If you’ve ever wondered what are some signs of a selfish person: this article is for you.
Everyone is a little selfish. You guard your weekend, you take the last slice, you say no to a favor because you’re exhausted. That’s normal, and some of it is healthy. Psychologists Scott Barry Kaufman and Emanuel Jauk (2020, Frontiers in Psychology) even built a scale to separate the two: healthy self-care tracked with higher well-being and more genuine reasons for helping others, while the exploitative kind went the other way.
The problem is the second kind. The person who always seems to come out ahead. The friend who is warm when they need a lift to the airport and strangely busy when you need one. You often can’t name what’s wrong, only that you keep leaving these interactions a bit lighter in the wallet, the calendar or the heart.
Spotting the pattern early saves a lot of grief. It also makes you a fairer judge, because one selfish moment doesn’t make a selfish person. What matters is repetition. If you want the gentler side of this skill, our guide on how to be an understanding person pairs well with what follows.
Below are 16 signs, each backed by research or by named specialists, plus what you can actually do when you see them.
1. Every conversation boomerangs back to them
You mention your new job. They ask how it’s going, wait two seconds, then launch into the story of their own promotion. Sound familiar?
Michael Yeomans of Imperial College London and Alison Wood Brooks of Harvard Business School gave this habit a name: boomerasking. Their paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (accepted August 2024) describes asking a question mainly as a runway for your own answer, and they found three flavors of it: bragging, complaining and plain sharing. In a March 2026 write-up of the work, Yeomans noted that around 83% of respondents believed this move would make a better impression than just talking about themselves. It doesn’t. Listeners judged boomeraskers as less sincere and less likeable than people who simply disclosed directly.
One boomerang is a social stumble. A steady stream of them tells you the question was never really about you.
Picture this: you tell a friend your dog is sick, and within a minute you’re comforting them about a pet they lost in 2019. Once is human. Every week is a pattern.
Next time, do this: after you answer one of their questions, pause and count how many follow-up questions come back to you. Zero, over several conversations, is data. If you’d like to model the opposite, these conversation strategies show what genuine curiosity looks like.
2. They take credit for your work
This one stings, and it’s common enough that people have a word for the feeling.
In a FlexJobs survey of 2,142 US workers, run through SurveyMonkey from August 21 to 30, 2026, taking credit for someone else’s work came top of the list of workplace “icks,” named by 65% of respondents. It beat micromanaging (57%) and gossip (54%). The survey was promoted through social media and newsletters rather than drawn as a random sample, so treat the exact percentages with some caution. The ranking, though, is hard to ignore. You can read the full FlexJobs 2026 workplace culture report for the rest of the list.
Credit-taking is selfishness in its purest workplace form. Your effort becomes their reputation, and the cost to them is zero.
Your move: keep a simple running log of what you contributed and when, then share progress in writing before big meetings. A short note to your manager (“Finished the supplier analysis, attached”) makes it much harder for anyone to rebrand your work. Our piece on asking your manager for useful feedback gives you a natural opening for those check-ins.
3. Your bad news gets a shrug
Watch what happens when you share something painful. A selfish person may understand perfectly well what happened. They just don’t seem to feel much about it.
That split is backed by numbers. Meenakshi Shukla and Niti Upadhyay pooled 14 studies with 5,328 participants in a 2025 meta-analysis in Frontiers in Psychiatry. Narcissism had essentially no link with cognitive empathy (knowing what you feel) but a small negative link with affective empathy (feeling it with you). For Machiavellianism and psychopathy, both kinds of empathy were lower, with the strongest drop in the emotional side. All 14 studies were cross-sectional, so this shows association, not cause, and the effects are modest. Still, it fits what many people describe: the selfish friend who can read the room perfectly and uses that skill for themselves.
So the clue isn’t confusion about your feelings. It’s the quick pivot, the flat “that sucks” before they change the subject, the absence of any follow-up a week later. If you want to see what real support looks like from the other side, our guide on how to show empathy to someone breaks it down, and you can quietly notice which of those behaviors you’re getting back.
4. They only call when they need something
Your phone lights up. It’s them. Your first thought is “what do they want this time?” That reflex is worth listening to.
In a September 2025 Newsweek piece on one-sided friendships, California family therapist Sharon Yu argued that friendship rests on mutual care rather than exchange, and that if you’re always the one initiating, the relationship may survive only on your energy. Friendship coach Zoe Asher put it more bluntly: if you’re “the only one paying the tolls” over the long run, you’re in something closer to a drain than a friendship. Both also made a fair point: grief, caregiving or burnout can tilt any friendship temporarily. What you’re looking for is the tilt that never corrects.
These are expert views rather than research findings, but they match what most of us know from experience. Contact that only arrives with a request attached is contact on their terms.
A quick experiment: for one month, stop initiating. Don’t announce it. Just see who reaches out, and why. The answer is usually clear by week three.
5. Rules are for other people
They cut the queue. They park in the disabled spot “for one minute.” They expect you to stay late but leave at five on the dot themselves.
The cause and effect runs like this. It starts with psychological entitlement, the belief that you deserve more than others. That belief raises expectations. Raised expectations make ordinary outcomes feel unfair. And once something feels unfair, bending the rules feels like correcting an injustice rather than breaking one. Sivan George-Levi’s October 2025 review in Frontiers in Psychology lists what entitlement scores have predicted in past research: selfishness in resource dilemmas, exploitative tendencies, rule-breaking, unethical decisions, envy and chronic relationship conflict. The review is selective rather than systematic, and the underlying studies are mostly correlational, so think of the chain as a well-supported explanation, not a proven sequence.
What you’ll notice in daily life is the double standard. Their lateness is traffic. Yours is disrespect.
Start small: point out one double standard, calmly and once, using their own rule. “You asked everyone to be on time Mondays, so I’ll hold you to that too.” Their reaction tells you a lot. If you’re dealing with this at work, our guide to working with a controlling person has more ways to hold your position.
6. They vanish when life gets hard for you
The real test of a relationship isn’t the barbecue. It’s the hospital waiting room.
Support from friends is less automatic than we assume. In Pew Research Center’s January 2025 report on where Americans turn for emotional support, 74% said they were extremely or very likely to turn to a spouse or partner, but only 46% said the same about a friend (54% of women, 38% of men). And 18% said they had no close friend at all. Against that backdrop, the friend who disappears exactly when you’re struggling is doing more damage than it looks. They’re taking up a slot in a support network that, for many people, is already thin.
The stakes are real. The WHO Commission on Social Connection’s report (June 2025) estimates that loneliness affects about 1 in 6 people worldwide and is linked to more than 871,000 deaths a year.
Notice who showed up the last time you had a rough patch, and who sent a single heart emoji. Then put more of your energy into the first group, and widen it where you can; these social skills tips help if your circle has shrunk.
7. They play the victim to get their way
Some selfish people don’t grab. They wilt. Somehow every disagreement ends with them hurt, misunderstood and owed something.
Timothy Bates and colleagues at the University of Edinburgh tested this in three preregistered studies published in Personality and Individual Differences (online November 2024). Working with 750 UK adults in each of the first two studies, they replicated an earlier finding by Ok and colleagues (2021): people higher in narcissism and Machiavellianism were more likely to signal “virtuous victimhood,” presenting themselves as both wronged and morally good. Narcissism was the stronger predictor in both studies. The authors frame this as a strategy for transferring resources: sympathy, apologies, favors. The data are self-report and correlational, and one part of the original 2021 finding (about a specific “amoral” subtype) didn’t replicate, so the picture is still being refined.
In practice, it looks like this: you raise a fair complaint, and ten minutes later you’re the one apologizing.
Test it this week: when the conversation flips, steer it back once. “I hear that you’re upset. I’d still like to sort out what I raised.” A person who’s genuinely hurt can hold both. A strategic victim usually escalates. If that escalation starts to make you doubt your own memory, read our guide on how to respond to gaslighting.
8. They’re a different person around anyone with power
Charming to the CEO. Dismissive to the waiter. Warm to the friend with the lake house, cool to the one without.
The same FlexJobs survey from August 2026 found that 33% of US workers listed “acting differently around senior leadership” as a workplace ick. That’s a third of respondents who’ve watched a colleague switch personalities depending on who’s in the room, and found it off-putting enough to name. The shift signals something specific: their kindness is aimed at people who can return it.
Say you’re at a team lunch. Your colleague is laughing at every one of the director’s jokes, then snaps at the junior analyst who ordered the wrong sandwich. You’ve just learned how they’ll treat you the day you stop being useful.
Here’s a simple way in: watch how someone treats people who can do nothing for them. Service staff, interns, the quiet person at the party. That’s the closest thing you’ll get to a preview. If you manage people yourself, our guide on how to be a good boss covers how to reward the opposite behavior on your team.
9. “Sorry” barely exists in their vocabulary
You might get “I’m sorry you feel that way.” You might get silence. What you rarely get is a plain admission and an offer to fix things.
Why? The mechanism runs through two emotions. To apologize, you first need to feel what your mistake did to the other person (empathy), and then feel bad about having caused it (guilt). Remove either step and the apology has nothing to stand on. Jochen Leunissen, Constantine Sedikides and Tim Wildschut tested exactly this chain in four studies published in the European Journal of Personality in 2017. They concluded that “narcissists are unwilling to apologize for their transgressions,” and found that lower empathy followed by lower guilt explained the link. A 2023 study by Tatiana Iwai in the British Journal of Social Psychology (684 participants, three studies) adds the flip side: people with a weaker moral identity were less likely to apologize, while prompting guilt about a lapse led to fuller apologies.
So don’t wait for the perfect apology. Decide in advance what you’ll accept as repair, such as a changed behavior even without the words, and stop chasing the rest. Our guide to improving emotional intelligence has more on why some people find these emotions so hard to access.
10. Everything is someone else’s fault
The project failed because of the client. The breakup happened because the ex was crazy. The car got scratched because someone parked too close.
A 2025 paper in the Journal of Individual Differences by K. M. Ryan and colleagues looked at how narcissism plays out in couples. Across three studies (two with roughly 60 college couples each, one with 506 online participants), people higher in narcissism tended to make negative responsibility attributions, meaning they read their partner’s actions as deliberate and blameworthy. Those attributions partly or fully explained why they were slower to forgive. The college samples were small and mostly white, so the result needs broader testing. The pattern, though, is a familiar one. If someone always assigns blame outward, two things follow: they never have to change, and you always have to apologize.
Give it a go: next time they tell a story about being wronged, ask, gently, “What would you do differently?” A person with normal accountability will find something. If the answer is always “nothing,” you’ve learned how the next conflict with you will go. For your own side of the conversation, practicing seeing things from different points of view helps you stay fair without absorbing their version.
11. Their generosity needs an audience
They donate loudly, help publicly and post about it. Offstage, the wallet stays closed.
In one of the more striking giving experiments of recent years, Ryan Dwyer, Elizabeth Dunn and colleagues gave 200 people in seven countries $10,000 each and asked them to spend it within three months (Psychological Science, published August 2023). On average, participants spent $6,464, about 68% of the money, on things that benefited others. Half were randomly told to share their spending on Twitter, and the public group gave about the same as the private group. For most people, in other words, being watched barely changed how generous they were.
A broader 2018 meta-analysis by Alex Bradley, Claire Lawrence and Eamonn Ferguson in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, covering 134 effects and 788,164 participants, did find a small boost to helping when others are watching (r = .14). So an audience nudges everyone a little. What separates the selfish person is the size of the gap.
Watch for this: compare what they do when there’s credit available with what they do when there isn’t. Who helps you move house? Who quietly covers a shift? Those private moments are a far better gauge than any post.
12. They keep a running ledger
Think of a joint bank account where only one person ever checks the balance. Every favor they do goes in as a deposit. Every favor you do vanishes. When they need something, they read out their deposits.
The analogy holds in one way: selfish people treat relationships as accounts, and they track them closely. It breaks down in another, because a real bank keeps fair records, and the scorekeeper’s ledger is famously one-sided. Research psychologist Dr. Kimberly Horn, author of Friends Matter, For Life, told Newsweek in September 2025 that when the balance in a friendship keeps tilting one way, tension builds and reciprocity collapses, and she flagged tallying who texts or plans first as a red flag in itself.
Say you skip their birthday drinks because your kid is sick. Three months later, when you ask for a lift, you hear about the birthday. Their two-hour drive for you last winter? Never mentioned.
A quick experiment: when the ledger comes out, don’t argue the numbers. Say, “I don’t want us keeping score,” and see whether they can drop it.
13. Lies come easily, especially small useful ones
Selfish people don’t necessarily tell huge lies. They tell convenient ones. The traffic was terrible. They never got the message. They’d love to help, but.
A 2026 study in Anales de Psicología by B. Viera-Delgado, E. Armas-Vargas and A. de Miguel surveyed 207 Spanish adolescents and found that higher Machiavellianism (the cold, strategic trait) separated those who reported lying from those who didn’t, as did lower responsibility. Teenagers aren’t adults, and the sample is small, so this is one piece of a larger picture rather than the final word. An earlier study of 305 Japanese university students by Yasuhiro Daiku, Kim Serota and Timothy Levine (PLoS ONE, 2021) found a similar shape: most people lie rarely, a few lie a lot, and Machiavellianism and psychopathy increased lying by lowering guilt about it.
The useful takeaway is that lying isn’t spread evenly. If you catch someone in several small, self-serving lies, you’re probably not seeing bad luck. You’re seeing a habit.
Next time, do this: check one claim. Not in a detective way, just quietly. If the story keeps changing, believe the pattern, not the latest version. And if their promises tend to evaporate too, our piece on how to keep a promise is a good reminder of what reliability actually looks like.
14. They guilt-trip you when you say no
You decline a favor and suddenly you’re reminded of every favor they’ve ever done. Or you hear, “If you really cared, you’d do this.”
Clinical psychologist Kia-Rai Prewitt explained in a January 2026 Cleveland Clinic article that guilt trips work because they hook into a relationship you value. She also made an interesting point: not all guilt-tripping is calculated. Some people don’t notice how much pressure they’re applying, and others reach for guilt because they’ve never learned to ask for what they need directly. Either way, she said, it’s inconsiderate, because it overrides your boundaries. Over time it breeds anxiety, self-doubt and resentment.
That nuance matters. Intent changes how you feel about someone. It doesn’t change the effect on you.
Start small: pause before replying, then repeat your answer once, briefly, without a long defense. “I can’t this weekend.” Prewitt’s advice is that saying no is self-respecting, not selfish. If the guilt trip sets your heart racing, these quick nervous system resets help you stay steady in the moment.
15. Your wins seem to sting them
You get the job, and they find the flaw. You get engaged, and they bring up the cost of weddings. Something about your good news seems to cost them.
The cause-and-effect chain here runs through what psychologists call malicious envy. Jens Lange, Jan Crusius and Birk Hagemeyer tested it across five studies with 1,225 participants (European Journal of Personality, 2016). They found that one side of narcissism, a rivalrous, defensive streak driven by fear of failure, led to malicious envy, the hostile kind that wants to pull the other person down. A different side, driven by hope for success, led to benign envy, which pushes people to improve themselves instead. So the mechanism goes: your success reads as a threat to their status, the threat triggers fear, and the fear comes out as a dig.
Not every envious flash makes someone selfish. Envy is human. What matters is what they do with it.
Share one piece of good news and watch the first ten seconds of their reaction. Real friends may be a bit jealous and still say congratulations first.
16. Their help comes with strings attached
They’ll help you, sure. You’ll just hear about it later, possibly at a family dinner, possibly as a bargaining chip.
Psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman, writing in Psychology Today in November 2022, describes unhealthy selfishness as a strong drive to exploit others for personal gain, set against a healthier self-care that leaves room for genuine generosity. In his 2020 study with Emanuel Jauk, a form of helping driven by self-interest, which they called pathological or toxic altruism, was negatively linked with healthy selfishness and tied to more neurotic, less genuine motives.
The tell is the invoice. Genuine help is given and forgotten. Strategic help is given and remembered, with interest.
Your move: when someone offers help, ask yourself if you’d be comfortable owing them. If the answer is no, a polite “Thanks, I’ve got it” can save you a long debt.
What to do if you see yourself in this list
Now the uncomfortable part. Most people reading a list like this will recognize at least one sign in themselves. Maybe you boomerask. Maybe you’ve guilt-tripped a sibling. That doesn’t make you a selfish person. Slipping into these habits now and then is part of being human; the question is what you do next.
Being harsh with yourself is usually the wrong move. In a well-known 2012 set of experiments in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Juliana Breines and Serena Chen found that people who took a self-compassionate view of a past moral lapse were more motivated to make amends and to avoid repeating it than people who simply boosted their self-esteem. It’s an older study, flagged as such, but a 2020 paper by Ying Yang and colleagues in Mindfulness, with more than 3,400 participants across two studies, linked self-compassion to less unethical behavior too, through lower moral disengagement. Beating yourself up tends to trigger defensiveness. Kindness makes it safer to look honestly.
A little guilt still has its place. Tatiana Iwai’s 2023 work found that prompting guilt about a lapse led people to give fuller apologies. So aim for the middle: own it, without drowning in it.
A few concrete moves:
- Apologize specifically. Name what you did and its effect, then say what you’ll change.
- Ask directly instead of guilt-tripping. Prewitt’s advice for people who catch themselves doing it is simple: state what you need and accept that the answer may be no.
- Pick one habit, not five. If it’s conversation, practice asking two follow-up questions before sharing your own story. Our guide on how to be friendly and kind has small daily practices.
- Review the week. On Sunday, ask yourself who you took from and who you gave to. Then even it out a little.
If you want a wider reset, these habits to stop for a better version of yourself are a good place to start.
Conclusion
Selfish people rarely announce themselves. They show up in patterns: the boomerang question, the borrowed credit, the empty chair in the waiting room, the favor that comes back as an invoice. One sign on its own proves little. Several, repeated over months, tell you a lot about how much room someone has for you.
You don’t have to cut everyone off. Sometimes the right response is a boundary, sometimes a frank conversation, sometimes just investing more in the people who give back. Pick one person in your life you’ve been unsure about, check them against three or four signs from this list this week, and decide what, if anything, you’ll change.
For more on building relationships that actually feed you, browse our relationships section.
