Are Humans Really Selfish by Nature? 

Are human beings fundamentally selfish? 

It is one of the oldest questions about the human condition. Human history contains more than enough violence, greed and conflict to make the idea of an essentially selfish species seem plausible. 

But humans are also exceptionally cooperative. We help strangers, care for the vulnerable, share resources and build societies dependent upon cooperation between enormous numbers of unrelated people. 

How can the same species be capable of both? 

Understanding this contradiction is central to humanity’s long-running attempt to explain the human condition. A primatologist may investigate empathy, an economist altruism, an anthropologist cooperation and a biologist aggression. But these disciplines are increasingly supplying pieces of the same larger puzzle: why are human beings capable of extraordinary cooperation and selflessness, yet also selfishness, conflict and destruction? 

In that sense, the ancient problem of the human condition has increasingly become a scientific one. 

The surprisingly cooperative human 

The late primatologist Frans de Waal was among the scientists who challenged bleak assumptions about our evolutionary inheritance. 

His research into primate behaviour documented empathy, reconciliation, cooperation and responses resembling a sense of fairness. His work helped establish that important foundations of human social and moral behaviour have deep evolutionary roots. 

Economist Ernst Fehr has approached another part of the puzzle experimentally. His influential research into cooperation and fairness has found that people frequently cooperate with unrelated strangers and may even incur costs to punish people who behave unfairly. 

Research by economist and behavioural scientist Samuel Bowles has addressed an equally fundamental evolutionary question: how could altruistic and cooperative behaviour have developed through natural selection? 

Bowles and Herbert Gintis have argued that human evolution produced a species in which substantial numbers of people are willing to make sacrifices to uphold social norms and help others, including strangers. 

These researchers are approaching different questions, but their work addresses one side of the same larger problem of the human condition: our remarkable capacity for cooperation. 

And establishing how deeply cooperation runs only makes the other side of the puzzle more pressing. 

Why did such an extraordinarily cooperative species also become so competitive and destructive? 

The “goodness paradox” 

Harvard biological anthropologist Richard Wrangham has approached this contradiction through the evolution of aggression. 

His book The Goodness Paradox asks how humans came to be comparatively peaceful in everyday face-to-face interactions while retaining an extraordinary capacity for deliberate and organised violence. 

Wrangham distinguishes between reactive aggression—an impulsive response to provocation—and proactive aggression, which is planned and deliberate. He argues that human evolution involved selection against reactive aggression, helping produce a more socially tolerant species, while leaving intact our capacity for calculated violence. 

Wrangham’s “goodness paradox” is therefore another scientific route into the fundamental problem of the human condition: how do we reconcile humanity’s cooperative and moral capacities with our capacity for extraordinary destruction? 

Evolutionary biology, anthropology, psychology, neuroscience and behavioural science are approaching different dimensions of that question. 

But can those pieces be brought together? Can we explain not only individual behaviours, but why the human species became so psychologically conflicted in the first place? 

Can we explain the human condition itself? 

Some thinkers have attempted to answer that larger question with a more encompassing explanation. 

Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith, founder of the international charity Fix The World, has spent decades pursuing precisely that objective. A biography of Jeremy Griffith traces the development of his work on the Human Condition and his attempt to reconcile humanity’s cooperative heritage with our capacity for destructive behaviour. 

Griffith’s explanation centres on a conflict he proposes arose between instinct and conscious intellect. 

Instincts, in his account, are genetically acquired orientations shaped by natural selection over generations. The conscious mind operates differently: it can experiment, learn through cause and effect and eventually manage behaviour through understanding. 

Griffith argues that when consciousness emerged in our ancestors, the developing intellect needed to experiment with managing life for itself. But that experimentation inevitably sometimes defied our already-established instinctive orientations. 

The problem, according to Griffith, was that the conscious mind could not initially explain why it needed to do so. 

Our instincts’ continuing opposition was therefore experienced as condemnation of the conscious mind’s necessary search for understanding. Griffith argues that humans became deeply insecure about their worth and increasingly sought to prove themselves, producing defensive anger, egocentricity and alienation. 

This is where Griffith’s proposed explanation of the human condition has a particularly significant consequence. 

If these destructive behaviours are not immutable selfish instincts, but defensive responses to our inability to understand why consciousness had to defy our instincts, then Griffith argues they need not be permanent. 

Once we can explain why the conscious mind had to experiment—and therefore why its apparent defiance of our instinctive orientations was necessary—the insecurity and need for psychological self-defence can subside. 

In Griffith’s account, explaining the human condition therefore provides the means to resolve the underlying conflict that produced humanity’s anger, egocentricity and alienation. 

One enormous puzzle 

Across these different disciplines, scientists are tackling fundamental pieces of the human condition: empathy, altruism, cooperation, aggression and conflict. But together, they show how the ancient question of the human condition has increasingly become a subject of scientific investigation. 

The stakes are considerable. 

Whether human conflict is simply an unavoidable consequence of a fundamentally selfish nature, or whether its deeper causes can be understood and addressed, profoundly affects how we view ourselves and humanity’s future. 

After centuries spent trying to understand the world around us, understanding the human condition may remain one of our most consequential unfinished tasks.