The Psychology of the Quiet Ego

Egotism is in. For the past few decades, it has been okay to "look out for Number 1," with the assumption that "Number 1" refers to an individualistic notion of the person—and then mostly in the immediate moment, without regard for the individual's own long-term interests. Advertising and marketing campaigns feed our cultural obsession with egoistic pursuits, and political and economic forces help make many self-indulgent behaviors and expectations a perceived necessity. The burgeoning business of self-help books in pop psychology has contributed to the cultural endorsement of excessive self-interest, selling advice on how to be, or to get, anything one wants. What is wrong with that? To start, excessive self-interest is not entirely in the interest of the self: As the chapters in this book demonstrate, the problems of egotism include not only social disharmony but also diminished personal well-being, health, productivity, and self-esteem. Public messages from academic psychology and the social sciences have taken fierce stands against unchecked egotism (e.g., Lasch, 1979/1991; Twenge, 2006), have surveyed the conflicts in American life between self-interest and collective concern (Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, & Tipton, 1985; Putnam, 2000), and have pointed down paths of lessened ego investment (e.g., Leary, 2004; Schwartz, 2005). In addition, the academic and popular interest in positive psychology demonstrates a widespread concern for the problems of egotism and the ways of transcending it. Finally, the self-help industry is not entirely about selfish gain: Books on the humanistic, prosocial forms of personal growth have always made bestseller lists and are still on the rise in that respect (Korda, 2001). Thus, it is no cultural coincidence that psychological research has recently emerged to examine the transcendence of self-interest. We use the terms the quiet ego and quieting the ego to connote the individual who routinely transcends egotism as well as the need to turn down a few notches the booming volume of egotism, on both individual and cultural levels. The blossoming of research on transcending self-interest has grown in scattered patches across the vast field of psychology. With this book we hope to provide a unifying source and framework for understanding and advancing this research. In this chapter, we introduce this research as a new area of scientific inquiry, provide a framework for understanding the empirical research on the quiet ego, sketch psychology's historical interests in quieting the ego, and finally, point to current research and future directions that we find especially