Are People Fundamentally Selfish?

We often hear that human beings are inherently selfish; That we’re naturally driven by profit and personal wealth accumulation; That success is solely determined by one’s superior intelligence or work ethic, and that we love to compete. We say this is human nature. 

But is this literally human nature from a scientific point of view or is it merely a perspective derived from a particular political-economic ideology, namely capitalism or perhaps even more specifically neoliberalism that rapidly permeated across the world since the 1980s?

In this episode, we unpack this topic with Karim Bettache, who’s a political/social psychologist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). He’s been researching and writing about this topic for many years now, including in a paper he wrote in 2024 titled Where Is Capitalism? Unmasking Its Hidden Role in Psychology. 

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