardnosed (coldblooded) actions were instrumental in the survival and success of their social order; Hitler’s leadership epitomizing callousness, lack of remorse and blame externalization was disastrous for all of Europe and led to notorious crimes against humanity.

As successful psychopaths can intelligently conceal their psychopathic traits, their number in the population is difficult to detect. In one large population survey, the prevalence of successful (i.e., no criminal record) psychopathic individuals living in households in England was 0.6% ( Coid et al., 2009a ). In the professional world of politicians, businessmen, doctors and lawyers, the number may be much higher. In their book Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths go to Work , industrial psychologist Babiak and criminal psychologist Hare ( Babiak and Hare, 2006 ) estimated 3.5% of professionals in business possess strong psychopathic traits. While some professionals with psychopathic traits are criminals, others benefit the social order by boldly leading changes needed for cultures to adapt to ever changing environmental, economic, and political conditions.

Neurobiology of Psychopathy

Dysfunctional emotional processing is a defining feature of psychopathy ( Anderson et al., 2017 ), from lacking empathy to possessing immunity to stress and fear. Meta-analyses of 26 studies found emotional recognition of facial expressions and vocal cues was significantly impaired in young and adult psychopaths for all of the basic emotions: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise ( Dawel et al., 2012 ). Their inability to recognize fear and sadness was especially pronounced, but they also exhibit reduced neural response to laughter ( O’Nions et al., 2017 ). Such blunted emotions affect perceptions, thought processes and actions toward others, fostering both boldness and lack of remorse. Dysfunctional emotions also affect another trait of criminal psychopaths – deeply flawed reasoning, including moral judgment.

Three of the sites in the brain responsible for criminal psychopathic behavior are also principal components of the neural circuitry for normal social-emotional processing: the prefrontal cortex (PFC), amygdala , and hypothalamus ( Figure ​ Figure2 2 ). Psychopathic behavior resulting from injury or disease implicates the ventromedial PFC (vmPFC) as a critical node for prosocial behavior; its dysfunction resulting in antisocial behavior ( Anderson et al., 1999 ; Barrash et al., 2000 ; Trebuchon et al., 2013 ). The enlarged prefrontal cortex is the neocortical (i.e., evolutionarily newest) region of the human brain responsible for top down, executive control; while the amygdala is the part of the allocortical (i.e., evolutionarily old) cortex that, as discussed earlier, integrates sensory and acquired information, including facial features, to assess threat levels. In the mammalian brain, the PFC is richly networked with the amygdala ( McDonald et al., 1999 ), with neurons in the cerebral neocortex sending fibers to connect with neurons in the amygdala embedded in the rostral temporal lobe ( Stein et al., 2007 ). Like most neural assemblages in the brain, it is a two-way street with amygdaloidal neurons sending fibers to the cerebral cortex. The amygdala in turn is richly interconnected with the hypothalamus ( Herman, 2012 ), another evolutionarily ancient brain region that regulates homeostasis and autonomic nervous system activity ( Jansen et al., 1995 ) and controls neuroendocrine functions including secretion of oxytocin and vasopressin into the systemic circulation ( Carter, 2014 ).

Prefrontal cortex-amygdala-hypothalamic circuitry. The prefrontal cortex-amygdala-hypothalamus axis has a pivotal role in social-emotional processing. Developmental disorders and injuries effecting its neural assemblages and circuitry can lead to antisocial behaviors characterizing psychopathy. (A) In this parasagittal view of the human brain, the spatial relationships and neural connectivity between the prefrontal cortex (PFC), amygdala (Amy), and hypothalamus (Hyp) are illustrated. Lesions involving the ventromedial PFC (vmPFC) are especially disruptive of prosocial behavior. Note the central role of the amygdala in the circuitry linking the prefrontal cortex and hypothalamus in the emotional processing network. Also see its intimate integration of the amygdala with the head of the hippocampus (Hip), which initiates and consolidates cognitive memory and learning processes in the brain. (B) Here is a schematic based on the generic mammalian brain to illustrate the multiple actions taken by the hypothalamus when a “Fight or Flight” response is triggered by cortical-amygdala interactions signaling high levels of risk or immediate danger, including life or death situations. Neurons in the hypothalamus terminating in the pituitary release oxytocin (OT), vasopressin (VP) and adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) into the systemic circulation. The sympathetic nervous system is fully activated via the hypothalamus, including by a direct neural projection to the adrenal medulla stimulating release of epinephrine (EPI, adrenalin) and norepinephrine (NEP, noradrenalin) into the blood stream. ACTH stimulates the release of the stress hormone cortisol (COR) from the adrenal cortex. The physiological responses include hyperarousal, focused vision, increased heart rate and blood pressure, blood shunted to the muscles, and suppression of digestion and appetite. Illustrated by Matt Hazard.

The association between medial prefrontal cortex (PFC) dysfunction and psychopathic behavioral features including lack of empathy and remorse, dishonesty, and poor planning and decision-making skills, has been extensively documented since the index case of Phineas T. Gage in 1848 ( Harlow, 1868 ; Damasio et al., 1994 ). Since then, there has been an abundance of research supporting the role of the PFC in social processing and behavior regulation ( Anderson et al., 1999 ; Grossman, 2013 ). In individuals with pronounced conduct control problems, numerous studies have shown the amygdala is smaller along with less gray matter volume in the frontal and temporal cortices ( Yang et al., 2010 ; Rogers and De Brito, 2016 ). Hypoactive amygdala responses to stimuli of others in distress are characteristic of children with the callous-unemotional trait and associated with aggressive behavior ( Lozier et al., 2014 ). Humans with bilateral amygdala lesions have impaired learning of fear and responding to eminent danger ( Bach et al., 2015 ; Klumpers et al., 2015 ). Bilateral amygdala lesions in rhesus monkeys have significantly blunted stress responses ( Raper et al., 2013 ). These findings strongly link the behavioral traits of the callous-unemotional trait, boldness, and fear/stress immunity to amygdala functions.

The hypothalamus is intimately involved as the control center of the brain for autonomic responses and regulation of sex hormones and the secretion of oxytocin, cortisol, and vasopressin into the bloodstream. Low oxytocin levels have been linked with callous-unemotional scores in adolescents ( Levy et al., 2017 ). Supporting this link are other studies indicating that inactivation of the oxytocin receptor by DNA methylation is correlated with an increased risk of callous-unemotional traits ( Cecil et al., 2014 ). Children and adolescents with the callous-unemotional trait exhibit reduced cortisol response ( von Polier et al., 2013 ; Grotzinger et al., 2018 ) perhaps explaining increased boldness/impulsivity, and are at high risk for developing into criminal psychopaths ( Kahn et al., 2013 ; Kimonis et al., 2016 ). As discussed earlier, oxytocin and vasopressin are two neurohormones that have essential roles in social behavior and the resultant reward and stress pathways that support those behaviors ( Poulin et al., 2012 ).

The neural circuitry for the Impulsive-Antisocial dimension of psychopathy overlaps with that for Boldness, but differs in important details. The size of the striatum , a major component of the basal ganglia, is larger in Impulsive-Antisocial individuals ( Korponay et al., 2017 ), especially the putamen and the nucleus accumbens in the ventral striatum , the reward center of the brain ( Figure ​ Figure3 3 ).

Dopamine reward system of the brain. (A) Dopamine neurons in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) directly innervate the nucleus accumbens (NAc), prefrontal cortex (PFC), amygdala (Amy), and hippocampus (Hip) ( de la Mora et al., 2010 ; Kahn and Shohamy, 2013 ; Shnitko and Robinson, 2014 ). As in most neural networks, connectivity between the nuclei goes both ways. Dopamine release from the VTA promotes feelings of satisfaction, pleasure and euphoria, rewarding and motivating behavior. Dopamine release from the substantia nigra in the striatum modulates motor functions. (B) While the neurocircuitry modulating the VTA and NAc is complex, major projections from the PFC, Amy and Hip to the VTA and NAc have been identified ( Sesack and Grace, 2010 ). This is consistent with known modulation of reward system dopaminergic activity being influenced by goal-directed behavior (PFC), emotions and feelings (Amy) and experience/memories (Hip) ( Sesack and Grace, 2010 ). Illustrated by Matt Hazard.

Dopamine release from ventral tegmental area dopamine neurons innervating the nucleus accumbens is an essential component of the reward circuitry ( Sesack and Grace, 2010 ; Kahn and Shohamy, 2013 ). In functional MRI studies, the ventral striatum including the nucleus accumbens displays robust activation in criminal psychopaths in game tasks involving rewards ( Pujara et al., 2014 ). The nucleus accumbens is a major component of the limbic system ( Morgane et al., 2005 ), the part of the human brain that provides emotional processing and motivational information to the enlarged, more deeply layered areas of the prefrontal cerebral cortex ( Shnitko and Robinson, 2014 ). Other interacting centers include the amygdala and hippocampus ( de la Mora et al., 2010 ).

As recently emphasized by Reidy et al. (2017) , reward-dominant learning and decision making in callous-unemotional individuals with strong Impulsive-Antisocial traits can explain their extremely violent behavior, their hair-trigger response for evoking rage or anger (the fight component of “Fight or Flight” behavior). In these individuals, rage and impulsivity with reduced fear from the amygdala evokes pleasure – dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens .

The absence of normal fear and stress responses is analogous to removing the brakes on a bulldozer. Boldness and greatly muted fear with positive reinforcement from the reward system of the brain is the result. For criminal psychopaths, it leads to clashing violently with others and taking risks that lead to incarceration, debilitating injuries or death.

Nature Versus Nurture in Psychopathy

Based on parent reported data on 5092 twins, genetically modeled inheritance for the core feature of psychopathy – callousness and unemotional trait – was 70% ( Henry et al., 2016 ). A smaller more recent study examining the reliability of parent reported data refines the estimate to 47% ( Moore et al., 2017 ). For the traits of Boldness and Impulsive-Antisociality, twin studies have reported inheritance in the 40–50% range ( Blonigen et al., 2005 ) and indicating the two traits were not linked genetically and differ in their neurobiology.

Some progress has been made in identifying genes associated with features of psychopathy. Consistent with data reported throughout this review that oxytocin has a prominent role in promoting prosocial human behavior, two independent studies have recently found a high association between an oxytocin receptor gene and callous-unemotional traits ( Beitchman et al., 2012 ; Dadds et al., 2014b ). Endogenous oxytocin is important in neural development including neural circuitry ( Carter, 2014 ), making it difficult to predict the effects from administration of exogenous oxytocin to the adult brain after critical periods in brain development. Initial studies indicate nasal administration of oxytocin increases aggressive behavior in normal adults ( Ne’eman et al., 2016 ) and adults with antisocial personality disorder ( Alcorn et al., 2015 ).

Role of Neuron-Based Heredity in Psychopathy

To what extent can neuronal-based heredity – learned societal and cultural traits – compensate for strong genetic psychopathic predispositions? This acquisition of social and cultural information begins before birth ( Partanen et al., 2013 ) as newborns recognize their mother’s voice and can distinguish it from a stranger’s voice ( Beauchemin et al., 2011 ). Prenatal development and functioning of neural systems is evident after birth with the pattern of crying of newborns shaped by their native language ( Mampe et al., 2009 ). Positive parental support and maternal behavior is exceptionally important during these critical periods. Chaotic home environments, negative parental behavior and mothers with strong callous-unemotional traits can affect their fetus’s and infant’s emotional and cognitive development ( Fontaine et al., 2011 ; Hyde et al., 2016 ; Viding and Pingault, 2016 ).

In a study of 561 children adopted within several days after birth where severe callous-unemotional maternal behavior was replaced by strong positive support, major effects were found in altering behavior ( Hyde et al., 2016 ). Having a biological mother with severe callous-unemotional behavior predicted the same traits in their children at 27 months of age, even though they had not been parenting them after adoption. Positive reinforcement by the adoptive mother significantly mitigated the expression of callous-unemotional behavior in their adopted child. The effect was dose-dependent, adoptive mothers with high positive reinforcement completely buffered the expression of the callous-unemotional behavior at 27 months ( Hyde et al., 2016 ; Viding and Pingault, 2016 ). Follow-up studies over time will be extremely important to assess the efficacy of early positive parenting on adolescent and adult behavior patterns.

Even with the caveat that longer longitudinal studies are needed, the malleability of callous-unemotional behavior in early childhood is encouraging. But as a developmental neural disorder with structural neuroanatomical abnormalities ( Cope et al., 2014 ) and impaired functional connectivity ( Harenski et al., 2018 ), how long is the window of opportunity open for therapeutic intervention for criminal psychopaths? Working with juvenile delinquents, over half of whom had committed a serious violent felony, a program at the Mendota Juvenile Treatment Center in Wisconsin using intensive therapy balancing punishment for bad behavior with rewards for improved behavior was able to reduce the number of crimes by over 35% perpetrated by the trainees over a 4–5 years period after release, compared to a treatment-as-usual control group ( Caldwell and Van Rybroek, 2005 ; Caldwell, 2011 ). While the effects on violent behavior were impressive, there remained a significant risk for aggressive behavior injuring others.

The Mendota Center approach of effectively reinforcing the reward center of the brain for improved behavior, while providing negative reinforcement for bad behavior, is now being tested elsewhere for younger adolescents with strong callous-unemotional traits ( Hagerty, 2017 ). However, treatments for adult criminal psychopaths have been notoriously ineffective and upon release 90% commit another violent crime within 20 years ( Anderson and Kiehl, 2014 ).

Extreme Selflessness: Zealous Altruism

Placing the interests of others above one’s own safety occurs so regularly in the United States and the rest of the world that it garners little media attention ( Ricard, 2013 , 2015 ). Only when there is serious injury or death of the Good Samaritans does it make the news, such as in May 2017 when a crazed man approached two young women on a commuter train in Portland, Oregon brandishing a knife and screaming anti-Muslim insults. Three strangers rushed to rescue the girls. Two died and the third was seriously injured ( Kristof, 2017 ). As the list of Carnegie Medal recipients for Extraordinary Civilian Heroism shows ( CarnegieHero.Org, 2017 ), altruists range from adolescents to aged adults. Some are very young like 10 year-old Kiera Larsen who saved a 2-year old child from being run over by a car that then struck and killed her. They can be old, like 72 year-old Louis Scharold who braved intense heat from burning, wrecked trucks to reach through the broken windshield of one vehicle to pull the dazed driver to safety. Twelve of the 94 Carnegie Medal Recipients in 2016 lost their lives in trying to save others. Again, routine altruistic actions are commonplace and seldom make the news, but extraordinary risks taken by some can and do lead to injury and death. These zealous altruists on the extreme end of the spectrum are those who take extreme measures to help others, unnecessarily placing themselves in harm’s way, such as anonymous living kidney donors that partake in surgery to donate an organ to an unrelated and unknown recipient they will never meet ( Tong et al., 2012 ).

Altruism can be impulsive suggesting instinctive reactions as in the preceding cases, or premeditated by choosing to help others in ways that are knowingly risky indicating involvement of executive functions, such as the actions of David Eubank, the American Aid Worker who rescued a young girl, the lone survivor of about 70 civilians massacred by ISIS fighters as they tried to free Mosul in June of 2017. Braving sniper fire with some support from Iraqi and US Forces, Eubank ran into the street, picked the girl up and brought her back to safety ( Yuccas, 2017 ). Eubank has repeatedly chosen to go to war-ravaged areas in Asia to aid children and others in need. Less dramatic, but equally extreme premeditated acts of generosity are those of altruists who donate one of their kidneys to help an unknown anonymous patient ( Marsh et al., 2014 ), placing their own lives at risk from complications of elective surgery and the removal of an organ. Other less risky altruistic premeditated actions include being a blood donor or donating bone marrow for transplantation.

Thus, the conundrum of altruism – taking risks by placing the interests of others, often strangers, beyond one’s self-interest – seems to directly violate the “survival of the fittest” principle of gene-based evolution. Darwin noted both sides of the issue in The Descent of Man . He astutely recognized that selfishness was a roadblock to human social evolution, “Selfish and contentious people will not cohere, and without coherence nothing can be effected.” However, Darwin continued, writing, “He who was ready to sacrifice his life, as many a savage has been, rather than betray his comrades, would often leave no offspring to inherit his noble nature” ( Darwin, 1871 ). Darwin (1871) proposed that as ancestral human reasoning and foresight powers increased, the benefits of reciprocal social assistance would become obvious and gradually lead to inherited reciprocal benevolence.

Darwin seems to have been justified, as just discussed there is strong evidence for both instinctive and cognitive benevolence in our species. This evolution has occurred thanks to a capability of the mind Darwin did not anticipate. Namely, our species possesses enhanced mind-reading skills to understand our own thoughts and emotions and what others are thinking and feeling ( Heyes and Frith, 2014 ; de Waal and Preston, 2017 ). Affective perception of other’s emotions includes the six basic emotional states visualized by facial expressions and body language: anger, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, and happiness. Feeling and understanding the emotions of others, the recognition of signals of need, sets the stage for perception-based actions such as benevolence and compassion.

With mind-reading skills at work, two major interactive factors appear to be crucial for promoting and maintaining broad levels of cooperation within human populations. The first, as hypothesized by Batson et al. (1981 , 1983 ), Toi and Batson (1982) and tested in a series of studies, is a strong link between empathy and altruism. A linkage that has been repeatedly replicated ( Persson and Kajonius, 2016 ) and further modeled and linked with oxytocin by Zak and Barraza (2013) . The second factor is punishment of those violating social norms ( Fowler, 2005 ). The efficacy of punishment as in promoting cooperation has been controversial. However, a meta-analysis of punishment and cooperation in 18 societies found punishment strongly promoted cooperation in societies with high trust levels ( Balliet and Van Lange, 2013 ). Also as Mussweiler and Ockenfels (2013) have demonstrated, perceived similarity promotes altruistic cooperation as well as evoking increased punishment for norm violations. The result, they suggest, enhances the ability for similar individuals to build strong, stable socially cooperative groups.

Neurobiology of Altruism

Implicit mind reading skills (gene-based) are present by the first 4–7 months of life with normally developing infants making face-to-face communication that activates the medial prefrontal cortex ( Grossman et al., 2008 ; Kovacs et al., 2010 ; Urakawa et al., 2015 ). Most or all neurocognitive mind reading skills are acquired and strongly shaped by culture (neuron-based), with the early stages of learning similar to those of learning to read ( Heyes and Frith, 2014 ). Infants are very vulnerable, so development of the ability to distinguish between those who can help versus those who may pose a risk is essential. Strong evidence from many research groups indicates that the majority of infants as early as 6–10 months of age prefer and selectively approach individuals displaying intentional prosocial behavior ( Hamlin and Wynn, 2011 ; Holvoet et al., 2016 ; Van de Vondervoort and Hamlin, 2017 ). Also by 1–2 years of age, simple reciprocal interactions elicit an early form of altruistic behavior, the child helping the experimenter or a stranger obtain an object clearly out of their reach ( Barragan and Dweck, 2014 ). By 5 years of age, children are capable of sharing with others and anticipating reciprocation ( Sebastian-Enesco and Warneken, 2015 ).

Altruism goes well beyond reciprocation by compassionately helping a stranger with no apparent self-benefit and at some risk to one’s own being. Neuroimaging studies have provided important insights into the neural networks underlying the behavioral linkage between empathy and compassion. As defined by de Waal and Preston (2017) , empathy is a “term for all processes that emerge from the fact that observers understand others’ states by activating their own personal, neural, and mental representations of that state.” Empathy then is a passive state of feeling. Physical pain or distress, and empathy from witnessing pain both activate the same higher brain areas, the anterior insula and anterior to mid cingulate cortex ( Figure ​ Figure4 4 ) ( Lamm et al., 2007 , 2011 ). Depending on the type of distress, other brain areas such as the primary motor and somatosensory cortices are recruited to simulate in the observer the neural activity in distressed individual: a vivid example of the continuing theater of the mind envisioned by the founder of modern psychology William James over 100 years ago where one’s own thoughts and sensations are blended with ongoing experience to produce emotions and feelings. Empathy for another in extreme pain can be extremely painful ( Fitzgibbon et al., 2010 ; Ricard, 2015 ). Intense and repeated exposure to distress can lead to severe emotional and health problems including empathetic distress and post-traumatic stress syndrome ( APA, 2013 ; Klimecki et al., 2014 ).

Active cortical sites for fear, distress, and empathy. Two deep cortical regions, the anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortex are strongly activated when feeling fear and empathy. Both are strongly interconnected with the amygdala ( Stein et al., 2007 ). (A) The insula lies beneath the temporal and cortical lobes and can be seen by separating the two lobes. (B) The anterior cingulate gyrus is the deepest cortical region of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) as seen in this sagittal section, and caps the anterior corpus callosum. Illustrated by Matt Hazard.

As opposed to the passive state of empathy, compassion is taking action to help others, including other species, in distress. Synonyms for compassion that help define it are benevolence, kindness and sympathy. Compassionate actions activate the reward system of the brain, the ventral striatum and the dopaminergic ventral tegmental area, as well as the medial orbitofrontal cortex ( Klimecki et al., 2014 ). The positive affect from compassion not only reinforces benevolent behavior, but can also calm painful empathetic feelings ( Figure ​ Figure5 5 ).

Benevolence pathway. (A) Empathy involves literally feeling another’s pain. An individual with empathic responsiveness upon seeing and or hearing others in pain mirrors that pain in their brain, activating the same higher cortical brain areas activated by fear, the anterior insula and mid-to-anterior cingulate cortex. Intense exposure to a stressful event or repeated exposure to stress in others can lead to burnout, empathy fatigue or PTSD. (B) Compassion activates the reward system of the brain and can significantly calm empathetic feelings of fear and pain. Therefore compassion and benevolence elicit positive feelings. Altruism not only benefits the recipient, but also benefits the altruist by rewarding their behavior with feelings of satisfaction. Illustrated by Matt Hazard.

Neuroimaging studies on adult Europeans making decisions on altruistic giving have identified two strongly engaged brain areas. Activity in anterior insula predicted generosity in individuals influenced by emotional empathy, while activity in the temporoparietal cortical junction was associated with cognitive empathetic giving ( Tusche et al., 2016 ). Another study taking a similar approach testing young European adults reported that volume of gray matter in the right temporoparietal cortical junction was strongly positively correlated with the maximal acceptable cost for an altruistic action ( Morishima et al., 2012 ). The results from both studies are supportive of the concept of altruistic potential being a common feature in populations and that can be evoked by empathetic feelings.

Another approach for identifying brain areas engaged in altruistic giving is that taken by Marsh et al. (2014) using neuroimaging to quantify structural and functional differences between Zealous Altruists (individuals who had donated one of their kidneys for transplant recipients) and Criminal Psychopaths. Brain size can be larger than normal controls in zealous altruists and, even controlling for the brain volume, the right amygdala is larger ( Marsh et al., 2014 ). As reviewed earlier, in psychopaths with conduct control dysfunction, the amygdala is smaller along with less gray matter volume in the frontal and temporal cortices ( Yang et al., 2010 ; Pardini et al., 2014 ; Rogers and De Brito, 2016 ). In contrast to psychopathy where responses to all facial expressions of emotion are muted, altruists show an enhanced responsiveness to fearful facial expressions and diminished responsiveness to anger ( Marsh et al., 2014 ).

The neural pathways involved in compassion are similar to those for impulsive-antisocial behavior. In this instance, prosocial compassionate behavior rather than antisocial behavior activates the dopamine reward system of the brain. The same neural systems are engaged (hippocampus, ventral striatum and ventral tegmental area, prefrontal cortex and amygdala). The major difference between prosocial and antisocial behavior is likely embedded in the perception of social order. This difference is wittily broached in a letter by Walpole (1769) in which he declared, “this world is a comedy to those that think; a tragedy to those that feel – a solution of why Democritus laughed and Heraclitus wept.” For altruists, the full capability for processing and integration of sensory and acquired information in the reading and feeling of emotions of others engenders taking positive actions – compassion – that mitigates the altruist’s own distress and reflexively activates the reward system. With the muted neurocircuitry for basic emotions in criminal psychopaths, taking action in the form of violent aggression actives the anger/fight component of the Fight or Flight response reflexively activating the reward system.

Nature Versus Nurture in Altruism

Given that altruistic behavior can be expressed by large segments of the population as discussed earlier, the genes underlying altruism may be commonplace. This includes genes for central dopaminergic systems engaged in the reward system and genes for oxytocin receptors that promote development of the social brain with strong capabilities for communication and mind reading of emotions ( Donaldson and Young, 2008 ; Carter, 2014 ; Heyes and Frith, 2014 ).

If genes underlying altruism are the norm, then it can be predicted that gene variants and mutations resulting in dysfunctional and antisocial behavior can be used to identify gene networks that are good candidates for promoting altruistic behavior. With the Callous-Unemotional trait found in individuals at high risk for violent criminal behavior, genetic variants in the oxytocin receptor have been identified as discussed earlier. Dysfunctional social behavior is also found with the overexpression of oxytocin. Williams Syndrome, which results from the loss of 28 genes, features dysregulation of oxytocin and vasopressin secretion by the hypothalamic-pituitary system ( Dai et al., 2012 ). Baseline plasma levels of oxytocin are three-times higher and vasopressin levels 0.30% higher in Williams Syndrome than in controls. Individuals with Williams Syndrome possess cognitive deficits with behavior characterized by diminished social anxiety and fearfulness, readily approaching, socially interacting with and trusting strangers ( Jarvinen et al., 2013 ). However, they experience difficulty interacting with peers and have high non-social anxiety. With cognitive deficits and overly trusting of others these individuals cannot live independently.

Several hundred genes, many of them rare copy variations, have been implicated as risk factors for dysfunctions in communication and mind reading that characterize autism spectrum disorders ( Pinto et al., 2014 ; Sahin and Sur, 2015 ). The large number is consistent with the broad heterogeneity of symptoms and their expression in autism. While alterations in oxytocin stimulatory proteins, oxytocin plasma levels and genetic variance in oxytocin receptors have been reported as risk factors for autism ( Jacobson et al., 2014 ; LoParo and Waldman, 2015 ), clinical trials on the efficacy of oxytocin therapy has found only modest benefits or no positive effects ( Young and Barrett, 2015 ). Collectively, the genetics underlying psychopathy, Williams disease and autism indicate that no one gene is responsible for the development of the human prosocial brain, but a broad network of interacting genes found in normal populations set the stage for the second system of heredity (neuron-based) to sculpt prosocial brain functions.

Role of Neuron-Based Heredity in Altruism

The human genome containing around 20,000 protein-encoding genes can provide the basic blueprint for brain development, but training and experiences in the early years from infancy through childhood are crucially important in sculpting brain development and function. As discussed earlier, prosocial behavior is displayed by most infants and preschool children. Culture plays a major role in enhancing and strengthening prosocial behavior. Even where genetic inheritance of the callous-unemotional trait is a significant risk factor for developing criminal psychopathic behavior, especially in chaotic, uncaring environments, expression of risky behavior can be muted by early adoption and raising with strong positive parenting.

The typical experience for a newborn is rapid bonding with a loving mother providing intensive high-attentive care. When this does not happen and there is profound social deprivation early in life, such as institutionalization in an orphanage, prosocial brain development is severely compromised. Connectivity between the prefrontal cortex and amygdala is altered and the amygdala-hypothalamic-pituitary stress axis affected ( Gee et al., 2013 ; McLaughlin et al., 2014 ). The constellation of problems found in institutionalized children include: smaller brain size with reduced cortical thickness, deficits in cognitive and language functions, problems with emotional regulation, and increased risk for psychotic symptoms ( Tottenham et al., 2010 ; McLaughlin et al., 2014 ; Trotta et al., 2015 ; Bick and Nelson, 2017 ).

From these studies we see that development plays an important role in cultivating behavior, and that early intervention can help recover normal development, even impacting adolescent criminals. How much of this is learning and how much is developmental determinism? Studies of economic games such as the Prisoner’s Dilemma indicate wide differences in the display of prosocial behavior in single and iterative play ( Fehr and Schmidt, 2003 ). However, a study of 102 adults participating in a repetitive Social Gambling Task indicated that an individual’s ability to learn how their actions impacted another’s outcome led to more prosocial behavior ( Kwak et al., 2014 ). In this context, learners were defined as those who made choices resulting in economic gain, whether for themselves or others, and is mathematical in nature. On a neuroscientific basis, learning occurs with the release of dopamine in the reward and reinforcement centers of the brain including regions of the striatum, such as the nucleus accumbens, from the ventral tegmental area and substantia nigra. Rodents have been observed to learn the conditions of an experimental shock more quickly after vicariously observing other rodents receive the shock during such conditioning experiments. These rodents vicariously learn the conditions of the experimental shock more rapidly if they also have experienced the shock for themselves, regardless of whether that shock was experienced within the context of the conditioning experiment or not ( Sanders et al., 2013 ; Lahvis, 2017 ). Rodents that had these vicarious learning experiences while hearing pain-induced vocalizations in others exhibited increased activation of both dopamine and serotonin circuitry and the ACC ( Kim et al., 2014 ) suggesting both empathy and learning through limbic systems and dopaminergic reward mechanisms. These studies on vicarious or empathic learning are supported by studies in humans showing experience of a painful stimulus increases empathy in human observers ( Eklund et al., 2009 ; Preis and Kroener-Herwig, 2012 ) which coincide with BOLD fMRI data indicating that the perception of pain in others is neurologically similar to the actual sensation of pain ( Preis et al., 2015 ). Participation in the Zurich Prosocial Game, a computer-based compassion training game that requires cooperation, has been shown to increase helping behavior in human subjects 5 days after training ( Leiberg et al., 2011 ), suggesting long-term processing and learning through reward mechanisms. Reflecting on gratitude increases scores on a self-report measure of altruistic values and coincides with increased BOLD fMRI activation in the nucleus accumbens and vmPFC ( Karns et al., 2017 ) indicating involvement of the mesolimbic dopamine pathway for reward and reinforcement learning of altruistic behavior ( Strobel et al., 2011 ). Further supporting the role of social learning as important in the cultivation of prosocial behavior are studies linking oxytocin, previously described for its prosocial and parental functions, with dopamine circuitry. Oxytocin receptors and dopamine receptors coexist in the striatum, medial PFC, substantia nigra and ventral tegmental area ( Skuse and Gallagher, 2009 ). Intranasal oxytocin in normal humans appeared to increase the reward for reciprocated cooperation through increased activation of the dopamine-activated, reward-linked nucleus accumbens during repeated iterations of Prisoner’s Dilemma game ( Rilling et al., 2012 ) which supports the role of oxytocin and dopamine learning pathways in trust and reciprocation behavior.

Thus social and cultural behaviors and activities are mechanisms for not only training the brain beginning in prenatal life, they are also principal components in determining brain development and dopaminergic reinforcement learning in the adult. Empathy and compassion are feelings with basic genetic and neural underpinnings crucial for the development of large interacting social communities characterizing our species. Successful cultures have strong and effective implicit and explicit mechanisms for promoting and enhancing empathetic and compassionate behavior. Empathy and compassion are core values in most, if not all, of the world’s major religions. Buddhist methods for training the mind through meditation and yoga ( Tomasino et al., 2014 ) are an example of positive approaches to enhance empathy and compassion that have been secularized and entered mainstream Western culture and medicine through mindfulness practices ( Gotink et al., 2015 ).

While this review has focused on those populating the extremes of the social, behavioral, and cognitive spectrums, the question remains as to whether individuals within a cultural norm can alter their behavior to become more compassionate and display less selfish behavior. For this non-clinical cohort there exists an interesting non-clinical approach encompassed by mindfulness-based and compassion meditation. In one BOLD fMRI based study of expert and novice compassion meditators, an increase in activity was observed in the ACC, amygdala, and the insular cortex (among other regions) of expert meditators during meditation compared with non-meditative rest in response to negative emotional sounds ( Lutz et al., 2008 ), indicating that compassion meditation increased activation of these emotion-processing limbic regions that are connected to the prefrontal cortex (also see Fox et al., 2016 ). These include regions implicated in the selfish–selfless spectrum as outlined previously in this text. The degree of activation of these regions also correlated with the self-reported depth of meditation and the degree of meditative training, indicating that additional experience activates these regions of the brain to a greater degree. Some groups have attempted to bring this practice to the clinical psychology setting ( Fox et al., 2016 ). One study found that 12 weeks of mindfulness-based intervention with compassion meditation in a group with social anxiety disorder resulted in a significant improvement in social anxiety symptoms, depression, social adjustment, and enhancement of compassion, all compared to a control group that was placed on a waiting list at the beginning of the study ( Koszycki et al., 2016 ).

In the general population, mindfulness-based practices have been reported to promote a plethora of effects on the whole body: reducing stress hormones, reducing inflammation, promoting pain relief and wound healing ( Hofmann et al., 2011 ; Lutz et al., 2013 ; Zeidan et al., 2015 ; Rosenkranz et al., 2016 ). Other forms of meditation including concentrative eye-gazing and controlled breathing have been shown to result in voluntary activation of components of the sympathetic nervous system, changes in plasma catecholamine and serum cortisol concentrations, and an attenuation of the innate immune response as measured by plasma cytokines ( Kox et al., 2014 ) and IL-6 markers ( Pace et al., 2009 ). The study of altruism and psychopathy has implications beyond these traits, as similar brain regions are affected in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder ( Keding and Herringa, 2016 ; Rinne-Albers et al., 2017 ). Yoga and controlled eye movement therapies, called Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), are techniques used for post-traumatic stress ( Zepeda Méndez et al., 2018 ) and recognized by APA (2017) and United States Department of Veterans Affairs (2017) . This suggests meditative or contemplative practices can affect acquired cognitive traits, including promoting unselfish behavior.

Altruism as envisioned by Auguste Comte exists in the general population and in zealous altruists who anchor the benevolence end of the Selfish–Selfless Spectrum. Advances in genetics, psychology, and neurobiology have increased our understanding of social neurocircuitry in the human brain, providing critical insights into resolving ongoing philosophical, biological, and social debate over “universal selfishness” or “universal goodness” characterizing human behavior. Both positions are partial truths based on the components of the Selfish–Selfless Spectrum being observed. As a lens into the social brain, the extremes of the Selfish–Selfless Spectrum defined by callous, unemotional psychopaths and dynamic, zealous altruists reveal the importance of both genetic and neuron-based heredity systems and reward processes in strongly influencing actions toward others and cooperative behavior. Critically, individuals with genes associated with developing dangerous social disorders such as callous, unemotional traits have the potential to modify those conditions using cognitive therapeutic interventions (e.g., strong positive parenting, compassion training) to change where they reside on the social spectrum. Evidence from population groups ranging from incarcerated juveniles, adopted children, twins, and meditators point to the important role of neuroplasticity and reward learning circuitry in forming and reforming of neural connections that determine our behavior. Success with treatment programs promoting positive behavior via the brain reward system in these diverse groups suggests promise as a therapeutic approach to mitigating violent, destructive behavior. Approaches involving introspection and promoting acts of compassion that activate the reward system, such as mindfulness training, are entering the mainstream of clinical treatment for pain management, depression, stress, and behavior modification.

Author Contributions

JS and DG contributed equally to the conception, design, writing of the manuscript, revisions, and approval of the submitted version.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Matt Hazzard for contributing the medical illustrations and figures used in this text and Dr. Wayne Bell for the encouragement in the study of critical issues in neurotheology.

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• Essay on Animals

Good Example Of Essay On Selfless Animals And Human Selfishness

Type of paper: Essay

Topic: Animals , People , Human , Food , Hazard , Autism , Nature , Interaction

Words: 1400

Published: 02/20/2023

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When Luna appeared his presence immediately began to draw attention. The town of Gold River depended largely on natural resources, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain a viable economy (Groc 159). Luna’s presence drew attention, tourism, and the money a struggling Gold River needed. That is not to say that Gold River’s people exploited Luna with any necessary malice; Luna was a gift and much of Gold River were grateful for his presence. For others, however, his presence caused considerable concern in several areas. And by making his new home in the bay off shore, a town soon became divided on several fronts. Luna was unafraid of people and sought out the opportunity to socialize with them (Groc 158). The term for this is “solitary sociable” (Groc 158) and refers to a social animal like Luna, in his case a toothed whale, who, after becoming separated from his pod seeks out humans for companionship. Luna was playful and was never reported, according to Groc (159), to show aggression to the people around him. His sheer size, however, made him a formidable playmate. In his attempts to engage with humans, he damaged boats and endangered people in kayaks (Groc 159). Luna meant many things to many different people. Some saw him as creating too much destruction while others welcomed the increased tourism. Native Americans believed he was the reincarnation of a respected chief (Groc 158). Everyone had an opinion and no one knew what to do. Ultimately, Luna became so accustomed to humans it led to his death when he ventured too close to a boat and received a fatal blow from the propeller (Groc 158). The controversy consisted primarily of what was best to do for Luna and many experts weighed in. Should he be left to his own devices or led back to his pod? No matter what was considered or attempted, however, human interaction kept Luna off the coast of Gold River. By receiving interaction and food, Luna was encouraged to stay where he was and even increase his interaction with people. In Luna’s case the harm came to him and to property, but not directly to humans. But not all cases of human interaction with wild animals end so benignly. There is a seeming disregard for the nature of animals, and a short-sightedness among humans about wild animals. Humans repeatedly attempt to interact with animals, and their seemingly docile response leads to an unwarranted level of comfort. But it is not because the animal has become tame; it is because the animal has lost its fear of man. This inevitably leads to disaster. In Luna’s case, he was the one who suffered most, but that is not always the case. In 2014, National Geographic highlighted the danger of human fascination with wild animals (Slater n.p.) both to the human and the animal. She cited one after another case of exotic pet owners, whose animals, seemingly tame, one day embraced their instinct, killing or maiming the human who cared for them: mountain lions, chimpanzees, kangaroos, snakes. Overall there are few restrictions on owning these animals (Slater n.p.) many of which can be bought online despite some being considered endangered animals. Common among all animal lovers is the tendency towards anthropomorphizing animals: attributing human qualities or emotions to animals. This can lull people into a sense of comfort, telling themselves ‘he would never hurt me; he loves me’ or ‘he seems so sad when I’ leading the person to do something in neither of their best interests. Keeping exotic pets is not the only ways human put both themselves and animals at risk. Wildlife reserves and animal parks are filled with warning signs not to feed the animals. The cute bear someone hands snacks to one day becomes 250 pounds of assertive predator unafraid to approach humans in no time at all. The Humane Society warns against this very thing (“Four Reasons” n.p.) noting the danger of animals losing their fear of people or becoming accustomed to cars. When animals are no longer afraid of humans, they will approach humans or make their way into recreational areas where humans and their food can be found or even in residential areas (“Four Reasons” n.p.). This creates an enormous amount of danger for both the human and the animal even though it may appear friendly. The fact is, it remains a wild animal and is simply unafraid to seek food from people. These animals can be become dangerous when they are not rewarded for their efforts or become frightened or anxious. Feeding animals from cars can be just as dangerous for both the people and the animals. If animals are used to being fed from cars, they are increasingly likely to be hit by cars. Further, they may break into cars in search of food with reports from Yosemite National Park noting over 1,000 cars per year damaged by bears in search of food (“Four Reasons” n.p.). Animals can develop a taste for human food which may not be good for them, or may become so used to being fed they seek out humans instead of following their own learned behavior to hunt for food themselves. The Humane Society reported a problem even with feeding wild ducks and geese. They can be fed so much human food they develop a disease, angel wing, as a result of depending on humans to meet their needs and forego their natural, healthy diets (“Four Reasons” n.p.). Another common use of wild animals is for entertainment. In circuses and shows around the world, wild animals are required to perform for audiences. They are removed from their natural environments and taught behaviors that violate many of their instincts (“Animals Used” n.p.). They are limited in space and kept chained or caged with limited contact with their own kind. PETA suggests, in a video series, animals which have been subjected to ill-treatment and unnatural expectations for so long they became erratic and dangerous, an allegation supported by video evidence entitled “Driven Insane” (“Animals Used” n.p.). Endless reports of wild animals rampaging or turning on trainers abound: elephants, big cats, bears, and yes, even orcas just like Luna. The interaction between humans and wild animals involve a delicate balance. Humans are responsible for the world we all share and, by default, for the animals with which we share it. But the degree of that responsibility and how it is carried out is the gray area around which much of the debate is centered. In the case of Luna, conservationists and wildlife activists fought to keep people away from Luna so he would not become accustomed to, and ultimately dependent on, people, but were unsuccessful. The dilemma was the need for socialization that whales have and whether or not he would survive without the human interaction he sought (Groc 159). Animals that are kept in cages or abused may require human intervention and might not ever be able to return to a natural habitat (Slater n.p.), and therein lays another dilemma: how far do humans go when it was humans who created the problem? What of orphaned wild animals? Left to their own, they are not likely to survive, but raised by humans who are not specifically trained to do so, they will never learn the skills necessary to live in their habitat and become destined to an unnatural life. In describing one former exotic- pet-owner-turned-environmentalist, Slater (n.p.) shared the man’s personal awakening when he realized the injustice he was doing to his captive animals. After visiting Africa and seeing wildlife existing in a primal rhythm with its environment, he knew that no person could offer a wild animal the life nature intended it to have, the life humans should ensure it can have, and the life the animal deserves to have.

Works Cited

“Animals Used for Entertainment.” People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. n.d. Web. Groc, Isabelle. “Orca Encounters.” Becoming an Active Reader: Skills in Reading and Writing. Ed. Eric Henderson. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. 158-162. Print. “Four Reasons Not to Feed Wildlife.” The Humane Society of the United States. May 7, 2013. Web. Slater, Lauren. “Wild Obsession.” National Geographic. April, 2014. Web.

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Home — Essay Samples — Psychology — Human Behavior — Essay On Survival Is Selfish

Essay on Survival is Selfish

• Categories: Human Behavior

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Words: 636 |

Published: Mar 5, 2024

Words: 636 | Page: 1 | 4 min read

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