by Alfie Kohn
SORTING TRUTH FROM FICTION
Critics of self-esteem have a tendency to slide into other familiar complaints: They also condemn excessive praise (as if self-esteem and praise were essentially the same thing),3 our alleged reluctance to criticize children, the diminution of competition (and therefore excellence), the ease with which grades and trophies are acquired, and so on. Sometimes all these grievances are bundled together under the heading of “the self-esteem movement” in order to permit more efficient disparagement of everything that rankles traditionalists.
A fair amount of what’s said in these articles and books consists of sweeping generalizations about lazy, entitled kids. The cumulative result of these attacks is that many parents and teachers are now embarrassed to point out that something is damaging to their children’s self-esteem, even when that’s an accurate description and a legitimate concern. Still, there are several questions about the concept that clearly need to be taken seriously. It’s certainly reasonable, for example, to point out that raising someone’s self-esteem isn’t easy to do, and that, even if successful, such efforts aren’t guaranteed to help children excel in school or become better people. So let’s take a moment to review what we know about the subject.
Does self-esteem really matter?
Those who regard the whole concept as something unworthy of serious concern include some psychologists—Jean Twenge, Martin Seligman, and Roy Baumeister, to name three—who argue that it’s merely a byproduct of other qualities or that high self-esteem is not particularly beneficial and may even be pathological. However, they tend to make these arguments while rattling off various other complaints about children and parenting that are commonly heard from conservative social critics, suggesting that their views about self-esteem may reflect a larger worldview.4
It’s fair to say there are difficulties with how the concept of self-esteem has been conceptualized and investigated, and cause and effect sometimes remain confused, as is true of many other topics in human behavior. Still, it’s clear to the great majority of psychologists—theorists, researchers, and clinicians—that self-esteem does have predictive value. How people view themselves really does mean something.
Adolescents with low self-esteem, for example, have “poorer mental and physical health, worse economic prospects, and higher levels of criminal behavior during adulthood,” even when other variables such as social class, gender, and depression are held constant. Preadolescents with low self-esteem are more likely to be aggressive a couple of years later and also to engage in “problem eating, suicidal ideation, and multiple health compromising behaviors.” And low self-esteem apparently causes depression more than the other way around.5
People with high self-esteem, meanwhile, are apt to be more satisfied with life, less depressed, and more optimistic.6 (There are other positive associations as well, but it’s not always clear that they’re caused by higher self-esteem.) What’s more, researchers have documented a set of interesting connections to success and failure: First, people who hold a positive view of themselves are more likely to persist at a task even when it’s difficult. At the same time, such people are more likely to recognize when persistence would be futile; they don’t keep trying desperately in a way that proves self-defeating and irrational. Finally, higher self-esteem appears to create resilience so that the experience of failure isn’t as discouraging.7
Does self-esteem promote higher achievement?
Here’s a good example of where the concept was oversold. When you look at the research over the last few decades, the correlation between self-esteem and school achievement isn’t all that impressive. To make matters worse, even when they are related, it’s not clear that the former is responsible for the latter. Part of the problem, however, turns on how broadly or narrowly self-esteem has been defined. A lot of these studies focus “on the capacity of global measures of self-esteem to predict specific outcomes.”8 If you score kids on how they respond to prompts such as “I feel that I have a number of good qualities,” the results aren’t all that useful for predicting how well they’ll do in math. But when you look at how children view their capability in a specific field, that does predict their performance. The effect isn’t huge, but it’s consistent, and it does seem to be causal according to two independent reviews of the research. “There is clear evidence . . . that prior levels of academic self-concept lead to higher levels of subsequent academic achievement beyond what can be explained by prior levels of academic achievement.”9
Perhaps you’ve heard people say that “self-esteem isn’t the cause of achievement; it’s the result.” This has become the mantra of traditionalists. Unfortunately, it represents an enormous oversimplification. I’ve already suggested that the first part of that statement is false, or at least greatly overstated: Some versions of self-esteem do contribute to achievement. But the evidence to support the second part, the proposition that doing well in school raises self-esteem, is “disappointingly weak.”10 Then, too, there’s the question of whether “doing well in school” refers to accomplishments that are meaningful to students. (No “I Believe in Me!” self-esteem unit could possibly be more foolish than the expectation that students will feel good about themselves because they successfully filled out a worksheet or memorized a bunch of facts for a quiz. Ironically, many critics of self-esteem seem to prefer just this sort of schooling.)
People who insist that achievement produces self-esteem rather than the other way around are mostly telling us what they think ought to be the case. After all, even if there’s reason to doubt that A causes B, that doesn’t allow us to conclude that B causes A. It may be that something else altogether (C) causes both A and B, giving the appearance of a direct connection between the two.11 Or it may be that A affects B, which, in turn, affects A. Indeed, there’s good reason to believe that “gains in academic achievement that are facilitated by self-esteem, for example, may further enhance feelings of self-worth, thus setting the stage for additional achievement in school.”12
A group of Australian researchers went a step further. They cautioned that it’s actually counterproductive to ignore how kids feel about themselves (or about what they’re doing) and focus only on how well they’re doing it. “Interventions aimed at enhancing performance may unintentionally undermine self-concept in ways that will eventually undermine the short-term gains in performance,” they pointed out. Their example was a study in which both competitive and cooperative strategies were introduced to improve physical fitness. Both produced temporary benefits, but cooperation improved—and competition undermined—the kids’ beliefs about their physical ability.13 It’s shortsighted to concentrate only on skills and other outcomes. If children feel worse about themselves, which is a typical long-range effect of competition for both winners and losers, then any benefits that do show up aren’t likely to last.14 Thus, self-esteem really does play an important role—even if we’re concerned only about achievement. And if we want to produce people who are also fully functioning, happy, and healthy, it matters even more.
Do programs to boost children’s self-esteem actually work?
When I reviewed the research on this topic in the early 1990s, I didn’t see much evidence of success. But there’s now more reason to be hopeful that school-based interventions can make a difference—provided that (a) the focus is on improving the way children view their aptitude in specific areas, (b) the measure of success matches that focus rather than looking at global self-esteem, and (c) the program isn’t ridiculous.15 A 1998 review of 102 studies pronounced the results “encouraging. Programs seem able to enhance children’s and adolescents’ [self-esteem].” Eight years later, another group of researchers reanalyzed those evaluations—as well as an additional batch of studies—using different statistical techniques. They, too, found “promising” results regarding the “overall positive effectiveness of the interventions.”16
Isn’t it possible to have self-esteem that’s too high?
The short
answer: only if you’ve stacked the deck, rhetorically speaking, by defining high self-esteem as something bad. That’s basically what Roy Baumeister did in a 1996 article whose subtitle was “The Dark Side of High Self-Esteem.” His essay—which presented no new data, incidentally—was snapped up by the media and to this day is still triumphantly cited by critics of self-esteem: Aha! Dangerous criminals actually think too well of themselves, not too poorly! Self-esteem is the problem, not the solution. But Baumeister’s conclusion was preordained by his premise. On his article’s very first page, “high self-esteem” and “egotism” were used interchangeably. Since many violent people are egotistical, there must be a risk when self-esteem reaches a certain level. Q.E.D.
Complementing this and other examples of dubious and even offensive reasoning17 was a remarkably simplistic understanding of human psychology. Baumeister basically assumed that we should take people’s sweeping self-congratulatory statements about themselves—“I’m the greatest/smartest/strongest!”—at face value. Anyone who brags about how amazing he is must have very high self-esteem. This premise is also accepted by like-minded critics such as Jean Twenge (“As any parent of a two-year-old can tell you, most kids like themselves just fine—and make the demands to prove it”18), but it’s unconvincing to anyone who realizes there’s a world of difference between, on the one hand, genuinely positive self-regard and arrogant self-satisfaction.
Even people who have never read Freud or other depth psychologists understand that someone who feels compelled to swagger and boast, to flash his credentials or his bling, to tell you how much better he is than everyone else, may well be trying to compensate for the terrifying suspicion that, down deep, he’s really not very impressive at all. Scratch a competitive person and you’ll likely find persistent insecurity and self-doubt. So, too, for narcissists: They “report a grandiose sense of self . . . yet, covertly, they seem to experience symptoms of vulnerability; they are self-doubting.”19 The same is true of those who are aggressive. As the psychiatrist James Gilligan, an expert on criminal violence, has remarked, “I have yet to see a serious act of violence that was not provoked by the experience of feeling shamed and humiliated. . . . The most dangerous men on earth are those who are afraid that they are wimps.”20
Grandiosity, narcissism, and perhaps competitiveness may be understood as strategies for dealing with underlying low self-esteem. But even if this isn’t always true, people with those characteristics are clearly very different from those with high self-esteem. In the words of the late Morris Rosenberg, one of the pioneers in studying this topic, “With self-esteem we are asking whether the individual considers himself adequate—a person of worth—not whether he considers himself superior to others.”21 To that extent, the fact that grandiose people may become aggressive provides no reason to believe there’s a “dark side” of high self-esteem.
Research confirms this. Whether or not high self-esteem and narcissism are positively correlated—and there’s mixed evidence about that22—it’s clear that “genuine self-esteem and narcissistic self-aggrandizement are distinct constructs.”23 Further, a series of studies with eleven-year-olds, fourteen-year-olds, and undergraduates found that aggression and delinquency were negatively related to self-esteem, meaning that we have more reason to worry when it’s low than when it’s high.24 The same pattern showed up when other researchers looked at hypercompetitive individuals. They were “highly narcissistic. . . . At base, however, they were found to have low self-esteem.”25 And it showed up again when yet another group of investigators found that students with a sense of entitlement had lower self-esteem.26
Baumeister himself appeared to back-pedal a few years after publishing his much-quoted “dark side” article. In an essay with a different group of collaborators, he acknowledged that high self-esteem comes in different forms, that many people with high self-esteem aren’t aggressive or narcissistic, and that “psychologists who wish to study or reduce aggression might be well advised to focus on factors other than self-esteem or, at least, to respect the heterogeneity of high self-esteem and therefore consider additional variables.”27 Unfortunately, his first paper had already done its damage: Many people continue to believe there’s something unsavory about having high self-esteem, even though what’s really problematic is (a) low self-esteem, (b) some aspect of self-esteem other than how high or low it is (which I’ll discuss in a moment), or (c) something other than self-esteem.
But don’t many young people have inflated self-esteem?
First of all, let’s keep in mind that, on average, adolescents and young adults do not have higher self-esteem than older adults, nor is there good evidence to support the charge that young people today have higher self-esteem than young people had in years past.28 Most important, though, if there’s really nothing wrong with having high self-esteem, then what exactly is meant by saying that it’s inflated? The answer is that young people feel better about themselves than critics believe they have a right to feel based on what they’ve accomplished.
This determination, of course, is grounded in value judgments, which need to be defended, about what level of achievement “justifies” a given level of self-esteem, and about the underlying belief that the two must be connected at all. But if the charge of inflated self-esteem also has an empirical basis, the claim seems to be that levels of achievement are low (or dropping) while levels of self-esteem are high (or rising). So let’s take a look at that.
Even before the spike in popularity for school-based self-esteem programs, conservatives were already denouncing what they called the “self-esteem movement.” “In the 1950s, before the Self-Esteem-Now theory was widely implemented in American schools,” a writer named Barbara Lerner informed educators in 1985, “competence was widespread, and excellence was common enough to make American students equal to those of any nation. In the 1970s, that was no longer so.” Students in fifth grade and above were “learning less,” she said, at the same time that self-esteem had become “excessive.”29 This story soon became the conventional wisdom, often ungrammatically summarized as “Kids are doing bad and feeling good.”30
The claim that children’s self-esteem has risen over the decades, as I’ve already mentioned, lacks support. The corollary premise—that academic performance has dropped—is persuasive primarily to people whose knowledge of education is limited to what they read in the newspaper, which may help to explain its popularity among politicians. Lerner’s nostalgia is just one more example of the Chicken Little school of thought—“The standards are falling! The standards are falling!”—which, as we saw in Chapter 1, has been on display in every generation.
Those who sound the identical alarms today tend to draw unfavorable comparisons between the current state of our schools and what they were thought to be like a few decades ago. The same is true of self-esteem: Twenge compared students’ noxiously high levels of satisfaction with themselves in 2006 with the more decorous modesty of their counterparts in 1975.31 In both cases, of course, what current curmudgeons see as the good old days (back when achievement was high and self-esteem was low) defined the very period that Lerner described as disgraceful—that is, the 1970s.
But regardless of one’s point of comparison, the idea that students today are “doing bad[ly]” is difficult to support. Even if one looks at the results of standardized tests—a very poor indicator of meaningful learning32—the National Assessment of Educational Progress, commonly described as “the nation’s report card,” fails to support the commonly accepted story of decline. There hasn’t been much change since NAEP testing began, and most of the change that has occurred has been for the better. In both reading and math, when the results for 2012 are compared to those for the early 1970s, some scores were approximately the same and some were markedly higher, depending on which age group and subject you look at.33 But when critics who pound the lectern about declining scores are presented with statistics that show our schools are actually doing about as well as ever, t
hey don’t miss a beat. “Well, doing as well as we used to do just isn’t good enough!” they declare—presumably in an attempt to distract us from the fact that their original claims were baseless.
Either that or they change the subject, switching from a comparison of now to then, to a comparison of us with them—“them” being students in other countries. But here, too, it turns out, the generally accepted story about poor performance on the part of US students is largely incorrect: They’ve held their own overall,34 requiring critics to cherry-pick results to make the situation appear dire. In any case, it’s frankly ridiculous to offer a summary statistic for all children at a given grade level in light of the enormous variation in scores within this country. Test results are largely a function of socioeconomic status. Our wealthier students perform very well when compared to those in other countries; our poorer students do not. And the United States has a lot more child poverty than other industrialized nations.
American kids are sometimes compared to those in Asian countries, a particularly popular pastime after one survey showed that Asian students were critical of their own performance. This was supposed to represent the ideal, and the opposite of our situation: They do well but feel badly anyway: the traditionalist’s dream come true. Less commonly discussed is the fact that many Asian leaders have become increasingly concerned about how their young people may be better at taking tests than at thinking, how they lack the impulse for creativity that’s needed in their society.35 As for that survey—now twenty-five years old—that compared math performance to kids’ beliefs about their aptitude: It may say less about Americans’ swelled heads than about the widely recognized Asian aversion to self-commendation.
But let’s put all of these findings in perspective. Some of the talk about inflated self-esteem doesn’t seem to be based on how well kids are actually doing. Rather, it reflects a way of looking at the world in which a sharp dichotomy is drawn between helping students to feel better about themselves, on the one hand, and spending time on academics, on the other. The former is depicted as a touchy-feely fad, the latter as old-fashioned honest toil. The former amounts to coddling students by pretending everything they do is fine, while the latter means facing up to hard truths and insisting that students measure up to tough standards. It’s almost as if, regardless of the actual effects, attending to self-esteem is regarded as objectionable, a distraction from the unpleasant tasks that must be done, tasks that kids used to do uncomplainingly in the old days before we started worrying about how they felt.