The Best Way to Deal with the Selfish People in Your Life

You’ve undoubtedly been faced with people who refuse to offer their help, despite the fact that you could really use some assistance. Perhaps it’s a relative you’ve known for many years who shows up at each family occasion ready to eat but not ready to cook or help clean up afterwards. When it comes to gift-giving, whether at a holiday celebration, birthday, or wedding, this person appears empty-handed, and doesn’t even appear to feel ashamed about it.

Indeed, at a time when people may be more tuned in than ever to the need to behave selflessly, there seems now to be a perception that selfishness is on the rise. A December 2020 Boston Globe/Suffolk University poll revealed that 27% of the 500 respondents sampled agreed with the statement that people in Massachusetts are "mostly selfish and looking out for their best interests," an increase from the 18% reported in May 2020.

Selfishness can appear in many forms in everyday life, but whatever the behavior, selfish people fundamentally believe they are entitled to more than are other people. There is no “fair share” with them, because the idea of sharing is foreign to their very nature. However, is there a way to get even the greediest of people to act on behalf of others?

According to Bence Bago and colleagues (2020) of the University of Toulouse Capitole, it may be theoretically possible to do so through a "deliberative correction" mechanism, in which you present them with a chance to redeem themselves by giving them a chance to think before they act. Add to this some incentive for behaving in a more selfless, prosocial manner, and perhaps they will turn off the selfishness switch and engage the on-button to become more giving.

In a cleverly-designed experiment, the French researchers put their participants into simulated games intended to shape their decisions to act in selfish vs. prosocial ways. In these simulated games, a participant must make a decision on how to divide experimental “money” with an anonymous but simulated participant.

In one version of the game ("Dictator") the participant is the one to make the decision. In the second version ("Ultimatum"), the offer is made to the participant by the simulated other. The incentive to offer or accept an unequal division of money comes from the condition set up by the experimenter that refusal to cooperate could result in no one getting the money at all. Your job, as participant, is to balance your own interest (getting as much money as you can) against the option of being left completely empty-handed. Variations of this basic game design involved having participants make decisions that would benefit or harm the “public good,” in that some decisions would lead to money being donated to a common pool rather than to one or the other participant.

To put this experimental situation into more everyday terms, consider the decisions you make when someone offers you 10 cookies and suggests you share them with a friend. The only condition placed on this offer is that if you offer too few cookies, no one gets any. You've got to figure out how many is "equitable" beyond a simple 50-50 split.

To force participants into making quick, intuitive, decisions, the experimenters set up the game so players made their decisions in the condition of high cognitive load (having to complete a challenging mental task). In the deliberative correction condition, there was no such pressure and participants could make a less hurried decision.

Participants in the set of seven studies following this basic outline were either undergraduate students at a Hungarian university or online test-takers from English-speaking countries. Their reading ability was tested as well to make sure that they could understand the instructions for their specific variant of the game they were playing.

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With all of these experimental controls in place, the research team could then address the question of how to curb people's innately selfish or selfless tendencies. Unfortunately, no amount of experimental enticement to act selflessly actually changed the decisions that the innately selfish made while playing the game. Having more time to decide on whether to benefit themselves, the other participant, or the “greater good” made no difference in the way participants dispersed the experimental rewards. They behaved the same way, whether having cognitive load or not.

In describing this finding, Bago et al. note that rather than making corrections after having more time, “it is far more likely that one’s final selfish or prosocial choice was already selected in the initial response stage” (p. 5)… making the deliberative correction model one that “does not present a viable psychological model of prosocial behavior” (p. 12).

The sad conclusion from the French-Hungarian study is that people will make their choices, whether selfishly or altruistically, on the basis of their innate, first reactions. As Bago and his collaborators suggest, policymakers trying to bring out the best motives of the public will be better off trying to influence those initial, intuitive decisions that people tend to make rather than bend their decisions after the fact. It is difficult to move them from this initial reaction. Your selfish relatives, then, will most likely not be “guilt-tripped” or otherwise moved by what you do or say from acting in their own best interests.

However, another way to look at the findings is to consider the percentage splits of choices that the participants made across the conditions of the study. More people made selfish choices (about 46%) than prosocial choices (38%), but the odds of choosing the prosocial option were highest (about 54%) when the choice they had to make involved receiving rather than giving rewards (the "Ultimatum" condition).

Armed with this data, consider what you might do to encourage people to behave less selfishly if their impulse is to take more than give. The Bago et al. results would suggest that you offer a choice rather than waiting for them to make an offer. Ask those selfish relatives if they’d like to split a gift for a holiday occasion, and when dishwashing time comes up, present them with the “wash” or “dry” options.

To sum up, the best way to handle the selfish people in your life may not be to expect them to change on their own, but to give them an opportunity to behave less selfishly. Overcoming someone’s innate selfishness may be an ambitious enterprise, but under the right circumstances could help steer them to make more prosocial, and potentially fulfilling, choices.

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