Why Do we Like Selfish People?

• Nobody likes selfish people.
• But if that’s the case, then why did you fall in love with selfish ones before?
• And why do some selfish people, sometimes seem very attractive to us?

There is no doubt that selfishness is a bad trait that repels most people, and while that is true, there is still a psychological reason behind the fact that many of us fall for selfish and unavailable partners.

In one famous experiment, it was shown that emotional rejection is very similar to physical pain. After all, we all know how rejection hurts, and certainly, no one likes to get rejected.

The fact that rejection is so painful is one reason that motivates most of us to try to fit in and be accepted by our friends and peers. Now the problem happens when all of a sudden, someone rejects us.

How did you feel the last time someone removed you from Facebook or unfollowed you on Instagram?
Probably you felt bad, at least if that person mattered to you.

So what does all this have to do with liking selfish people?

Why selfish people can seem very attractive to us

A typical selfish person is a self-absorbed person who might not care about others as much as he cares about himself.

This means that the selfish person is very less likely to show others that he really cares about them. In other words, the selfish person deprives people of their important need to be accepted.

When we believe that someone isn’t approving us, we usually try harder to let that person accept us.

That’s not everything. The selfish person can sometimes express his emotions and become friendly if this doesn’t go against his self-interest. This results in a very random and unpredictable pattern which can be very rewarding to most people.

The reason people find gambling addictive is that it provides them with variable and unexpected rewards.

If a person made us feel good about ourselves sometimes and ignored us many other times, then this variable reward of approval we are getting will certainly motivate us to chase that person even more. And once we start to expect something from a person, we will think about them even more and liking them will become highly possible.

Selfish people are challenging.

Women sometimes go for challenges just to help themselves feel good about themselves.

Yes, some men can do the same, but generally, women are the ones who do that often. The selfish person represents a challenge for most women because he doesn’t really care about anyone but himself.

For a woman, this means that attracting that person and making him care about her is actually a tremendous achievement that could give her a potent self-esteem boost. This is another reason why women find selfish people very attractive.

It’s the fact that this person is emotionally unavailable, making them seem very attractive to approval-seeking humans.