**Humans are primarily driven by self-interest because every action is intended to benefit themselves in some way, even perceivably selfless actions have underlying motivations of self-interest.** [Psychological egoism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_egoism) assumes that all human behaviour is fundamentally motivated by self-interest, with our aim being our own welfare. In this view, everything we do, we do because at some level we believe that doing so will benefit us in some ways – even acts that are presumably selfless. In this sense, even altruistic deeds are motivated by self-interest because humans feel a sense of satisfaction after helping someone. Therefore, psychological egoism is not necessarily a bad trait and does not mean we are inherently selfish. Instead, humans are primarily motivated by self-interest as when we are helping ourselves, we help others.

I agree, but with a few additional considerations. **Specifically, selfishness and selflessness are not opposites** It is essentially impossible to be appropriately selfless without it ultimately having a selfish sensation/motivation tied to it. This isn't a flaw in selflessness, it is how the mechanism works. For instance, a lot of how we do selfless acts comes from wanting to be a good person (arguably selfish) and doing so based on what will give us positive feedback from others (also arguably selfish). The only way to be motivated to do good is to ultimately have some mechanism that lets you know what you did was actually good. Otherwise, there is no mechanism to actually work with. I suppose the original point of the question is whether humans are more **exclusively** selfish, or if they are more often selfless. A difficult thing to cleanly measure, since our day-to-day lives are based around "selfish" things like eating, drinking, etc. I could expand to include "getting dressed for work", but is that a selfish need to be desired, or a selfless need to appeal to others? Is going to work selfish because you do it for a paycheck, or selfless because you do it to contribute to something bigger than yourself? I suppose that depends very much on what your job is. But even if you work underpaid for a dog shelter, is that because you want to help dogs, or because you want to *be* a person who helps dogs? The question here is: *Why does that distinction matter?* If you didn't get some reward, good feelings, or even feelings of "self-righteousness", then being selfless would be unsustainable. It would drain you, because you wouldn't be recharged by the results. And again, you would have a hard time verifying that what you actually did was good. To make a final point, however, I'll see if I can find the studies on reflexive selfish/selfless behavior. I don't have the sources now, but it's generally been shown that humans are actually *selfless* as a reflex. Most of our (exclusive) selfishness comes when we have time to ruminate and analyze the situation.