But Where Is It Taking …. Another unfortunate factor — many find it hard to detect selfishness in themselves. As a study from Yale psychologists and economists at the University of Zurich found out, selfish people make adaptions to their memories to avoid feeling bad about their egotistical behavior.
The research, published on April 29 in the journal Nature Communications , revealed that people tend to remember themselves being better to others than they actually were. Fast-forward a few years from now, and certainly more than a few people will be remembering their actions of today with a very different slant from what actually happened. At what point does your right not to get infected outweigh the right of another to pursue economic prosperity?
How much does my right to survive depend on the good will and cooperation from others? Answering these truthfully, without feeling attacked, can stem the tide of real and perceived selfishness that goes against our better natures and costs us lives and societal degradation. Exploring Morality and Selfishness in Modern Times. Key Takeaways. This insecurity of not having enough motivates a person to hold on to their resources and not share them.
Another reason why people are selfish is that they have a fear of losing control. If someone has many needs and goals, then they overvalue their resources because they think that these resources are going to help them reach their goals.
If they lose these resources, they lose their goals and if they lose their goals they feel they have lost control over their life. To him, sharing notes could mean losing an important resource that could help him reach his goal. And not being able to reach your goals is a recipe for a feeling of loss of control over your life.
In other cases, the way a person was raised can also make them act in selfish ways. The only child or the child whose every demand was met by his parents spoilt child learns to take as much as he can and give very little back. Such children learn to care only for their needs with little empathy or consideration for others. As children, we were all like that to some extent but, gradually, we began to learn that other people have emotions too and so developed empathy.
The most important thing to do when dealing with a selfish person is to figure out the reason behind their selfishness and then work on eliminating that reason. Self-absorption is a hard characteristic for anyone, but it becomes especially dangerous when someone has power or authority over others.
They have a sense of entitlement and expect everything to go their way. The list of characteristics that make up the personality of a selfish person is not exhaustive.
However, it does give you a good idea of how to spot someone who only cares about themselves and will do anything necessary to get ahead without regard for others. Skip to content Search for:. Many anthropologists agree that such egalitarian societies were normal until a few thousand years ago, when population growth led to the development of farming and a settled lifestyle.
In view of the above, there seems little reason to assume that traits such as racism, warfare and male domination should have been selected by evolution — as they would have been of little benefit to us.
Individuals who behaved selfishly and ruthlessly would be less likely to survive, since they would have been ostracised from their groups. It makes more sense then to see traits such as cooperation, egalitarianism, altruism and peacefulness as natural to human beings.
These were the traits that have been prevalent in human life for tens of thousands of years. So presumably these traits are still strong in us now. Of course, you might argue that if this is case, why do present day humans often behave so selfishly and ruthlessly?
Why are these negative traits so normal in many cultures?
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