Insatiable Desires – Greed: What is it good for? – Chapter 3

First, we examined whether greedy people had more economic, evolutionary, and psychological success than less greedy people. We adopted the approach that Eriksson et al. (2020) recently used to study the benefits of selfishness. We found that greedy individuals had more economic success, sometimes more and sometimes less evolutionary success, and less psychological success, than their less greedy counterparts.

Second, we aimed to disentangle greed from self-interest in relation to these indicators. Here we found that greed differed from self-interest in terms of economic success, and partly in terms of evolutionary success (with greed being slightly more advantageous), but that they are similar in terms of psychological success.