Self-esteem
Self-esteem is confidence in one's own worth, abilities, or morals, and it carries beliefs as simple as "I am loved" or "I am worthy." The psychologists Smith and Mackie drew a line between two ideas that sound alike. The self-concept is what we think about the self, they wrote, while self-esteem is the positive or negative evaluation of the self, in how we feel about it. So self-esteem is not a list of facts about a person. It is the verdict a person passes on themselves. That verdict comes wrapped in emotion: triumph, despair, pride, and shame. A single question runs underneath this whole subject. If feeling good about yourself is so plainly beneficial, why has the science of it been so contested? A California lawmaker once compared raising self-esteem to handing out a vaccine. A leading psychologist insisted nearly every problem in human life traced back to its absence. And yet a state task force, after reviewing the evidence, found the associations very small. The chapters ahead follow that argument through philosophy, therapy, public policy, and the clinic, all the way to a cancer ward.
David Hume, the Scottish enlightenment thinker, gave the concept its first written expression in the 18th century. Hume argued that valuing and thinking well of oneself serves a motivational function. It enables people to explore their full potential. That practical, almost mechanical defense of self-regard set the tone for everything that followed.
William James, the philosopher and psychologist, was the first to mark self-esteem out as a distinct construct. James split the self into two levels. There was the process of knowing, which he called the "I-self," and the resulting knowledge, the "Me-self." The I-self observes and stores, and from that storage emerge three kinds of knowledge: the material self, the social self, and the spiritual self. The material self holds the body and possessions. The spiritual self holds descriptions and evaluations of who one is. The social self, comprising all the characteristics that others recognize, comes closest to self-esteem. James saw self-esteem as the sum of an individual's attitudes toward itself, and that view still holds today.
Morris Rosenberg, a social psychologist, defined self-esteem in the mid-1960s as a feeling of self-worth. He built the Rosenberg self-esteem scale, a 10-item instrument that became the most widely used measure of self-esteem in the social sciences. Francis Fukuyama, the political scientist, reached further back. In 1992 he tied self-esteem to what Plato called thymos, the spiritedness within the Platonic soul.
The behaviorist movement of the early 20th century had no patience for any of this. Behaviorists shunned the introspective study of feelings and replaced it with objective experiments on behavior in relation to the environment. They saw the human being as an animal subject to reinforcements. They wanted psychology to be an experimental science, like chemistry or biology. Self-esteem, harder to pin down with rigorous measurement, was overlooked, and clinical trials on it went unrun.
Phenomenology and humanistic psychology reversed that neglect in the mid-20th century. Researchers returned to self-esteem as a possible treatment for depression, anxiety, and personality disorders. They began asking new questions: why people feel less worthy, why people grow discouraged, why people find themselves unable to meet challenges alone.
The core self-evaluations approach, from 1997, folded self-esteem into a larger frame. It became one of four dimensions of a person's fundamental self-appraisal, alongside locus of control, neuroticism, and self-efficacy. That bundle has since shown an ability to predict job satisfaction and job performance, which gave self-esteem a foothold in the world of work.
Government and non-government groups began endorsing self-esteem around the 1970s, enough that one can speak of a self-esteem movement. Its founding idea was bold and simple. Low self-esteem was the root of an individual's problems, and therefore the root of society's dysfunctions too. The psychologist Nathaniel Branden, a leading figure, put it without hedging. He could not think of a single psychological problem, from anxiety and depression to fear of intimacy or success, to spouse battery or child molestation, that was not traced back to the problem of low self-esteem.
John Vasconcellos, a California assemblyman, turned that belief into law. In 1986 he worked to set up and fund the Task Force on Self-Esteem and Personal and Social Responsibility. Vasconcellos argued the task force could fight crime, teen pregnancy, school underachievement, and even pollution. He likened raising self-esteem to a vaccine that could protect people from being overwhelmed by life.
The task force set up committees across California counties and gathered scholars to review the literature. Their finding undercut the premise. The committee found very small associations between low self-esteem and its assumed consequences. Low self-esteem was not the root of all societal problems. The task force disbanded in 1995. Its mission passed to the National Council for Self-Esteem and then the National Association for Self-Esteem. Vasconcellos and Jack Canfield sat on the advisory board in 2003, and the masters' coalition included Anthony Robbins, Bernie Siegel, and Gloria Steinem.
Abraham Maslow placed self-esteem inside his hierarchy of human needs and split it in two. There was the need for respect from others, won through recognition, success, and admiration. And there was the need for self-respect, built from self-love, self-confidence, skill, or aptitude. Respect from others, Maslow believed, was the more fragile of the two, easily lost. Without the self-esteem need met, a person would chase it endlessly and never reach self-actualization. The healthiest form of self-esteem, he said, is the one that manifests in the respect we deserve for others, more than renown, fame, and flattery.
Sociometer theory frames self-esteem as a gauge. It evolved, on this view, to check one's level of status and acceptance in a social group. Terror Management Theory casts it differently. There, self-esteem serves a protective function, reducing anxiety about life and death.
Carl Rogers, who lived from 1902 to 1987, traced many people's troubles to a single source. They despise themselves, consider themselves worthless and incapable of being loved. Rogers offered his clients unconditional acceptance, positive regard no matter what they said or did, believing it could lift their self-esteem. From that grew a principle stated as an inalienable right. Every human being, for the mere fact of being, is worthy of unconditional respect, and deserves to esteem himself and to be esteemed.
The Rosenberg self-esteem scale asks participants to indicate how strongly they agree with a series of statements about themselves, across ten items. The Coopersmith Inventory takes a different route. It runs 50 questions over many topics, asking subjects to judge whether someone is similar or dissimilar to themselves. Solid self-regard marks a person as well adjusted. Answers that reveal inner shame mark them as prone to social deviance.
Implicit measures arrived in the 1980s, designed to slip past conscious awareness. The name letter task and the Implicit Association Task are two of them. Psychologists present self-relevant stimuli and time how quickly a person identifies positive or negative words. Show a woman the words female and mother, then measure whether she reaches faster for evil or for kind.
The trouble is that implicit self-esteem may not be measuring anything real. It correlates weakly or not at all with explicit self-esteem and with informant ratings. Worse, the various implicit measures fail to correlate even with each other. Currently there is little scientific evidence that self-esteem can be reliably or validly measured through implicit means.
Parents are the main source of a young child's positive and negative experiences, and their influence on early self-esteem is significant. Unconditional love builds a stable sense of being cared for and respected. Elementary school children with high self-esteem tend to have authoritative parents, caring adults who set clear standards and let the child voice an opinion in decisions. Being listened to, spoken to respectfully, and having both accomplishments and mistakes acknowledged all feed healthy self-esteem. Harsh criticism, abuse, ridicule, and the demand to be perfect all drain it.
Self-esteem moves along a long arc. It typically declines from ages 4 to 8, as children compare their real and ideal selves. It rises rapidly through adolescence and young adulthood, climbs gradually through middle age, peaks around ages 60 to 70, then declines again in later life. Social comparison drives much of the early shaping, as children measure themselves against classmates. In adolescence, peers take over. Social acceptance produces confidence and high self-esteem, while rejection and loneliness produce self-doubt.
The pattern holds across groups with notable variations. No differences appear between males and females in how self-esteem develops. Hispanic adolescents start slightly lower than their black and white peers, then run slightly higher by age 30. African Americans rise more sharply in adolescence and young adulthood than Whites, but decline more rapidly in old age. A 2023 study of Italian teenagers found a gender gap in self-rated beauty. Male participants rated themselves conservatively, while females often gave themselves higher scores, sometimes a perfect 10.
Roy Baumeister has shown that inflating self-esteem on its own can actually decrease grades. From the late 1970s into the early 1990s, many Americans simply assumed students' self-esteem drove their grades, friendships, and future success. Programs sprang up to raise it. Then peer-reviewed research arrived and refused to confirm the assumption. High self-esteem, it turned out, tends to be a result of high academic performance, not its cause. Praising students for their mere uniqueness fails unless feelings of well-being are joined to actual well-doing.
Albert Ellis, an influential American psychologist, went further and called the whole concept harmful. He judged self-esteem unrealistic, illogical, and often more damaging than helpful, built on arbitrary premises and grandiose thinking. Rating particular behaviors is fine, even necessary, but rating a human being's entire self is, to Ellis, irrational and unethical. His alternative was unconditional self-acceptance and unconditional other-acceptance, the foundation of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy.
The demonstrated benefits, by one accounting, narrow to two. High self-esteem increases initiative, lending the confidence to act on beliefs and risk new undertakings. It also raises happiness, though whether the link is causal is not yet known. But the same initiative can push people toward stupid or destructive things, even against everyone's advice. Narcissism complicates the picture further. It correlates only moderately with self-esteem overall, yet strongly with the sense of superiority and self-admiration inside it. Narcissism, some argue, can be a symptom of fundamentally low self-esteem, masked by an immense increase in self-esteem through denial and overcompensation. Nowhere does the stake feel higher than in the cancer ward, where the study "Self at Risk" found that women with fragile self-esteem suffered the largest drops in quality of life and self-image after surgery, and need special psycho-oncological care.
Common questions
What is self-esteem in psychology?
Self-esteem is confidence in one's own worth, abilities, or morals. Smith and Mackie define it as the positive or negative evaluation of the self, distinct from the self-concept, which is what we think about the self. It encompasses beliefs such as "I am worthy" along with emotions like triumph, despair, pride, and shame.
Who first developed the concept of self-esteem?
The concept of self-esteem originated in the 18th century in the writings of the Scottish enlightenment thinker David Hume. Self-esteem was later identified as a distinct psychological construct by the philosopher and psychologist William James, who divided the self into the "I-self" and the "Me-self."
How is self-esteem measured?
Self-esteem is typically assessed using self-report inventories. The most widely used is the Rosenberg self-esteem scale, a 10-item scale developed by Morris Rosenberg in the mid-1960s. The Coopersmith Inventory uses a 50-question battery, and implicit measures introduced in the 1980s include the name letter task and the Implicit Association Task.
Does high self-esteem improve academic performance?
No, inflating students' self-esteem by itself has no positive effect on grades, and Roy Baumeister has shown it can actually decrease them. Research indicates high self-esteem is generally a result of high academic performance rather than its cause.
What was the California Task Force on Self-Esteem?
The Task Force on Self-Esteem and Personal and Social Responsibility was set up and funded in California in 1986 through the work of assemblyman John Vasconcellos. Its scholars found only very small associations between low self-esteem and its assumed consequences, and the task force disbanded in 1995.
How does self-esteem change across a person's life?
Self-esteem typically declines from ages 4 to 8 as children compare their real and ideal selves, then rises rapidly during adolescence and young adulthood. It increases gradually through middle adulthood, peaks around ages 60 to 70, and then declines again in later life.
What is the difference between self-esteem and narcissism?
Self-esteem and narcissism are not interchangeable, sharing only positive self-regard as a main feature. Narcissistic self-appraisals are exaggerated and defined by entitlement, exploitativeness, and dominance, whereas non-narcissistic positive self-views are relatively modest. The overall correlation between the two is only moderate.
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