Sep 17, 2023

Are human beings fundamentally good or fundamentally bad? Are people mostly generous, or are they mostly selfish?

In today's NY Times: People Are More Generous Than You Think

In any given experiment, he reported, about 30 percent of the people do, indeed, behave selfishly. But, he continued, “fully half of all people systematically, significantly and predictably behave cooperatively."

"The point is, across a wide range of experiments, in widely diverse populations, one finding stands out: In practically no human society examined under controlled conditions have the majority of people consistently behaved selfishly."

Humanity hasn’t thrived all these centuries because we’re ruthlessly selfish; we’ve thrived because we’re really good at cooperation.