Do Selfish People Steal Our Utility?

Psychology, and the HEXACO model, are seriously worth studying

I have had some pretty good bosses over the course of my life. When I was a teenager delivering pizzas and I had no place to live, my boss put me up for a week. Another boss diffused complaints I’d gotten from irritable and hypersensitive coworkers, which actually turned out to be an even bigger deal. But some bosses have been, well… worse.

My most recent boss was, to put it kindly, a Narcissist. He was hypersensitive to criticism, insulted people lower in the organization, pushed his own duties on his employees, and applied rules unfairly, initiating disciplinary proceedings against his personal enemies while letting others slide. His feelings were a big deal at work; in one meeting, we spent about an hour basically talking about how he was feeling. The most hilarious thing about working under this guy was probably the way he would feign enthusiasm for unpleasant aspects of the work environment, deny the existence of well-known problems, and then say, over and over again in meetings, “I’m never going to lie to you.” Eventually I started to suspect that his saying “I’m never going to lie to you” was self-talk, reminding him to seriously at least try to tell the truth for once.

Most of these are things I experienced first-hand; some of it was through the grapevine, as the entire organization reacted to the unpleasant changes that occurred when this guy stepped into a managerial role. I felt bad for the staff who worked most closely with him, and made an effort to check in with them from time to time to give them a chance to vent. Unfortunately, the overall level of trust dropped pretty sharply, and we all rapidly figured out we’d better be careful about whom we opened up to. Promoting this guy to a position of authority was, ultimately, the equivalent of setting off a misery bomb in the center of the building.

Draining the Joy out of Life

Naively speaking, this is what we might naturally assume selfish, dishonest people do: They drain the happiness from other people so they can feast on it themselves.

Right? Maybe they steal things for their own benefit. Maybe they put down other people for fun, or brag to make themselves look better. Maybe they cut corners to save time, manipulate others into doing what they want, or cheat to gain rewards others had to work hard to attain. Speaking like a utilitarian, they siphon utility away from others, and into themselves.

Image Courtesy of Mert Coşkun

But is this really what’s going on? Do they actually derive any utility from the cost they inflict on others? Are selfish people actually happier than others around them?

It may make sense that they would be, but we should probably check, though.

Fortunately, this is something I’ve been checking for decades, ever since the first research started to compare subjective well-being to the personality traits in the HEXACO. For those of you new to this blog, it’s been found that there is a broad personality factor relevant to moral behavior called Honesty-Humility (H).¹ People at the high end of this trait describe themselves, and are described by others, as sincere, honest, trustworthy, giving, and kind; people low in this trait are described by words like conceited, selfish, dishonest, and vain.² They say things like, “If I knew that I could never get caught, I would be willing to steal a million dollars.” If we’re looking for someone capable of draining utility from others and taking it for themselves, people low in Honesty-Humility are on the job.

So how do does Honesty-Humility actually relate to how happy people are? Are people low in Honesty-Humility less happy, then?

No, Honesty-Humility actually relates positively to overall satisfaction with life.³

Wait, but are these honest, humble people happy moment by moment?

Yes.⁴

They’re not just satisfied, they’re actually happier?

They feel positive emotions, yes.⁵

But what about negative emotions?

They feel those less often.⁶

But we might naturally wonder about—

Look, people high in Honesty-Humility have better relations with others, more feelings of autonomy and mastery over their environment, a better sense of personal growth, more purpose in life, and they’re also more self-accepting than others. By every measure of happiness we know of, they do just a little bit better.⁷

Let me guess, people high in Honesty-Humility are also less prone to mental disorders?

Well… are we talking addiction, psychosis, or personality disorders?

Uh, all three.

OK, Honesty-Humility is also mildly protective against mental disorders like addiction, psychosis, and personality disorders.⁸

Why Aren’t Selfish People Happier than the Rest of Us?

To clarify, all of these relationships can be expressed the other way around: A vast body of research finds selfish people are less satisfied, less happy in the moment, have less purpose in life, more negative emotions, are more prone to psychosis etc. ad nauseum.

These are the results of recent meta analyses, not just a few pre-replication crisis studies I’m quoting here. So they’re pretty trustworthy overall. Yes, it does pay to be skeptical, and if you’re going to cross your arms and tell me you don’t believe any of this, I respect that.

But even leaving personality aside, the same findings hold. Simple acts of dishonesty, like cheating, reduce life satisfaction;⁹ an altruistic pattern of behavior improves not only mood, but also health and longevity.¹⁰ We don’t require an external reinforcement on behavior—our biology rewards and punishes us for individual acts of virtue and vice.

So whether you’re willing to draw the obvious conclusion from all this or not, I can definitely say that I have absolutely no evidence whatsoever to support the claim that selfish people are happier than others. Which is what they should be if they are stealing happiness from other people. There is no way we can successfully argue they are taking utility from others and enjoying it themselves. At best, selfish people are utility vandals who just destroy the happiness in other people. At worst, they’re making the rest of us unhappy as part of a strategy of making themselves less happy, too.

But why aren’t they benefiting from all the happiness they take away from the rest of us? Why do they do it, then? Well I can’t cite any studies, here, but I have a pretty good idea:

I think selfish people are slightly messed up. I think they’re compensating for a yawning emptiness inside themselves with short-sighted exploitation of their social environment.

We have terms for a wide variety of disorders, right? Disorders of the blood, or the thyroid, or the muscles. We have names for psychological problems, too, like schizophrenia, anorexia, or alcoholism. When we talk about a person X with one of these conditions Y, we mean “Y is a thing that is wrong with X,” and maybe hope something could be done about it. We can name multiple disorders like Psychopathy, Narcissism, and Machiavellianism,¹¹ or Borderline Personality Disorder¹² which correlate negatively with Honesty-Humility. If there are disorders of unselfishness, I don’t know their names. Have you ever heard of anything like this?¹³

Nature tries to make our bodies and our brains work well, in the sense that it promotes traits that enhance fitness. Modest, calculated, situationally appropriate selflessness, the kind of thing measured as moderate and high levels of Honesty-Humility, is such a trait.

If you picture a generic human, do you see someone in your mind who doesn’t care at all about whether they do the right thing, or are helpful to others around them? Do you see someone who is simply motivated to get what they need regardless of the cost to others around them? I don’t. I see the generic human as someone who not only tries to follow rules, but makes an effort to avoid harming others even when they could get away with it.

There’s a very good biological reason why psychopaths and similar people are rare: extreme selfishness isn’t adaptive. Humans who cut corners, lie, manipulate people, and betray their allies make terrible partners. They don’t work well with teammates, they struggle to keep friends, their pair-bonds are weak, and they also make terrible parents. Fine, in a world of bacteria who consume resources and reproduce via fission, this may be no problem. No partners or parents required. But success and reproduction, for humans, requires cooperation. And cooperation isn’t easy. It’s hard. Selfish people are bad at this—they’re bad at a basic skill our ancestors needed in order to pass on their genes. Sure, they can try to compensate with manipulation and flattery, but how well does that work? And for how long?

No Apple Pie, You’re Overgeneralizing from Weird People

Say that I am. Say that growing up among Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and whatever D stands for Democratic people has addled my wits and convinced me that casual, so-long-as-it-isn’t-incredily-costly altruism is the rule of the day, when in reality, nature is harsh and cruel. Red of tooth and claw! Nasty, brutish, and short! Like sharks!

Right, like shark mothers, who care for their young? Because according to this grade-school-appropriate web source that I totally didn’t look up just now, Great White Mommy Sharks “swim close to their young and use their bodies to shield them from potential predators. They may also push their young towards the surface to help them breathe and regulate their body temperature. Mother sharks also produce a special milk called ‘yolk sac milk,’ which provides their young with the nutrients they need to survive.”

Sharks may not be much for saving the rainforest or scrupulously obeying traffic laws. But being a good shark definitely means being selectively, strategically altruistic. So, what I’m talking about is at least applicable to WEIRD people, and great white sharks.

(By the way I checked my subscriber map. All of my readers are either sharks, or WEIRD people.)

Have you ever wondered where you lived? So have I! Thanks to this handy infographic, now we know.

Trait Theory is the Periodic Table of Psychology

At this point I think we can put to rest the idea that selfish people steal utility from others. At best, their behavior ruins things for other people without helping them at all; at worst, their behavior is dysfunctional and makes them unhappy along with everyone else. We can talk about this because psychologists

1. Carefully investigated the space of human variation, moving from folk conceptions of abilities, values, and personality until reaching a working model containing selfishness,

2. Made repeated efforts to measure these traits, and then,

3. Repeatedly investigated the relationships between these traits and a variety of biological and sociological variables, like genetics, social status, country of residence, and happiness.

The consequences of this one, single finding about selfish people being unhappy are philosophically vast. To name just a few:

• Maybe we should rethink the need to punish wrongdoers; they aren’t making themselves happy with what they do.

• Maybe we should rethink our attitude toward our own temptations. Vices aren’t likely to make us happy.

• Maybe we should think about whether we should be impressed by the Bad Boys. They’re basically working with a mental health condition.

• Maybe we might make some insights about the purpose of life, or morality.

But not everybody seems to see progress in psychology this way. Adam Mastroianni recently asked, “Why doesn’t psychology have more to show for itself?” His impression is that the entire field of psychology is pretty useless, because after the replication crisis, nobody bothered to check which papers didn’t replicate:

[I]f you hear that 60% of papers in your field don’t replicate, shouldn't you care a lot about which ones? Why didn't my colleagues and I immediately open up that paper's supplement, click on the 100 links, and check whether any of our most beloved findings died? The answer has to be, “We just didn't think it was an important thing to do.” We heard about the plane crash and we didn't even bother to check the list of casualties. What a damning indictment of our field!

…there's no world-changing insight like relativity, evolution, or DNA, nor any smaller-but-still-very-cool discoveries like polymerase chain reaction, CRISPR, or Higgs bosons. Only a few psychological discoveries are mentioned by more than one commenter, except for “most psychology studies are bunk.”

My response to this is to say that he’s completely ignoring the things that matter, and looking only at empty fads. He lists three paradigms:

• the cognitive bias craze (not really interesting unless I know which biases I’m prone to)

• “situations matter” (not really interesting because of course they matter, they just affect different people differently)

• pick a noun (like “leadership”) and study it.

But studying anything in psychology, without having a firm basis in trait theory, is like trying to be a chemist without the Periodic Table. Is this seriously what these guys have been doing? They really don’t care about the results in their own field? I’m a physicist, not a psychologist, and I care enough about the psychological findings to carry out independent investigations of my own!

In the past, Mrs. Apple Pie has told me she thinks psychology is pretty frou-frou. She has a point. If 60% of your field doesn’t replicate, then it really seems like it’s mostly junk.

But the reality is that the 60% that didn’t replicate was never the important stuff. The solid, useful findings in psychology are all found in

• cognitive psychology,

• intelligence research,

• behavioral genetics, and

• trait theory,

each of which is over fifty years old, and whose findings have replicated very well. It’s a real tragedy that these fields aren’t taught in the conventional secondary education system, but if you’re reading this, it’s not too late to learn about The Empirical, Theoretical, and Practical Advantages of the HEXACO Model of Personality Structure directly from Michael Ashton and Kibeom Lee. (Or you know. You could just read about it on Wikipedia.)

But I wouldn’t ignore it entirely if I were you. Before long, even the cool kids will check the end of Wikipedia’s article on the Big Five and start to realize that maybe, trying to walk around with only five factors of personality is actually pretty uncool.

1. I’ve written before about how Honesty-Humility is actually a blend of honesty-related traits on the one hand, with patient, forgiving, agreeable-related traits on the other. This is seriously a problem if we want to understand what people are like who are honest and also mean, or those who are easygoing and also complete con-artists. But I’m not trying to talk about those people here. I’m just wanting to talk about people who are good or bad in the combined sense of being moral + nice vs immoral + mean. For that purpose, ordinary Honesty-Humility does the trick very nicely.

2. Lee, K., & Ashton, M. C. (2008). The HEXACO personality factors in the indigenous personality lexicons of English and 11 other languages. Journal of personality, 76(5), 1001-1054.

3. Anglim, J., Horwood, S., Smillie, L. D., Marrero, R. J., & Wood, J. K. (2020). Predicting psychological and subjective well-being from personality: A meta-analysis. Psychological bulletin, 146(4), 279. Available Online

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid.

8. Pletzer, J. L., Thielmann, I., & Zettler, I. (2023). Who is healthier? A meta-analysis of the relations between the HEXACO personality domains and health outcomes. European Journal of Personality, 08902070231174574.

9. Muñoz-García, A., & Aviles-Herrera, M. J. (2014). Effects of academic dishonesty on dimensions of spiritual well-being and satisfaction: a comparative study of secondary school and university students. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 39(3), 349-363.

10. Post, S. G. (2014). Altruism, happiness, and health: It's good to be good. An Exploration of the Health Benefits of Factors That Help Us to Thrive, 66-76.

11. Lee, K., & Ashton, M. C. (2005). Psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism in the Five-Factor Model and the HEXACO model of personality structure. Personality and Individual differences, 38(7), 1571-1582.

12. Roters, J., & Book, A. (2023). Using the HEXACO to explain the structure of borderline and psychopathic personality traits. Personality and Mental Health.

13. Of course, if I were feeling uncharitable towards religious conservatives, I might have mentioned them.