Maura R. O'Connor

Bio & resources

A couple of months ago, I came across an online ad for a psychological self-esteem test. Interested to discover how such a thing as “good self-esteem” is measured, I decided to investigate. Essentially, the test is composed of statements such as “In social situations, I have something interesting to say,” “If I don’t do as well as others, it means that I am an inferior person,” and “I am an important person.” One rates his or her agreement or disagreement with these statements, and the answers are given a numerical value, the total of which is rated on a scale representing good to bad self-esteem.

Self-esteem is generally defined as the confidence in one’s own merit as an individual. Since the 1970s, when baby boomers discovered and embraced the concept en masse, it has become a tenet of the psychological canon and is so ingrained in popular wisdom and parenting techniques as to seem like natural law: The higher a person’s self-esteem, the happier, more productive, and more mentally healthy that person will be. Like most people my age, I’m a product of this movement, which means that from a very young age I’ve had parents and teachers telling me that I’m fundamentally great and that it’s important for me to know and accept this fact. So how did I rate on the self-esteem test? Let’s just say I’m not lacking any.

According to many psychologists, I’m not the only one. In her recently published book Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled—And More Miserable Than Ever Before (2007), psychologist Jean M. Twenge cites a fascinating statistic. In the 1950s, just twelve percent of teens age fourteen to sixteen agreed with the statement “I am an important person.” Yet by the late 1980s, an incredible seven times that—eighty percent—of teens said they agreed with it. The increase attests to the steadily greater adherence in America’s schools, families, and popular culture to the belief in the power of self-esteem. Even government officials have embraced the concept. For example, in 1984, a state representative from California, John Vasconcellos, launched a statewide initiative to raise self-esteem in young people in order to reduce the social ills of teen pregnancy, drug abuse, unemployment, and crime.

The concept of self-esteem has actually been around for over one hundred years—since 1890, in fact, when William James, the American philosopher and psychologist, coined the term and explored it in his book The Principles of Psychology. James posited that a person’s self-esteem could be objectively measured through a simple ratio of goals, aims, and purposes to the actual attainment of those things. In essence, James believed that if people succeed in attaining their goals, their self-esteem goes up, but if people do not attain the goals they strive for, their self-esteem goes down.

With this simple equation, it’s easy to see why he is considered the father of American pragmatism. But one has to wonder what James would make of our modern concept of self-esteem, which has become so divorced from a person’s actual achievements that eighty percent of fourteen- to sixteen-year-olds could believe they were important people before they’d even graduated from high school, gotten their first job, or voted. As Twenge points out in Generation Me, these days “we simply take it for granted that we should all feel good about ourselves, we are all special, and we all deserve to follow our dreams.”

What’s wrong with this? As it turns out, a lot. Contrary to popular belief, self-esteem does not make better people of us at all. From 1970 to 2000, there have been over fifteen thousand articles published on the relationship between self-esteem and every aspect of life you can imagine: academics, career success, relationships, sex, drug and alcohol abuse, crime, happiness, and even good looks. Working with a team of researchers in 2002, psychologist and Florida State University professor Roy Baumeister undertook the massive project of reviewing the findings of these thousands of studies. Out of fifteen thousand studies, Baumeister discovered that only two hundred of them exhibited sound science.

In a report published in Scientific American in 2005, Baumeister challenged a number of previous findings about self-esteem. For instance, boosting self-esteem artificially (being told you’re a good soccer player, for example, even if you never score a goal) appears to lower performance, contrary to the commonly held idea that raising someone’s self-esteem enables that person to perform better. High self-esteem was found to have no positive correlation to a person’s ability to have successful relationships; on the contrary, as Baumeister writes, “Those who think highly of themselves are more likely than others to respond to problems by severing relations and seeking other partners.”

Low self-esteem, he found, does not cause teens to engage in earlier sexual activity as previously believed; instead, those with high self-esteem were found to be less inhibited and more likely to have sex. Low self-esteem also doesn’t cause people to be more aggressive or violent—in fact, perpetrators of aggression generally hold favorable and perhaps even inflated views of themselves. In the report’s conclusion, Baumeister tackled perhaps the central tenet of the self-esteem movement: Higher self-esteem leads to happier individuals. “It seems possible that high self-esteem brings about happiness, but no research has shown this outcome. Any correlation between the two is just that, a correlation.”

The implications of this research are interesting for anyone to consider, but for Gen-Yers they paint a grave picture: No other generation has been raised to have higher self-esteem than we have. Since we were literally toddlers, we’ve been told: “Value yourself.” “Believe in yourself.” “You’re great just as you are.” “Trying is just as good as succeeding.” As Twenge points out, ideas like these have become “some of our culture’s most deeply entrenched beliefs, and Generation Me has grown up hearing them whispered in our ears like the subliminally conditioned children in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.”

Would this explain the higher rates of narcissism being reported in studies like one released by San Diego State University this year? The report is based on the results of over sixteen thousand Narcissistic Personality Inventory tests taken by college students since 1982. What the researchers discovered by tracking scores over the past twenty years is that college students today are more narcissistic, have a greater sense of entitlement than ever, and are increasingly likely to agree with statements such as “I think I am a special person” and “If I ruled the world, it would be a better place.”

If my generation were interested in tackling this problem—our inflated self-esteem and the narcissism it has bred in us—there are a number of solutions we could employ. But it strikes me that one of the most powerful could be resuscitating the original concept of self-esteem as William James first conceived it—not as a way to make us feel good about ourselves indiscriminately, but as an objective measure of our ambitions, desires, and worth as they relate to the reality of our personal life. If we undertook this stark exercise every now and then, it’s hard to imagine that so many of us young people could continue to delude ourselves into thinking we’re really so important. Instead, we might actually start proving it.