Beneath the clash between selfishness and solidarity lies an evolutionary truth: humans survived not just by competing, but by caring. Yet neoliberalism has treated only one side of our nature as real, redesigning society around the fiction of the purely rational, selfish actor. Paul Deutchman of University of Pennsylvania, drawing on his research into evolutionary psychology and human behavior, explains how this misreading now underpins inequality, democratic decay, and a fraying sense of the common good. To rebuild institutions worthy of us, we must reclaim the cooperative instincts that shaped our minds and design a political economy that lets both sides of our nature work in tandem.

There is a fundamental tension at the heart of human nature—we’re both inherently selfish yet also incredibly altruistic. We are capable of pillaging, oppression, and slaughter, yet we’re also capable of compassion, loving kindness, and self-sacrifice. While this may seem like a paradox, humans’ predisposition to be both selfish and selfless can be explained by understanding how evolution via natural selection has shaped our species’ psychology. By the end of this article, I will make a case for why an empirically grounded understanding of human nature offers important implications for our societies’ economic and political institutions.

The evolution of cooperation and morality

Humans, like all organisms, are fundamentally selfish at the genetic level—genes, the building blocks of life, have a sole “goal” of replicating themselves by transmitting their genetic material to the next generation. But if our genes are inherently selfish, why aren’t we entirely selfish as well? In other words, why does cooperation exist at all?

Following Charles Darwin’s publication of The Origin of Species, in which he laid out his theory of evolution by natural selection, a large body of research in evolutionary biology has investigated the mechanisms that facilitated the emergence of cooperation in our species. As a result of this work, we now have a firm understanding of how human cooperation evolved through genetic self-interest.

The first key to understanding human prosociality is non-zero-sum interactions. Non-zero-sum interactions are relationships in which all parties can benefit, allowing for the possibility of mutual benefit through cooperation. Cooperation emerges in non-zero-sum interactions when helping another organism also increases the cooperator’s own genetic fitness. This can occur directly, such as in the context of kin selection, in which an individual confers benefits to their genetic relatives. Or it can occur more indirectly, such as in the context of long-term reciprocal relationships between species (such as the mutualism between flowers and pollinators) or within species (such as in the context of human friendship). Regardless of the specific mechanism, non-zero-sum interactions facilitate the emergence of cooperation.

The second key to understanding human prosociality is to recognize that, much like evolution has shaped our bodies—hearts to pump blood, sensory organs to perceive our environment—it has shaped our minds. To understand how natural selection has shaped human psychology, we need to consider the types of recurring evolutionary problems our ancestors faced throughout our species’ evolutionary history. One of the most historically common and important problems our ancestors encountered were collective action problems.

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Natural selection has shaped our species to be both highly selfish and selfless.

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Collective action problems are situations in which there is a conflict between what is best for the individual and what is best for the collective. While everyone is better off if they contribute, the best outcome for any individual is to free ride by reaping the benefits of others' cooperative effort without contributing themselves (for example, think of a student who gets an A on a group project without actually having done any of the work). Collective action problems thus create an inherent tension between individual self-interest and the interests of the group.

Our ancestors encountered many different types of collective action problems, but the ones we faced most frequently throughout our evolutionary history included activities such as cooperative hunting, resource management, and intergroup conflict. Because these problems were so crucial to human survival—and the benefits of overcoming them so great—our ancestors would have faced strong selection pressures to evolve psychological adaptations to overcome these challenges.

Over hundreds of thousands of years, these evolutionary selection pressures gradually favored increasingly prosocial and cooperative traits. Individuals and groups who could successfully work together to overcome collective action problems were able to reap the benefits of cooperation and outcompete less cooperative individuals and groups. To achieve this, natural selection endowed us with a moral sense governing right and wrong, a capacity for empathy and perspective-taking, a deep concern for fairness, and the ability to acquire shared expectations of behavior—social norms—which allowed for the facilitation of complex cooperative behavior in groups.

In this way, natural selection has shaped our species to be both highly selfish and selfless. While we are inherently selfish at the genetic level, we also possess a number of innate psychological abilities and cultural tools that have allowed us to overcome this self-interest, at least in part by engendering a deep concern for collective welfare.

Neoliberalism and human nature

Understanding the evolutionary and psychological basis of human nature offers important implications for modern human social institutions. This can be seen mostly clearly in the Western world’s prevailing political-economic ideology—neoliberalism.

More specifically, neoliberalism is a political ideology and policy framework that has greatly shaped modern capitalism, the predominant economic system of human society. Neoliberalism champions free markets, privatization, deregulation, fiscal austerity, and individual responsibility. During the 1970s and 1980s, neoliberalism emerged as the West’s predominant political-economic ideology—supplanting Keynesian economics—after being championed for decades by influential economists like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman and institutionalized through the policies of political leaders like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

At the core of this ideology is the capitalistic assumption that humans are self-interested and that this self-interest can be channeled to collective benefits—what the philosopher and political theorist Adam Smith coined the “invisible hand”. Neoliberalism extends this market logic by placing competitive individualism and market incentives at the heart of our political economy and society. This is captured in one of the central theoretical assumptions underlying neoliberal economics—rational choice theory. Rational choice theory argues that individuals and firms make optimal decisions by maximizing their utility based on available information and preferences. In this framework, economic agents are assumed to be purely selfish, deliberative, and logical actors with the sole goal of maximizing their own utility.

Neoliberalism complements human nature in an important way—it capitalizes on our inherent self-interest to drive non-zero-sum economic gains that benefit everyone, generating innovation, improving global living standards, and significantly lowering the cost of consumer goods. In other words, allowing individuals to pursue their own interests ultimately creates benefits for society as a whole. It also promotes cooperation at an international level because global markets have increasingly integrated nations’ economies, creating mutual dependencies that have reduced the risk of armed conflict. In fact, these economic interdependencies between nations are thought to be a large contributor to the reduction of violent conflict in the developed world, a phenomenon that’s been coined capitalist peace theory.

However, at the same time, neoliberalism also comes into conflict with important aspects of human psychology. Namely, while neoliberalism identifies self-interest as the major driver of human behavior, it overemphasizes the importance of selfishness in human behavior by neglecting the many innate prosocial motivations that underlie human nature.

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By prioritizing the role of self-interest in human decision-making, neoliberalism clashes with our evolved motivations for fairness, reciprocity and collective wellbeing.

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This can be seen most clearly in the case of rational choice theory, which fundamentally misunderstands human nature and, as a result, frequently makes incorrect predictions about human decision-making and behavior. Consequently, while rational choice theory is an incredibly influential and important assumption in economic theory, it is simultaneously a poor explanatory theory of human decision-making because it fails to reflect the fact that we are not purely selfish, rational actors. Rather, an understanding of human evolutionary history and psychology reveals that, while we can be selfish, we are also inherently cooperative and care for the welfare of others, not just our own.

Neoliberalism underestimates our species’ cooperative nature

An entire field of research sitting at the intersection of economics and psychology—fittingly known as behavioral economics—has explored the many ways in which rational choice theory is a poor theoretical model for capturing human behavior and decision-making. For example, humans are far from cold, calculating robots—in fact, we’re quite the opposite. A large research literature has documented how we misbehave: we’re driven by fleeting emotional impulses that comprise our strategic decision-making, frequently struggle to delay immediate gratification, and rely on cognitive shortcuts that systematically bias our judgments and behavior.

Humans are also not selfish, at least not entirely. This can be seen clearly in findings from the dictator game, an experimental economic game that measures an individual’s prosocial preferences. In the dictator game, one player is assigned as the dictator, and the other as the recipient. The dictator receives $10 and decides how to divide it between themselves and the recipient. Whatever the dictator decides is immediately enacted, and the other player has no choice but to accept the offer. A rational, self-maximizing economic agent in the dictator game would offer $0 and keep all $10 for themselves. The problem is that’s not how people actually behave when they play the dictator game: on average, people offer just over ¼ of their money to the other player. That people offer anything in the dictator game at all speaks directly against rational choice theory and demonstrates how it fails to capture our innate prosocial preferences for others’ welfare, cooperation, and fairness.

Consequently, while neoliberal economics captures human self-interest as a driver of innovation, it is frequently an inaccurate explanatory theory of human behavior. By prioritizing the role of self-interest in human decision-making, neoliberalism clashes with our evolved motivations for fairness, reciprocity and collective wellbeing. This mismatch with our innate psychology and moral values has in turn fueled rising inequality, alienation, and polarization, weakening the democratic institutions that manage large-scale collective action problems.

Neoliberal norms and prescriptions for human morality

But neoliberalism is more than just a political-economic ideology; it’s also a normative framework for how we should govern society. In other words, it’s also a prescriptive theory of human behavior that’s concerned with how people should behave (not just how they do behave). Recent research highlights how neoliberalism shapes the public’s attitudes on the fairness of inequality, fostering increased tolerance for global wealth inequality.

Since its apex in the 1980s “decade of greed,” neoliberal hegemony has spread throughout our culture and societal norms. Market logic has now permeated into many purportedly non-economic domains, including education, healthcare, and civic engagement, changing what we value in our society. For example, students are no longer learners pursuing knowledge for personal growth or civic engagement—they’re consumers paying for a commodity that will maximize their return on investment. We judge members of our society based on their productivity, skills, and market value, rather than their intrinsic human dignity or contribution to the public good and society.

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We cannot maintain a democratic society when its institutions and norms reward wealth extraction over wealth creation.

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While it’s difficult to directly attribute these changes to the influence of neoliberal thought, it is clear that neoliberalism’s endorsement of selfishness and individualism as the primary drivers of human behavior has influenced societal norms in a way that has undermined the role of the public good and collective well-being in public life.

Neoliberalism as a prescriptive theory of how we should behave is fundamentally at odds with our species' cooperative evolutionary history. Consequently, beyond being a poor explanatory theory of human behavior, it’s also a poor normative guide for how we should interact with others and society. This is epitomized by the fact that most people do not want to be friends with purely selfish, calculating rational economic agents. In fact, if we were to encounter a true rational agent in the real world, we’d likely view them as an antisocial psychopath, bereft of guilt, remorse, or concern for the well-being of others. Clearly this is not a model of human behavior that most people would endorse.

Psychological implications of human cooperation for society

I want to end by discussing two suggestions for how our political and economic systems can better align with our species’ innate cooperative nature and moral values.

The first is that we need to better align incentives in our institutions such that workers actually have a stake in the success of their work. While self-interest is a major driver of wealth creation and innovation, it must be harnessed for the public good, rather than disproportionately benefiting the most wealthy and powerful. For example, worker-owned cooperatives such as food co-ops and credit unions, mutual aid societies, community benefit corporations, and collective ownership models like community land trusts all better balance human self-interest with our innate drive for cooperation, reciprocity, and fairness. To the extent we can align our self-interest with our motivation to help others, the stronger our societies and democratic institutions will be.

The second is that, because we innately value fairness, justice, and reciprocity, those values should be reflected in our government and institutions. We cannot maintain a democratic society when its institutions and norms reward wealth extraction over wealth creation, funneling the vast majority of our society's wealth to the investment class at the expense of workers and collective well-being. This asymmetric distribution of wealth accumulation, propelled by neoliberal thought, has contributed to the highest levels of wealth inequality since the Gilded Age, detrimentally affecting our society by weakening trust in institutions and undermining democratic values.

A political-economic system that reflects our concern for fairness and cooperation would foster trust in institutions and maintain democratic norms at a time when authoritarian populism is on the rise. Giving workers a stake in the success of their work, strengthening collective bargaining and unions, providing universal public services, and enacting progressive taxation are all means of more fairly redistributing the wealth created in capitalist societies. More generally, we need to reprioritize the role of collective action and the public good in state policy and the public sphere—we cannot rely on the private sector to do it for us.

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Importantly, an understanding of human behavior rooted in our evolved psychology does not endorse the wholesale discounting of self-interest in motivating human behavior. Specifically, it suggests that capitalism—if not neoliberalism specifically—should still be at the center of societies’ economic systems precisely because it so successfully harnesses our inherent self-interest to drive non-zero-sum benefits for society as a whole. When societies remove the motivating force of self-interest, they lose an important driver of economic and technological development. This may partially explain why collectivized economic systems like communism are likely to be (and historically have been) ineffectual—namely, because they fail to capture the importance of self-interest, private ownership, and freedom of choice in human behavior (although there are many other, more nuanced explanations as well).

However, at the same time, we need to balance self-interest with our species innate prosocial tendencies by putting in place constraints that limit the worst excesses of unfettered capitalism. By providing a strong social safety net, offering universal basic services, and enacting progressive taxation, societies can better take advantage of human self-interest while simultaneously ensuring that the wealth produced by a market system is allocated more equally and is consistent with our inherent concern for fairness, cooperation, and the public good. In many respects, the Nordic social democracies (like Norway, Sweden, & Denmark) excel at balancing these competing forces and aligning individual incentives with collective welfare. While the successes of these countries may not be entirely replicable in larger, more pluralistic societies like the United States, they still offer valuable lessons for how societies can better reconcile the core motivators of selfishness and selflessness in human decision-making and behavior.

Understanding how evolution has shaped our psychology for cooperation is key to building an economic and political system that works with, rather than against, human nature.