By |

The Psychology of Snobbery

A wine snob
The snob mistakes the appearance of discernment for discernment itself.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Why you shouldn’t be a snob, and how to avoid being one.

The protagonist of the British sitcom Keeping Up Appearances is the social-climbing Hyacinth Bucket—or ‘Bouquet’, as she insists upon being called. To give the impression that she employs domestic staff, she answers her beloved pearl-white slimline telephone with, ‘The Bouquet residence; the lady of the house speaking.’ The originally working-class Hyacinth spends most of her time trying to impress others in the hope of passing off as upper-middle-class, while looking down on anyone who does not meet her approval. This is the simple but effective recipe for five seasons of timeless British comedy.

Hyacinth is funny because her snobbery is self-defeating. Every attempt to advertise her refinement instead advertises her insecurity.

It has been claimed that the word ‘snob’ originates in the Latin sine nobilitate (‘without nobility’), used in abbreviated form—s. nob—on lists of names by Cambridge colleges, passenger ships, etc. to distinguish between titled and non-titled persons. In fact, ‘snob’ was first recorded in the late eighteenth century as a term for a shoemaker or his apprentice, although it is true that Cambridge students came to apply it to local tradespeople, townspeople, and anyone unaffiliated with the university. By the early nineteenth century, ‘snob’ had come to mean ‘a person who lacks breeding’, and then, as social structures became more fluid, ‘a social climber’. Thackeray’s Book of Snobs (1848), a compilation of satirical articles, cemented the word in the public lexicon.

At the heart of snobbery is the tendency to mistake status for value. Applied to people, this means mistaking social status for human worth; applied to things, it means mistaking prestige for quality. The snob identifies with the relevant markers of status or prestige (wealth, education, accent, address, brands, cultural tastes…), uses them to bolster his own status, and denigrates those who lack or disregard them. ‘I’m not a snob,’ said Simon Le Bon, the lead singer and lyricist of Duran Duran, in jest: ‘Ask anybody. Well, anybody who matters.’

Case Study: The Wine Snob

As a wine writer, I may sometimes pass for a snob.

In my defence, snobbery is not simply a matter of discernment, or of having high standards. A so-called wine ‘snob’ who enjoys and even insists on good wine may or may not be an actual snob, depending on the degree of his or her prejudice (from the Latin praeiudicium, ‘prior judgement’). To exercise judgement and discriminate between things is not necessarily to discriminate between people.

If wine is a case in point, this is because it can be tasted blind. Hide the label, price, producer, appellation, and vintage, and there is no longer anything to lean upon but the wine itself. Blind tasting can be wonderfully humbling as great names fall short, newcomers triumph, and prejudices dissolve in the glass. This proves the point: the more we rely on prestige indicators, the less we taste, or experience.

I’m quite happy—in fact, happiest—drinking an inexpensive or little-known wine, so long as it has a story to sing. To my worst enemy, this might be a way of being a snob while escaping the label, a meta-snobbery known as the meta-snobbery of authenticity—but let’s not get too meta.

The Psychology of Snobbery

Some sommeliers, immersed as they are in the world of wine, can place undue value on wine knowledge, to the point of deprecating their own seemingly ignorant patrons—a phenomenon lightheartedly referred to as ‘sommelier syndrome’. In mitigation, the snobby sommelier, like many a snob, is defending not only status but self-conception.

Aside from its unpleasantness to others, snobbery tends to undermine the snob, their achievements, and the interests and institutions that they represent. The Member of Parliament Jacob Rees-Mogg did himself, his party, and the UK House of Commons no favours when he compared people who had not attended a public school (fee-paying school) or Oxbridge (the universities of Oxford and Cambridge) to ‘potted plants’.

Snobbery betrays rigidity of thinking and, by extension, poor judgement, as with those British aristocrats (Unity and Diana Mitford, Lord Rothermere, the Duke of Windsor…) who, despite their elite educations, came to sympathise with Nazi ideology. The thinking, in so far as it can be called thinking, is not merely rigid but warped. Snobs pigeonhole people according to skin-deep criteria such as their birth, profession, or accent, and, on that basis, either embrace or denigrate them. Like wine snobs who ‘drink the label’, they often miss out on real value or originality. As company, they are utter bores, constantly detracting from the rich texture of life and unable to marvel at anything other than through themselves.

Inverse Snobbery

Closely related to snobbery, and presenting some of the same pitfalls, is ‘inverse snobbery’. Inverse snobbery is the disdain for those same traits that the snob might hold in high regard, combined with admiration, whether real or feigned, for the popular, the ordinary, and the commonplace—and, in this case, not just with the aim of winning an election. Inverse snobbery can be understood, in large part, as an ego defence against the status claims of others; and it is possible, indeed common, to be both a snob and an inverse snob, for instance, looking down on someone’s privileged education while boasting about one’s own working-class credentials.

Inverse snobs make the same fundamental mistake as snobs: they judge according to status rather than substance, merely reversing the signs. An expensive restaurant must be pretentious; a successful artist must have sold out; an educated person must be out of touch.

Why Snobbery May Be on the Rise

Both snobbery and inverse snobbery can be interpreted as a symptom of social insecurity. Social insecurity may be rooted in early experiences, especially feelings of shame at being different, or a sense of privilege or entitlement that, in later life, cannot be realised. Or it may result from rapid social change. For instance, after Brexit in the UK and the election of Donald Trump in the US, the ebbing of influence from established, educated elites seemed to lead, on all sides, to a surge in both snobbery and inverse snobbery.

In a similar vein, some snobbery may represent a reaction to an increasingly egalitarian society, born out of a deeply ingrained human instinct that some people are better than others, that these people are more fit to dominate or rule, and that their rule tends to produce better outcomes—although, of course, one need not be a snob to share in that belief or intuition. Whatever its source, snobbery can serve as a mechanism of class surveillance and control—as can, paradoxically, inverse snobbery—entrenching existing social hierarchies and the status quo, or status quo ante.

The Way Out

In some cases, snobbery may be a manifestation of narcissism or excessive self-regard—which points to its antidote, namely, humility. Instead of looking inward, or sideways, the person of genuine taste looks outward, toward the thing itself.

Humility on its own can be hard to achieve. Taken to an extreme, or to its perfection, it approaches the dissolution of the ego, which in certain Indian traditions amounts to liberation. This requires a highly philosophical mind, or drugs.

Alternatively, it may be possible to arrive at humility indirectly through the more achievable route of empathy—including empathy towards the snob. Snobbery (‘snobbishness’), said the writer Hugh Kingsmill (d. 1949), ‘is the desire for what divides men and the inability to value what unites them.’ 

If humility corrects the relation to the self, empathy corrects the relation to others, and, indirectly, the relation to the self.

Reason, as Hume held, is but the slave of the passions: employing empathy to alleviate snobbery is, I think, an excellent example of better feeling opening out onto better thinking.

Continue Exploring

If this essay spoke to you, you might look into Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions and The Concise Guide to Wine and Blind Tasting.

You may also enjoy

Explore all Emotions essays

Explore all Success & Failure essays

Explore all Wine & Blind Tasting essays

By |

How We Stopped Needing One Another

Three people at a café, looking at their phones

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

We have never been more connected, yet many of our interactions feel strangely empty. Modern life has left us with abundant contact but thinner encounters, as we have become less dependent on—and less attentive to—one another.

We are more connected than any generation in history. We can speak to almost anyone, at almost any time, across almost any distance. Yet all this connection feels strangely empty. We sit in conversations, meetings, and relationships—surrounded by words and faces—and have the quiet sense that nothing is really happening between us.

Not absence.

Presence without encounter.

We have more connection than ever, but less of what makes connection feel alive.

Presence Without Encounter

Loneliness is commonly thought of as “being alone”. But its deeper form has little to do with physical isolation. It is the experience of no longer being met by another mind. That is why loneliness can be at its keenest within relationships, families, and social lives that appear full from the outside. Contact continues, but recognition fades. Conversation carries on, but nothing quite lands.

When this happens, loneliness often does not feel like pain. It feels like flatness. And this is where boredom becomes revealing.

We think of boredom as a lack of stimulation. Yet it often appears in situations where stimulation is plentiful and still nothing meaningful is happening between people. The conversation is pleasant enough. We exchange opinions, anecdotes, updates. Yet nothing surprises us, challenges us, or changes us.

Nothing happens.

Attention, finding nowhere to go, folds back upon itself. What we call boredom in these moments is often social contact that has ceased to feel alive.

Abundant Contact, Thin Encounter

Modern life amplifies this condition. We move through dense networks of people—workplaces, cities, cafés, airports, and digital spaces—where interaction is constant but encounter is fleeting. We know more people than ever, but are deeply engaged with very few.

The result is not isolation.

It is something subtler: abundant contact, but thin encounter.

People cease to become discoveries. They lose weight. We mistake familiarity for knowledge, communication for conversation, and proximity for presence. Social life grows smoother, more efficient, more continuous. And strangely empty.

From this perspective, boredom and loneliness begin to look less like separate problems than different expressions of the same condition. When meaningful contact is absent, we experience loneliness. When contact is plentiful but psychologically empty, we experience boredom. In both cases, what is missing is not company but encounter.

The End of Necessity

Why has this happened? Technology has changed our relationships, but it has not fundamentally changed human nature. The deeper change is that we no longer need one another as we once did.

For most of human history, our lives were interwoven by necessity. Families, neighbours, and communities depended upon one another not merely for companionship but for everyday survival. People met repeatedly, over many years and in many different contexts. They quarrelled, reconciled, forgave, relied upon one another, and could not simply disappear whenever things became uncomfortable.

Dependence demanded attention. We pay close attention to those upon whom our lives depend. We notice their moods because they affect our own. We learn their strengths and weaknesses because they matter to us. Necessity sharpens perception.

Today, much of that necessity has quietly disappeared. We can shop without speaking to anyone, work from home, entertain ourselves alone, and replace awkward conversations with easier ones. Our relationships have become lighter, freer, and more voluntary. This is one of the great achievements of modern society. But every achievement carries a hidden cost.

As our dependence upon one another has diminished, so too has the sustained attention that dependence once demanded. We have become remarkably good at communicating while becoming less practised at encountering—and have grown, almost, to fear genuine encounter.

The Loss of Shared Depth

There is another, quieter shift. Not only have we become less dependent on one another—we also inhabit fewer shared worlds.

For much of history, conversation rested on a relatively common symbolic ground: shared stories, shared texts, shared moral and religious reference points. People could assume that others recognised the same narratives and allusions, and so a single phrase could carry layers of meaning. In that sense, conversation carried implicit depth.

Today, that shared cultural background is thinner and more fragmented. We no longer reliably inhabit the same symbolic world. Our references diverge, our media diverge, our intellectual inheritances diverge. Even when we speak the same language, we often do not share the same implicit meanings.

This does not make people less intelligent or less educated. But it does make encounter more literal. Conversation stays closer to surface experience because there is less shared depth for it to fall into. Where there is no common symbolic ground, there is less space for resonance.

We are not only less necessary to one another. We are less interiorly shared with one another. And so even when we meet, we meet more lightly.

From Aristotle to Buber

This idea is older than it may seem. Aristotle distinguished three kinds of friendship: those grounded in usefulness, pleasure, and virtue. He regarded the last as the highest, since friends united in virtue help one another to live and flourish. Practical need may first bring people together, but in depending upon one another, they may discover deeper reasons to remain together.

More than two thousand years later, Hegel carried the thought further. We become fully ourselves only through recognition by another consciousness. The self is not something we discover alone, but something that emerges in being recognised by another self.

Martin Buber distilled the matter to its essence. Human life is built upon encounter. We become fully human not through information or interaction, but by meeting another person as a Thou rather than an It.

Across these thinkers runs a single intuition: we do not merely live alongside one another. We become ourselves, and our best selves, through one another.

What We Have Forgotten About Connection

Perhaps this is what modernity has quietly eroded. We have not become less social. In many ways, we have become more social than any people in history. But we have become less necessary to one another. Less dependent. Less bonded. Less anchored in common worlds of meaning.

Without necessity, we attend less closely. Without shared depth, we encounter one another more lightly. Without attention, recognition begins to fade. Without recognition, encounter becomes rare. Without encounter, other people cease to surprise us or feel fully alive.

Perhaps the deepest paradox of modernity is not that we have become less connected, but that we have forgotten what connection is. We have confused communication with encounter. Proximity with presence. Contact with recognition.

We have become connected to almost everyone.

And truly encountered by almost no one.

Continue Exploring

If this essay spoke to you, you might look into For Better For Worse.

You may also enjoy

Explore all Relationships essays

By |

The Psychology and Philosophy of Pity, Sympathy, Empathy, and Compassion

A doctor or nurse empathizing with a patient
Empathy begins with the simple but profound attempt to see the world through another person’s eyes.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 22 July 2026.

Article summary: Empathy and sympathy are often confused, but they are not the same. This article explores the psychology and philosophy of pity, sympathy, empathy, and compassion, explaining how they differ, why they matter, and what they reveal about human nature.

The terms empathy and sympathy are often used interchangeably, but they are not the same. Sympathy is care or concern for another person’s suffering. Empathy goes a step further: it involves understanding and, to some extent, sharing in that person’s emotional experience. Compassion, which involves the desire to relieve suffering, builds upon empathy. These distinctions matter—not only in psychology and medicine, but also in friendship, parenting, education, and everyday life.

Suppose a friend has just lost a parent. If I say, ‘I’m so sorry this has happened to you,’ I’m expressing sympathy. If I can also imagine, however imperfectly, what this loss feels like from within their own world, I begin to empathise. If that empathy inspires me to support them through their grief, it becomes compassion.

Before examining these concepts, it is worth asking where the modern idea of empathy came from.

What Is Empathy?

In 1909, the psychologist Edward Titchener translated the German Einfühlung (‘feeling into’) as empathy. At that time, German philosophers discussed empathy in the context of artistic or aesthetic evaluation, but Titchener proposed that empathy can also help us to recognise one another as minded beings.

Today, empathy might be defined as a person’s ability to understand and, to a greater or lesser extent, share in the emotions of another person, fictional character, or sentient being. Empathy involves two closely related capacities: (1) seeing another person’s situation from their embodied perspective, and (2) resonating with, or sharing in, the emotions that they are feeling.

For me to share another person’s point of view, it is not enough merely to put myself into their position or situation. Instead, I must go further still and imagine myself as them, and, more than that, imagine myself as them in the situation in which they find themself. One cannot empathise with an abstract or detached feeling, only with a particular person. To empathise with them, I need to have some understanding of who they are and what they are doing, or trying to do. I need to have some idea of where they came from and where they want to go. As John Steinbeck famously wrote:

It means very little to know that a million Chinese are starving unless you know one Chinese who is starving.

Pity, Sympathy, Empathy, and Compassion

Empathy is easily confused with pity, sympathy, and compassion, which are all prosocial reactions to the plights of others. Let us look at each one in turn.

Pity is a feeling of discomfort at the distress of one or more sentient beings and usually carries paternalistic overtones. Inherent in the notion of pity is that its object does not deserve its plight, and is incapable of preventing or overturning it. Pity is less engaged than sympathy, empathy, or compassion, often amounting to little more than a conscious acknowledgement of another’s suffering.

Sympathy (Greek, ‘fellow feeling’ or ‘community of feeling’) is care or concern for someone, often someone close or relatable, accompanied by a wish to see them better off. Compared with pity, sympathy implies a greater sense of shared similarities and deeper personal engagement. But unlike empathy, sympathy need not involve a shared perspective or shared emotions, and while the facial expressions of sympathy convey caring and concern, they do not ordinarily convey shared distress.

Sympathy and empathy often lead to one another, but not invariably. For instance, it is possible to sympathise with a hedgehog but not, strictly speaking, to empathise with it, since our access to its subjective experience is necessarily limited. Conversely, psychopaths with little or no sympathy for their victims may nonetheless possess sufficient understanding of another person’s thoughts and motivations to ensnare and manipulate them.

Sympathy might also be distinguished from benevolence, which is a more detached and impersonal attitude—akin to the attitude that I might have towards my students or neighbours, or that a monarch might have towards his or her subjects.

Compassion (Latin, ‘suffering alongside’) is more engaged than empathy and is associated with an active desire to alleviate the suffering of its object. With empathy, I share your emotions; with compassion I not only share your emotions but also elevate them into a universal and transcending experience. Compassion, which builds upon empathy, is one of the principal motivators of altruism.

Researcher Brené Brown has done much to popularise the distinction between sympathy and empathy, arguing that sympathy creates distance while empathy creates connection. Her work has helped bring empathy to a much wider audience. Even so, sympathy need not be distant or dismissive. Properly understood, it is often the beginning of empathy rather than its opposite.

The relationship between pity, sympathy, empathy, and compassion can be summarised as follows:

Can We Ever Know Another Mind?

My friend tearfully confides that, as a child, she was sexually abused by her father. Moved by her plight, I try to comfort her:

‘I know just how you feel.’

To my surprise and alarm, she snaps back:

‘No, you don’t know how I feel! How could you?’

Notice that, in claiming that I cannot know how she feels, my friend is implying that she knows how I feel—or, at least, that however I might be feeling, it is not how she feels. But if she is correct in asserting that I cannot know how she feels, how can she know how I feel, or that how I feel is not how she feels?

A similar paradox is raised in the Zhuangzi (c. third century BCE), one of the two foundational texts of Taoism:

Zhuangzi and Hui Shi were strolling on the bridge above the Hao River. Zhuangzi said, ‘Out swim the minnows so free and easy; this is the happiness of fish.’ Hui Shi said, ‘You are not a fish. Whence do you know the happiness of fish?’ Zhuangzi said, ‘You are not me. Whence do you know I don’t know the happiness of fish?’ Hui Shi said, ‘Granted that I am not you, I don’t know about you. Then granted that you are not a fish, the case for your not knowing the happiness of fish is complete.’ Zhuangzi said, ‘Let’s trace back to the root of the issue. When you said, ‘Whence do you know the fish are happy?’, you asked me already knowing I knew it. I knew it from up above the Hao.’

The exchange captures an enduring philosophical puzzle. We can never inhabit another person’s consciousness. Yet, in everyday life, we routinely understand enough of one another’s inner worlds to communicate, cooperate, comfort, teach, love, and forgive. How is this possible?

Theory of Mind and Mirror Neurons

Empathy rests upon what psychologists call theory of mind: the ability to understand that different people see the world from different perspectives and possess different beliefs, desires, sensitivities, commitments, and forms of understanding.

Some writers distinguish between cognitive empathy and affective empathy. From a philosophical point of view, however, it is preferable to distinguish theory of mind from empathy, rather than to divide empathy into ‘cognitive’ and ‘affective’ forms, thereby obscuring the distinct role of theory of mind. On this view, theory of mind forms the cognitive basis for empathy, while empathy itself also involves emotional resonance.

Theory of mind is innate (‘from up above the Hao’), first appearing at about four years of age. Thereafter, it continues to develop, and can be trained in both reach and accuracy. Crucially, theory of mind enables us to posit the intentions of others and to explain and predict their actions.

Researchers have proposed that mirror neurons contribute to this capacity. These neurons fire both when we carry out a particular action and when we witness that same action in someone else. By internally modelling the actions of others, they may help us infer some of the thoughts, emotions, and desires that gave rise to them. Although empathy and theory of mind involve a broader network of cognitive processes, mirror neurons offer one suggestive illustration of how we may come to understand the experiences of others.

Why Did Empathy Evolve?

From an evolutionary standpoint, empathy has been selected for because it promotes parental care, prosocial behaviour, and non-verbal communication, and, by extension, the survival of the proximal gene pool. By supporting social interaction, collective enterprise, resource sharing, teaching and learning, and storytelling and other art forms, empathy increases the strength, stability, and resilience of a society and its members.

Empathy enables us to anticipate the actions and reactions of others and to respond effectively to their ever-changing needs and expectations. At the same time, to empathise is not to merge. Because empathy remains at one remove, it provides a degree of distance in which to make normative judgements about the person or people being empathised with and to weigh up their best interests.

The Limits of Empathy

That said, empathy can also skew our judgement, leading us to violate moral principles to favour the one or the few over the many. It can be distressing or exhausting. Doctors and nurses who are surrounded by human suffering often constrain or regulate their empathetic faculty, not out of callousness or unconcern but to guard against compassion fatigue and burnout.

Yet in less pressured environments, the exercise of empathy is often rewarding and even revitalising. Doctors and nurses who are able to empathise with their patients—though not so much that it prevents them from resting and recuperating—are more likely to feel fulfilled in their work, to say nothing of the benefit to the patients themselves.

Empathy does not grant direct access to another person’s inner world. Rather, it is our best means of approaching that world while respecting its separateness. It allows us to understand without possessing, to care without collapsing distinctions, and to recognise that every human being lives a life that is uniquely their own.

Continue Exploring

If this essay spoke to you, you might look into Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions.

You may also enjoy

Explore all Emotions essays

Explore all Relationships essays

By |

The Psychology and Philosophy of Altruism

A proud beggar
Is everything about us selfish and self-interested? Or can we sometimes do the right thing for the right reason?

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 29 August 2026.

Is it possible to do something for another person without, at some level, doing it also for ourselves? Even the most selfless of acts may bring pleasure or pride. If so, can true altruism be said to exist?

Altruism is ordinarily defined as unselfish concern for the welfare of others. Like ‘empathy’, ‘altruism’ is a modern term, coined by the philosopher Auguste Comte (d. 1857) from the French autrui, which itself derives from the Latin alteri (‘other people’).

The classical notion that most nearly approaches altruism is almsgiving, which derives from the Greek eleos (pity) and means ‘to give charity’. In Christian theology, charity is, properly speaking, the love of man for God, and through God, for his fellow men.

Altruism as an Ego Defence

Altruism can be read as an ego defence, a form of sublimation in which we deal with our problems and anxieties by stepping outside ourselves and helping others.

By concentrating on the needs of others, people in altruistic vocations such as medicine, nursing, and teaching may be able to permanently push their own needs into the background, where they can more easily be ignored or forgotten. Conversely, people who care for a young, disabled, or elderly person may experience profound anxiety and distress should this role suddenly be removed from them.

Altruism as a defensive operation ought to be distinguished from true altruism, the one being primarily a means of covering up uncomfortable feelings, the other of achieving some external or impersonal end such as alleviating hunger or poverty. 

Psychological Egoism

However, many psychologists and philosophers have argued that there is, in fact, no such thing as true altruism—a position sometimes referred to as ‘psychological egoism’.

In The Dawn (1881), Nietzsche argues that that which is called ‘pity’ is not selfless but variously self-motivated.

Here, Nietzsche is in effect agreeing with Aristotle, who in the Rhetoric defines pity as a feeling of pain caused by an evil that befalls one who does not deserve it, ‘and that might well befall us or one of our friends, and, moreover, befall us soon.’ In other words, we only pity someone insofar as they are relatable.

In an insightful aside, Aristotle adds that people feel pity for their similars and acquaintances, but not for those for whom they feel as they do for themselves. The pitiful, says Aristotle, should not be confounded with the terrible: Amasis wept at the sight of his friend begging, but not at that of his son being led to death.

The acts that we call altruistic are self-interested, if not because they relieve anxiety, then perhaps because they lead to pleasant feelings of pride and satisfaction; the expectation of honour or reciprocation; or the greater likelihood of a place in heaven; and even if neither of the above, then at least because they relieve painful feelings such as the guilt or shame of not having acted.

Is True Altruism Possible?

This argument has been attacked on various grounds, but most pointedly for its faulty, circular logic: ‘People who perform altruistic acts benefit from those acts. Therefore, altruistic acts are performed for the benefit of the people who perform them.’

The bottom line, I think, is this. There can be no such thing as an ‘altruistic’ act that does not involve some element of self-interest, no such thing, for example, as an altruistic act that does not lead to some degree of pleasure or pride. Therefore, an act should not be written off as selfish or self-motivated simply because it includes some inevitable element of self-interest. The act can still be counted as altruistic if the ‘selfish’ element is accidental; or, if not accidental, then secondary; or, if neither accidental nor secondary, then at least un-determining.

Each year in the UK, around a hundred people donate a kidney to a stranger. These remarkable individuals probably derive considerable satisfaction from having donated a kidney, but it does not follow that they did so in order to obtain that satisfaction.

In short, an act is altruistic if we would have done it anyway, regardless of what it happened to bring us.

Only one question remains: how many of our so-called altruistic acts can meet this criterion for true altruism?

Continue Exploring

If this essay spoke to you, you might look into Hide and Seek: The Psychology of Self-Deception and  Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions.

You may also enjoy

Explore all Self-Deception essays

Explore all Emotions essays