Self-esteem as a general enabler or inhibitor

'curious' asks: "would it be self-importance rather than self-esteem ..."

No, respectfully, I rather doubt that the research quoted was likely to have confused self-esteem with self-importance, that's why the findings are potentially important. I realize it's a form of heresy to doubt in even a small way the value of self-esteem building, or to claim that "bad" domination behavior could be enabled by self-esteem, but the case is plausible that the hyperbole around the popular view of the concept does cover up some less savory correlations in at least some people. I think I see a pattern in the history of American psychology that things that start out as reasonable and useful theories become undoubted ideologies as they gather steam and enter the marketplace. I suspect that may have happened with self-esteem.

Yes, I could be wrong, but what I've read makes sense to me right now. I'm basing this on the research I saw reviewed by Roy Baumeister in some of his peer-reviewed APA papers and in his book, "Evil." "Evil" is pedantic but a popular psychology style book, so it doesn't describe the research in great detail, just the results. You have to go to the sources to evaluate the real credibility of the arguments.

I went to some of his sources, and he seemed to be making a legitimate point from good data as far as I could tell.

Then I read Robyn Dawes make a similar point in one of his books, and he tends to be very careful about research interpretation. He focuses more on the remarkably small amount of real evidence for any correlation between self-esteem and positive achievement, or between low self-esteem and serious problems, considering the enormous industry around advocating building self-esteem. When you consider the size of the problem of bullying, and the low correlation with poor self-esteem, it isn't rocket surgery to conclude that it might just be possible that self-esteem could enable bullying in some people, just as it seems to enable sexual behavior in teenage males.

These guys are fairly divergent on most issues (Dawes is a researcher-critic of most clinical psychology), but they seemed to agree on this, so all this made me think hard about the real possibility that it might be true.

Dawes cites the California Report on Self-Esteem, whose authors were convinced of its strictly positive value, even while their own review of 30,000 journal articles admittedly failed to support the case. They remark:

"One of the disappointing aspects of every chapter in this volume (at least to those of us who adhere to the intuitively correct models sketched above) is how low the
association between self-esteem and its consequences are in
the research to date. If the association between self-esteem and behavior is so often reported to be weak, even less can be said for the causal relationship between the two."

I don't know about you, but that sounds to me very much like someone who wants to believe something, assumes it is true, and refuses to believe their own eyes that it isn't true.

The report itself goes on to note the following:
- a lack of evidence for any direct relationship between low self-esteem and child abuse
- correlation between *general* measures of self esteem and
academic achievement of 0.17.
- correlation between *academic* self-evaluation (rather than self-esteem) and achievement measures of 0.42.
- for males, higher self-esteem correlated with greater teen sexual activity
- for females, no correlation between teen sexual activity and self-esteem
- some correlation between high self-esteem and contraceptive use, without evidence of causation
- mixed results on correlation between self-esteem and teen
pregnancy
- no predictive value of low self-esteem for crime and violence
- no evidence for correlation with chronic welfare dependency
- no evidence of a causal role in drug or alcohol dependency
- retrospective reports of female d&a abusers of low teen self-esteem

Not a very strong case from advocates of something that "everyone knows."

Thinking about my own acceptance of that idea, I think I believed that bullies have "low self-esteem" partly because of the effective hyperbole of the self-esteem self-help industry of course, but also more rationally because of the credibility of the frustration model of aggression. We assume that people who are marginallized and feel inferior are frustrated and want to strike out. It's partly true of course. Some people who feel inferior do strike out from frustration and feeling that they have run out of other options.

However, if these researchers are right, that description doesn't seem to accurately characterize most bullies. Most don't seem to feel inferior, according to what I've seen, they seem to feel superior, but to also to be likely to feel their perceived high status threatened and feel the need to protect it.

It makes a lot of sense to me the more I think about it. Protecting and challenging status is a primary source of male aggression particularly, so it makes sense that people with more to lose will tend to be more protective of it if they also feel threatened. But why should they feel threatened if they have high self-esteem, right ?

The logical problem is, I think, that we assume the self-esteem scale measures some factor of "I don't need to prove anything anymore," and then we assume that this factor correlates positively with self-esteem. We seem to think of this as if self-esteem automatically raises us on a plateau of confidence that protects us from self-esteem threats. If Baumeister and Dawes are right, and I think they are, it could well be that there is no such plateau, at least for *some* people. They are missing some other factor that would protect their high self-esteem from threat and prevent them from feeling the need to protect their status.

Baumeister's conclusion is that much cruelty results from a failure of the usual mechanisms we rely on for self-control rather than being consequences of enjoying cruelty or feeling inferior or other traditional explanations.

It leads to an interestingly different slant than the usual way of looking at this from the American social sciences tradition, which places blame heavily on economics and class.

I want to reiterate that I don't doubt that self-esteem is an enabler for a variety of behaviors, and low self-esteem an inhibitor. Also, I'm not making the same argument as some of the "self-esteem doubters" who claim that the popular emphasis on self-esteem doesn't build "real" self-esteem, just a fragile version. I'm just doubting that legitimate self-esteem "is all good" simply because it enables many social behaviors. I find the heresy of the high self-esteem bully and sexually active teen perfectly consonant with my own experience as well as making some biological sense.

kind regards,

Todd

refs:

"Evil : Inside Human Violence and Cruelty"
by Roy F. Baumeister, W H Freeman & Co; ISBN: 0805071652; (December 2001)

"House of Cards : Psychology and Psychotherapy Built on Myth" by Robyn M. Dawes, Free Press; ISBN: 0684830914; (January 1997)

Replies:

Re:Self-esteem as a general enabler or inhibitor, by curious, 04/13/02 Ok, you could do that, but why ?, by Todd, 04/14/02 Re:Ok, you could do that, but why ?, by curious, 04/14/02 Measures vs.Theories of self-esteem, by Todd, 04/17/02 psych research, by neeru, 04/15/02 Re:psych research, by Todd, 04/17/02 Re:psych research, by neeru, 04/18/02 Relation of self-esteem to sexual activity varies by gender, by Todd, 04/23/02 self-esteem and intimacy, by Todd, 08/04/02

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