Do you know anyone who is aggressive? Do you think the person has high or low self-esteem?
Low self-esteem is frequently implicated in society’s ills, from juvenile delinquency to violent acts of aggression. It often seems as if we could make the world a better place if we could help everyone achieve higher self-esteem. Yet in the late 1990s, psychologist Roy Baumeister presented a provocative idea: He suggested that high self-esteem, not low self-esteem, is associated with aggressive acts (Baumeister, 1999; Baumeister, Bushman, & Campbell, 2000; Baumeister & Butz, 2005; Baumeister & others, 2007; Bushman & Baumeister, 2002).
In a variety of experimental studies, he showed that individuals who scored very high on a measure of self-esteem were more likely than their counterparts with low self-esteem to behave aggressively toward others when their self-esteem was threatened. For example, individuals with high self-esteem might have been more likely to blast someone with loud noise in the lab after being told that they did not perform well on an intelligence test. These findings conflicted with a long-held belief in psychology that self-esteem was a central component of psychological health.
Following the publication of Baumeister’s work, research conducted by developmental psychologists (who study the ways human beings mature from earliest childhood to old age) challenged the notion that high self-esteem was bad. These researchers used longitudinal data collected from a large sample of individuals in Dunedin, New Zealand, to show that contrary to Baumeister’s conclusions, low (not high) self-esteem was associated with a variety of negative outcomes, including aggression, delinquency, poor health, and limited economic prospects through the middle adulthood years (Donnellan & others, 2005; Trzesniewski & others, 2006). How can we resolve this apparent conflict between experimental evidence and longitudinal correlational evidence? One possibility is that individuals with high self-esteem might act aggressively in the artificial setting of a laboratory when given the chance to do so, but would not engage in actual aggressive behavior in real life. Another possibility is that Baumeister was talking about a particular kind of high self-esteem: inflated and unstable high self-esteem (W.K.Campbell & others, 2004; Konrath, Bushman, & Campbell, 2006). Individuals with unrealistically high self-esteem appear to be prone to react aggressively in response to a threat. Such individuals might be best described not as psychologically healthy but rather as narcissistic. For most people, though, it is more likely that low self-esteem rather than high self-esteem is linked to higher levels of aggression.
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