Self-Esteem

Self-esteem refers to one's overall positive or negative evaluation of oneself and can be viewed in a variety of ways: as an enduring trait, as stable versus fragile, as specific domains of contingent self-worth, or as a goal that people pursue. Self-esteem is thought to develop in childhood and remains relatively stable over time. Although there are costs associated with different types of self-esteem, there are alternatives to pursuing self-esteem that may help to reduce the costs.

There is tremendous emphasis in North American culture on self-esteem, with continuing discussion over whether self-esteem is a universal need or is unique to North American culture. In popular culture, thousands of self-help books and child-rearing manuals have been written on this topic; in the scientific community, more than 15,000 journal articles have been published in this area in the past 30 years. Self-esteem has often been hailed as an antidote to society's problems. The self-esteem movement of the 1990s assumed that raising people's self-esteem could reduce social problems such as low academic achievement, high dropout rates, teenage pregnancy, domestic violence, and drug and alcohol abuse. A recent review of the literature by Roy Baumeister and colleagues, however, suggests that the effects of trait self-esteem may be limited. High self-esteem, once thought to predict a variety of positive outcomes, was found to be associated only with a tendency to experience positive emotions and feelings of self-efficacy. Low self-esteem, once thought to be a cause of negative outcomes, was found to be merely a symptom or correlate of negative outcomes rather than a reliable cause. Overall, their review suggested that there may be more to self-esteem than whether it is high or low.

This entry examines the multifaceted nature of self-esteem: how self-esteem affects people's responses to self-threats; the stability of self-esteem; contingencies of self-worth, or the domains on which people base their self-esteem; and self-validation goals, or the desire to prove that one possesses certain qualities on which self-esteem is based. This entry concludes with a discussion of cross-cultural differences in self-esteem and ways to reduce the costs associated with pursuing self-esteem.