Seven Deadly Sins: Read an excerpt from the book by Guy Leschziner

This individual tendency to greed is largely hard-wired within our psyches. What is the relationship between wanting more and unethical behaviour? Take a look

Greed is a core aspect of human nature. Like many psychological traits, it is normally distributed within the population, meaning that the majority have intermediate greed, while a few are very minimally or excessively greedy. This individual tendency to greed, measurable using a variety of psychological assessments, tends to remain stable within a person over time, suggesting that it is largely hard-wired within our psyches, less susceptible to the vagaries of our experiences. And as with any such widespread human trait, there must be some sort of evolutionary directive for us to exhibit greed, not just to support the principles that underpin our modern societies. There must be some benefits that propagate greed through the generations.

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Therefore, before considering greed as a sin, let us contemplate the good of greed. At first glance, this might seem rather obvious. It is, however, not as simple as just imagining that greed drives people to do better. The acquisition of wealth or possessions is not always inevitably a good thing for the individual. There is a difference between wanting the best outcome, and wanting more. Maximising the outcome of any situation relies upon the balancing of costs and benefits, a rational process to achieve the best, and how you define that. A greedy person, though, may reap negative consequences of their greed, going into debt for example to buy more, or alienating those around them in their relentless pursuit of wealth. The constant dissatisfaction and need for more may cause irrationality.

If we do indeed hypothesise that greed is under evolutionary influence, what might be the mechanisms driving it? Does greed lead to more procreation and increase your chances of passing on your genes?

Unravelling this is more complicated than it first sounds. Greed may manifest in a drive to want more children, but it may also push towards having as many sexual partners as possible, at the expense of forming stable, long-lasting relationships and having children. Greed may drive people to invest more in their social relationships to achieve sexual encounters, albeit temporarily, before moving on.

In the wonderfully titled research paper, ‘Greedy bastards: Testing the relationship between wanting more and unethical behavior’, being disposed to greed was significantly associated with acceptability and self-reported engagement in unethical behaviours. These included evading fares on public transport, illegally downloading movies, switching price tags at the supermarket and spreading gossip.(The same study showed that being greedy was also associated with increased likelihood of accepting a bribe in a laboratory-based game.) Importantly, this study also found a strong association between greed, the desire to cheat on a partner, and actually doing so.

But does this predisposition to infidelity result in more children, fewer, or make no difference whatsoever? In the real world, or at least the modern European version of it, greed does not appear to correlate with more offspring. In one study, of 2,367 individuals representative of the Dutch population, greed was actually associated with fewer children but, as expected, with higher numbers of sexual partners, and shorter relationship lengths.

Of course, in our evolutionary journey, the modern age with its modern sensibilities is but a blink of an eye. As with those genes that influence obesity, the advance of genes promoting greed may relate to circumstances different to the current era. Perhaps this association between greed and multiple sexual partners found in the Dutch study might be of more relevance to the evolutionary pressures favouring greed, in our past rather than present. Maybe, in different cultures or times, greed might give rise to more rather than fewer offspring. Particularly when having children was less associated with self-sacrifice (for males, at least), having access to more resources would probably have been an important driver of having more children and their increased likelihood of survival. Furthermore, pursuing a strategy of multiple brief sexual encounters might have been a successful evolutionary strategy to have lots of offspring who are genetically diverse.

(Excerpted with permission from Seven Deadly Sins: The Biology of Being Human by Guy Leschziner; published by HarperCollins; 2024)