Human Nature Means You’re Both Selfish And Selfless
Looking out for number one has been important for survival for as long as there have been human beings.
But self-interest isn’t the only trait that helped people win at evolution. Groups of individuals who were predisposed to cooperate, care for each other and uphold social norms of fairness tended to survive and expand relative to other groups, thereby allowing these prosocial motivations to proliferate.
So today, concern for oneself and concern for others both contribute to our sense of fairness. Together they facilitate cooperation among unrelated individuals, something ubiquitous among people but uncommon in nature.
A critical question is how people balance these two motivations when making decisions.
We investigate this question in our work at the Social Cognitive Neuroscience Lab...