Self-interest - what is it and how to recognize it?

The desire to achieve the set life goals is inherent in any person, but often it turns into a real profit. Surprisingly, even psychologists sometimes consider it useful for the development of a person climbing up the career ladder.

What is self-interest?

Depending on what science treats the concept, it acquires new facets. If one abstracts from the initially negative connotation, self-interest is not only a negative phenomenon. It can be opened in one of the following ways:

  1. Striving for profit and self-profit. Sociology, as the sphere of knowledge about processes in society, does not approve of such a passionate desire, set above moral values.
  2. Inability or unwillingness to do good is easy, without material rewards. Self-interest is closely connected with a decrease in the need for moral satisfaction from approval and oral gratitude.
  3. The motive for committing a crime is theft, murder, fraud.

Self-interest - psychology

Science, revealing the mechanisms of the work of human consciousness, calls self-interest the highest form of selfishness , because at least once in a life each person experiences such impulses. The self-interested person is the person who regularly becomes a victim of the baser desires to earn more and more quickly. Psychology can not fight prudence, but this science is capable of giving a person motivation to suppress it in its character.

How to understand selfish goals?

Criminal law and psychology are two branches of science that know the answer to the question of how to recognize mercenary goals. Specialists of the reasons, allowing them to distinguish, help to carry out their work. Mutual relations between people are not always fair, as well as selfish motive can become an occasion for conversation with a psychologist or prison punishment. To understand whether a person was self-serving during this or that act, three factors will help:

How to recognize self-interest?

Feel the prudence of the interlocutor or relative will help intuition and life experience. A self-serving person, although forced to communicate with the one by which he would like to achieve something, but because he does not feel any pleasure from this contact, will allow blunders:

Self-interest in marriage

The more difficult the life situation, the more active a person seeks to correct it as soon as possible. Marriage with a rich or powerful partner is one of the easiest tools for gaining financial freedom, though at the expense of one's own feelings. A self-interested person can be both a man and a woman, but a fair sex is more often accused of calculating when creating a family. It is expected that in such a marriage the two main problems will be:

  1. Joint leisure . When the couple are connected only with money, they can not reconcile themselves with musical preferences, hobbies and views on each other's life.
  2. Sexual relations . Self-interest does not force partners to experience passion and satisfaction in bed.

Self-interest in Orthodoxy

The Christian religion calls the sin of money-love one of the most common and dangerous sins . Priests believe that society is poisoned by the culture of consumption, so the people entering it do not see that they are motivated by the cult of money and their own importance. Self-interest hinders the salvation of the soul, therefore Orthodoxy advises to fight it in the following ways:

  1. An ascetic way of life . Modesty in clothes, food and entertainment will help not only save money, but also pacify the excesses caused by their excess.
  2. Formation of correct values ​​in children . That children were not as unhappy as the parents who instilled in them the love of success and wealth, they must be reoriented to respect and charity.
  3. Conversations with the ministers of religion . Communicating with a priest and like-minded people by faith will give a feeling of unity and support.