Selfishness is placing concern with oneself or one's own interests above the interests of others. Selfishness is the opposite of altruism or selflessness.

Given two actors, oneself and someone else, there are four types of possible behavior directly impacting the welfare of the actors; selfishness, altruism, spite, and cooperation. Selfishness is harming someone else in order to help oneself; Altruism is harming oneself in order to help someone else; Spite is harming oneself in order to harm someone else; Cooperation is helping someone else and also helping oneself.

The implications of selfishness have inspired divergent views within religious, philosophical, psychological, economic and evolutionary contexts.^{[citation needed]}

Yaron Brook (Hebrew: ירון ברוק‎; born 1961) is a political activist and the current president and executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, a non-profit organization in Irvine, California, whose mission is to promote the novels of Ayn Rand and her philosophy of Objectivism.

Brook was born and raised in Israel. His parents were Jewish socialists who were originally from South Africa. A friend lent him a copy of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged when he was 16, and he eventually embraced Objectivism. At the age of 18 he was drafted into the Israeli Army. He served for three years (1979–1982), and was a First Sergeant in Israeli military intelligence. Once out of the army, he attended college at the Technion—Israel Institute of Technology located in Haifa, and in 1986 he received his B.Sc. in Civil Engineering.

In 1987, Brook moved to the United States to study at the University of Texas at Austin. There, he received his MBA in 1989 and his PhD in Finance in 1994. He was subsequently hired to teach Finance at Santa Clara University in California, where he was an assistant professor for seven years. He was a teacher and developed a class on "Finance and Ethics." In 1998 Brook (with Robert Hendershott) started an investment consulting business called BH Equity Research, located in San Jose, California. He is currently a managing partner of that firm.

Ayn Rand ( /ˈaɪn ˈrænd/; born Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum, February 2 [O.S. January 20] 1905 – March 6, 1982) was a Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter. She is known for her two best-selling novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and for developing a philosophical system she called Objectivism.

Born and educated in Russia, Rand moved to the United States in 1926. She worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood and had a play produced on Broadway in 1935–1936. After two initially unsuccessful early novels, she achieved fame with her 1943 novel The Fountainhead. In 1957, she published her best-known work, the philosophical novel Atlas Shrugged. Afterward she turned to nonfiction to promote her philosophy, publishing her own magazines and releasing several collections of essays until her death in 1982.

Rand advocated reason as the only means of acquiring knowledge and rejected all forms of faith and religion. She supported rational and ethical egoism, and rejected ethical altruism. In politics, she condemned the initiation of force as immoral and opposed all forms of collectivism and statism, instead supporting laissez-faire capitalism, which she believed was the only social system that protected individual rights. She promoted romantic realism in art. She was sharply critical of the philosophers and philosophical traditions known to her besides Aristotle.

Alan Wilson Watts (6 January 1915 – 16 November 1973) was a British philosopher, writer, and speaker, best known as an interpreter and populariser of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience. Born in Chislehurst, he moved to the United States in 1938 and began Zen training in New York. Pursuing a career, he attended Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, where he received a master's degree in theology. Watts became an Episcopal priest but left the ministry in 1950 and moved to California, where he joined the faculty of the American Academy of Asian Studies.

Living on the West Coast, Watts gained a large following in the San Francisco Bay Area while working as a volunteer programmer at KPFA, a Pacifica Radio station in Berkeley. Watts wrote more than 25 books and articles on subjects important to Eastern and Western religion, introducing the then-burgeoning youth culture to The Way of Zen (1957), one of the first bestselling books on Buddhism. In Psychotherapy East and West (1961), Watts proposed that Buddhism could be thought of as a form of psychotherapy and not just a religion. Like Aldous Huxley before him, he explored human consciousness in the essay, "The New Alchemy" (1958), and in the book, The Joyous Cosmology (1962).

Joyce Meyer (born Pauline Joyce Hutchison; June 4, 1943) is a Charismatic Christian author and speaker. Meyer and her husband Dave have four grown children, and live outside St. Louis, Missouri. Her ministry is headquartered in the St. Louis suburb of Fenton, Missouri.

Meyer was born Pauline Joyce Hutchison in south St. Louis in 1943. Her father went into the army to fight in World War II soon after she was born. She has said in interviews that he began sexually abusing her upon his return, and discusses this experience in her meetings.

A graduate of O'Fallon Technical High School in St. Louis, she married a part-time car salesman shortly after her senior year of high school. The marriage lasted for five years. She maintains that her husband frequently cheated on her and persuaded her to steal payroll checks from her employer. They used the money to go on a vacation to California. She states that she returned the money years later. After her divorce, Meyer frequented local bars before meeting Dave Meyer, an engineering draftsman. They were married on January 7, 1967.