Self-Esteem

Theoretical and Measurement Issues

Because SE involves an evaluation of how worthy one is as a person, by definition, it seems that people with high SE should have positive self-regard and those with low SE should have negative self-regard. However, though it is true that people with high SE have positive, well-defined views of the self, people with low SE do not necessarily hold negative views of themselves. Instead, low-SE individuals tend to evaluate themselves neutrally, and their self-views tend to vary considerably from situation to situation.

This neutrality and variability in evaluations of the self raises several important theoretical, methodological, and practical questions that have not been clearly answered in the SE literature. For example, it is not completely clear why people with low SE have variable views of themselves; several incompatible theoretical explanations may account for this phenomenon. On one hand, it is possible that people with low SE lack a clear notion of who they are, and therefore they describe themselves in noncommittal, middle-of-the-road terms. Indeed, people with low SE exhibit less stability of self-evaluations and tend to give inconsistent responses to questions asking them to describe themselves (compared with those with high SE). Thus, according to the self-concept clarity explanation, low-SE individuals are confused and ambivalent about who they are and therefore tend to be variable and noncommittal in their self-views.

On the other hand, it is also possible that people with low SE are actually more accurate in their selfevaluations than high-SE individuals. In this sense, the neutrality and inconsistency of self-evaluations associated with low SE actually represent a more accurate perception of the self that truly varies across situations and circumstances. Because we sometimes act as worthy and capable individuals and sometimes do not, people with low SE may be correct in their self-descriptions, and those with high SE may be positively biased and even detached from reality. Indeed, there is some evidence to suggest that people with high SE consistently exaggerate their positive views of the self. For example, several studies have shown that people with high SE overevaluate how much other people like them, and some researchers have even claimed that the interpersonal success of high-SE individuals exists only in their own minds. Indeed, high SE has often been equated with narcissism.

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