"How do you explain that?" That can also be a selfish act. The feeling of happiness and pride from being gratuitously thanked exceeds the feeling of happiness

"How do you explain that?" That can also be a selfish act. The feeling of happiness and pride from being gratuitously thanked exceeds the feeling of happiness from getting extra cash. Social validation and feeling wanted is a powerful driver of happiness, because being popular in your tribe leads to reproductive success. Clear selfish motive there. So that doesn't map onto anonymously stealing from a store which many people, if not most people, would do if there were guaranteed to be no criminal or social consequences. Empirically the correlation between income and shoplifting wasn't that high, last I checked. And studies of people cheating show it is more common than not, last I checked. Almost everyone eats meat, despite the knowledge it's morally reprehensible, simply because it's still within the Overton Window for now. Eating meat is more morally reprehensible than shoplifting, the only reason people do the former and not the latter is social acceptability. By design, people are intrinsically selfish creatures. Any motivations that present as altruistic are either cultural mind viruses, disingenuous virtue signalling, or strategies (such as popularity and recognition seeking) we unconsciously selfishly employ to improve happiness (proximate reason) and genetic fitness (underlying reason).