The science of selfishness: Humans aren't actually hard-wired to be jerks

Not long ago, a few of my friends figured out the perfect way to guilt me into doing just about anything. Decisions made on impulse tend to err on the side of selflessness and collective social gain for a group of people; it’s when we have time to mull things over that selfish decisions are made. For the analysis, Matthew Hutson examined different studies investigating human moral behavior, and found science suggests our default setting is intuitively selfless -- a provocative suggestion in an age where narcissism is celebrated via selfie-serving posts on social media. One model, The Prisoner’s Dilemma, asks two participants who are given a scenario in which they’re prisoners to decide whether to betray each other or work together, and are then given points accordingly. The Prisoner’s Dilemma showed that cooperation in the form of selflessness benefits individuals in terms of resisting short-term temptation to act in a self-serving manner and collaboration, which offers long term benefits by creating bonds of both trust and reciprocity.