Why everything selfish and what to do

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

I want to tell you, where does the idea of ​​the pursuit of others for personal gain and what you can do to improve communication with society.

Why do we think that everything is selfish

Each person has ever accused the other of excessive self-love. Mentally or out loud, it does not matter. The main thing is that we see for other selfish behavior far more often than with him.

This is a scientific explanation - naive cynicism. it thinking distortionThat is, to varying degrees, each of us. His definition of cognitive psychology is: people naively expect from other, more selfish behavior, than it actually is.

We demonstrated this effect in 1999 by American psychologists Justin Kruger and Thomas Gilovich. They conducted the following experiment

Naive cynicism in everyday theories of responsibility assessment: On biased assumptions of bias.

Psychologists have gathered a group of pairs of people: spouses, participants debate, darts players and video games. The participants' task was to assess the degree of responsibility for the good and bad events in the pair. To do this, each person was asked two questions.

1. «What do you think, what is your contribution to the good and bad events in a pair? " Most of the participants answered the same way. They said that about equally applied force and / or have achieved success (winning the game or dispute, supported the marriage) and equally made mistakes.
2. "Do you think, as your partner will appreciate your contribution to the good and bad things?" And here comes the fun part. The participants claimed that their partners are sure to exaggerate their contribution to the victory and happy marriage and preumenshat its responsibility for the error.

Such an expectation selfish behavior of others and is called naive cynicism. Naive it is because people are not looking for evidence that is attributed to others. They just think the other selfish, especially those who do not agree with them. Here is a classic description of the theory of naive cynicism:

• I am not biased.
• You are prejudiced, if you do not agree with me.
• Your intentions / actions reflect your egocentric bias.

It would be naive to believe that the only disagreement with you makes people selfish. So behaved young children. When my mother does not give her son a candy bar before dinner, he believes that the insidious mother wants to eat it herself, and being selfish, when in fact it takes care of health of the child.

Like most distorted thinking, naive cynicism is present in every person, but manifests itself in varying degrees. Someone denounces selfish everybody and surrounds himself with sycophants, and someone accuses others of self-interest, only when his capture emotions.

Selfishness is not that man lives as he wants, but the fact that he makes others to live according to his principles.

Oscar Wilde

How to overcome the naive cynicism

To begin with - to recognize that we are all naive cynic. There are no people who would not have tried at least once be fair to call others selfish. You could blame the partner who has done something for himself and did not consult with you. Or a stranger in the store, which is faster than you could run up to a free ticket office.

Manifestations of naive cynicism should be seen as a scale on one end of which a person who considers all polls selfish (regardless of circumstances), and on the other - always rational and reasonable evaluating human actions genius. Most of us are in the middle.

Do not try to objectively assess the contribution of the person in a particular achievement. You still will not work. After all, the foundation of naive cynicism - comparing yourself with others. To shake it enough three questions:

• This man really selfish?
• Is there any other explanation for his behavior?
• Maybe I should favorably consider his selfish, to justify themselves?

The more you ask yourself these questions and be given time to ensure that they give full answers, the less will yield to the naive cynicism.

Another effective way to offer the authors of the experiment, psychologists Kruger and Gilovich. In their study, they noted that the best strategy for dealing with naive cynicism - to realize that working together more benefits than a single contribution.

For example, a football team can win only if every player interacts with other players, and the couple will "live happily ever after"Only if both partners in this endeavor.

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whether a person is selfish by nature? Scientists are not yet able to give a definite answer. But one thing is certain: the joint efforts bring more results than acting alone. And if those efforts, guided by the idea of ​​the common good rather than self-interest, we will always achieve more.