The Three Types of Selfishness

Search "three types of selfishness" and you'll get a tidy answer: good, neutral and bad. Psychologists have split it other ways too. Put the versions side by side and something interesting falls out. Every one of them ends up saying that one kind of self-interest is healthy and necessary, and one kind wrecks people. Selfism has a name for the healthy kind, and it isn't "selfish." It's Selfist.

Here are the three versions, what each gets right, and where they lead.

Version one: good, neutral and bad

This is the split you'll see most often, credited to John Johnson, a personality psychologist and retired Penn State professor. He sorts selfish acts by asking who benefits.

• Good selfishness benefits you and the other person. You buy a car from a friend who wanted to sell it. Both of you won.
• Neutral selfishness looks after you without touching anyone else. Brushing your teeth. Cooking dinner. Going for a run.
• Bad selfishness benefits you at someone else's expense and gives nothing back. Johnson's view is that it ends up bad for both sides, because the selfish person slowly loses everyone's trust.

Notice how silly it feels to call the first two "selfish" at all. That's the problem with the word. It has been stretched to cover anything you do for yourself, so people end up feeling guilty about brushing their teeth while the actual takers carry on unbothered.

Version two: egocentric, adaptive and pathological

In 2019 the criminologist Adrian Raine and his co-author Uh published the Selfishness Questionnaire in the Journal of Personality Assessment, one of the first serious attempts to measure selfishness as a personality trait. They found three forms.

• Egocentric selfishness: putting your interests first while being less warm, less generous and less moved by other people's distress.
• Adaptive selfishness: looking after your own interests in ways that help you get on in life without hurting anyone. In their data it wasn't tied to the negative traits the other two were.
• Pathological selfishness: getting ahead by harming other people.

The useful finding is that the self-interest that helps you function sits apart from the kind that does damage. You don't have to scrub out the first to avoid the third.

Version three: healthy selfishness vs pathological altruism

The third split puts something surprising on the list: over-giving.

In 2020 the psychologists Scott Barry Kaufman and Emanuel Jauk published a study in Frontiers in Psychology, testing new scales on 370 and then 891 people. One measured what they called healthy selfishness, borrowing Erich Fromm's idea of respect for your own health, growth, happiness, joy and freedom. Items include "I have healthy boundaries" and "I balance my own needs with the needs of others." The other measured pathological altruism: putting other people's perceived needs above your own in ways that harm you, usually out of fear of rejection. Items include "I need to be needed." Kaufman has described the three types as healthy selfishness, unhealthy selfishness that exploits others, and this approval-hungry kind of altruism.

The results line up almost exactly with what Selfism argues. Healthy self-interest tracked strongly with well-being and life satisfaction (correlations around 0.7) and with lower depression. Those people also scored higher on goodwill toward others, not lower. Over-giving went the other way, with lower well-being, lower self-esteem, and more of the anxious, insecure form of narcissism. The full cup gave more. The empty one just got emptier.

What the three versions agree on

Line them up and the pattern is clear. Every version has a damaging kind, where you take from people. Most have a healthy kind, where you look after yourself and others are fine or better off. And the newest research adds a third failure that our culture still calls a virtue: giving yourself away.

That's the same map Selfism draws, with clearer names.

• Selfish is the damaging kind. The book calls it petty selfishness, the child grabbing at the cake. It takes without weighing the cost to anyone else, and in the end it loses. More in what does selfish mean.
• Selfless is the over-giver, the martyr with the empty cup, pouring dust and calling it love. More in what does selflessness mean.
• Selfist is the healthy kind, and it's the goal. Rational self-interest, as the book puts it: you are an asset, so you look after the asset. You keep your own cup filling, you hold your boundaries, and what you give comes from the overflow.

Why not just say "healthy selfishness" like the researchers do? Because it still asks you to call yourself selfish, and the word carries so much shame that most people can't get past it. A Selfist isn't a nicer kind of selfish person. A Selfist is a different kind of person: full enough that taking isn't needed and martyrdom isn't tempting. The three zones are laid out properly in selfish vs selfless vs selfist.

Which one are you, most weeks?

Most people swing between the two failures. Selfless all month with family, then a burst of "I'm done" that comes out as plain selfishness, then guilt, then back to over-giving. The way out of that loop isn't to settle somewhere in the middle. It's to step off the line entirely and start acting like a Selfist on purpose: own your time, say what you want, fill your cup first, and give because you choose to.

Start small. Pick one thing you said yes to this week and ask who benefited. If the honest answer is "they did, and I paid," that wasn't kindness. It was the martyr. Next time, try the Selfist answer.

The book, Selfism: The Art of Being Selfist, goes into rational self-interest in its own chapter.

Frequently asked questions

What are the three types of selfishness?

The most common answer, credited to personality psychologist John Johnson, is good selfishness (benefits you and others), neutral selfishness (looks after you without affecting anyone), and bad selfishness (benefits you at someone else's expense). Research splits it other ways too: Raine and Uh measure egocentric, adaptive and pathological selfishness, and Kaufman and Jauk distinguish healthy selfishness, unhealthy selfishness and pathological altruism.

What is healthy selfishness?

Healthy selfishness is respect for your own health, growth, happiness, joy and freedom, the definition Kaufman and Jauk adapted from Erich Fromm. In their 2020 study it was strongly linked to higher well-being and life satisfaction, lower depression, and more goodwill toward others. Selfism calls a person who lives this way a Selfist.

Is being selfless a type of selfishness?

It can be. Researchers call one version pathological altruism: putting other people's perceived needs above your own in ways that harm you, often out of fear of rejection or a need to be needed. Selfism treats this as the martyr's trap, a failure just like selfishness.

Why does Selfism say Selfist instead of healthy selfishness?

Because 'selfish' carries so much shame that most people can't use it about themselves, and because a Selfist isn't a softer selfish person. A Selfist is full enough not to need to take from anyone and secure enough not to give themselves away.

How do I move from selfish or selfless toward Selfist?

Start by filling your own cup on purpose: protect your time, say plainly what you want, and hold your boundaries. Then give because you choose to, from the overflow, not from fear or guilt. The Selfist Score survey shows which zone you live in now.