# The structure of neural pathways for both selfishness and empathy indicates that there are no intrinsically “good” or “evil” parts of our brains. Self-interest and concern for others involve overlapping brain regions at all three levels of MacLean’s (1990) triune brain. We need to keep constantly training our prefrontal executive systems, and when possible each other’s, to maintain an optimal balance between selfishness and empathy. # Chronic childhood stress inclines people as adults toward greater fight-or-flight or dissociative responses and away from caring responses (e.g., Perry et al., 1995). Conversely, children raised in caring societies and homes typically become caring adults (e.g., Eisenberg, 1992). # One of our more unfortunate pervasive human habits is to conflate bullying with strong leadership – which accounts for the attractiveness of authoritarian dictators to large numbers of people. # Perino et al. (2019) found that the adolescent bullies he studied were not deficient in empathic accuracy, that is, in picking up social cues about whether the people they interacted with were happy or unhappy. By contrast, these authors said that Aggression stemming from socially dissonant responses — e.g., taking pleasure in others’ pain or expressing displeasure when seeing others’ happiness—is more explanatory than traditional empathic explanations (p. 1473). # Finding the right combination of charismatic leadership with the caring emotional side of empathy is difficult but must be pursued for organizations to flourish. Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research | March 2025 | Volume 16 | Issue 1 | pp. 27-37 36 Levine, D., The Trade-off of Selfishness and Empathy in the Human Brain #mentalhealth #brain #health #wellness #humanity #psychology #healthybrain #happybrain #neuroscience #HBE #humanbrainexpo #3hbrain #science #AI #brainhealth #ethics #helpfulbrain #innovation #innovationmanagement #events #news #biotech #psychiatry
