Voting may be the ultimate selfish act.

Despite Warren Buffett’s desire to raise his own taxes for the good of others, data indicates that he's an outlier. The vast majority of the time, we vote for measures that are in our own best interests.
 
“It turns out that people who really support gun control laws are the people who don’t have guns,” says Robert Kurzban, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania and co-author of The Hidden Agenda of the Political Mind: How Self-Interest Shapes Our Opinions and Why We Won't Admit It.
 
We’re partly hard-wired for this self-interest, he says. “If you’re going to try to understand humans as social creatures, as political creatures, certainly it’s important to understand them in an evolutionary context. After all, those organisms that didn’t look after their interests – they’re not our ancestors.”
 
In today's world, we're bombarded with all kinds of contentious issues — from taxation to marijuana legalization. So it seems hard to believe that the country can be so evenly split between two parties, and that each platform satisfies all the selfish needs of every member of the party.
 
Kurzban points out that our country is neatly divided, in part, because Republican and Democratic leaders tend to shift their positions to even the field. For the parties to survive, they have to be pragmatic. “So they’re moving in directions that wind up lassoing roughly half of the electorate.”
 
Will political contentiousness continue to beat out harmony? If the past is any indication – and people have debated the partisan nature of politics since America was founded – then we’ll be faced with more of the same.
 
“As long as there’s going to be certain kinds of policies that are good for some people and bad for others, then we’re going to see genuine conflicts in the political realm.”