Subject: 
        Re: [evol-psych] The Trouble With Self-Esteem
   Date: 
        Tue, 5 Feb 2002 00:46:30 -0800
   From: 
        "Ian Montgomerie" 
     To: 
        [email protected]




On 3 Feb 2002, at 10:31, Ian Pitchford wrote:

> New York Times
> February 3, 2002
> 
> The Trouble With Self-Esteem
> By LAUREN SLATER
> 
> Take this test:
> 1. On the whole I am satisfied with myself.
> 2. At times I think that I am no good at all.
> 3. I feel that I have a number of good qualities.
> 4. I am able to do things as well as most other people.
> 5. I feel I do not have much to be proud of.
> 6. I certainly feel useless at times.
> 7. I feel that I am a person of worth, at least the equal of others.
> 8. I wish I could have more respect for myself. 9. All in all, I am
> inclined to feel that I am a failure. 10. I take a positive attitude
> toward myself.
> 
> Devised by the sociologist Morris Rosenberg, this questionnaire is one
> of the most widely used self-esteem assessment scales in the United
> States. If your answers demonstrate solid self-regard, the wisdom of
> the social sciences predicts that you are well adjusted, clean and
> sober, basically lucid, without criminal record and with some kind of
> college cum laude under your high-end belt. If your answers, on the
> other hand, reveal some inner shame, then it is obvious: you were, or
> are, a teenage mother; you are prone to social deviance; and if you
> don't drink, it is because the illicit drugs are bountiful and robust.
> 
> Full text
> http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/03/magazine/03ESTEEM.html

Roy Baumeister's book "Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty" 
ties into some of his research on self-esteem.  Basically, he finds 
that the most dangerous people are those who have high self-
esteem which is frequently threatened.  (Reasons it is frequently 
threatened include that they are generally hypervigilant for 
"disrespect", that despite their high self-esteem their social status 
is low and so other people don't hold them in such high self-
esteem, that their self-esteem is highly tied into how others 
perceive them rather than some conception of their "intrinsic" self 
worth, whatever).  At any rate, people who have a high self-esteem 
who feel they are "put down" will feel very bad and try and save 
face, often being very aggressive in doing so.  People (or more 
accurately, men) with low self-esteem, on the other hand, don't feel 
perceived low opinions on the part of others as a crushing and 
injust attack (after all they share the opinion that they're not the 
greatest thing since sliced bread), so they are much less likely to 
retaliate, violently or otherwise.

This area of research is rarely expressed in evolutionary 
psychological terms, but reading it, I get quite a "this makes 
perfect evolutionary sense" feeling.  Throughout the evolutionary 
history of man and primate, social status was a reproductive 
advantage to males, but often required risky aggressive behavior 
and violent retaliation to maintain it - the social status competition 
is not a positive-sum game, so maintaining status means being 
able to defeat or deter challenges to it.  "High self-esteem" is a 
high opinion of oneself, leading to risk-taking and aggressive 
behavior because of confidence in one's abilities to succeed in the 
face of adversity.  The sort of high opinion that is only "sensible" 
(and evolutionarily advantageous) if one can in fact back it up and 
receive the esteem of others (or at least keep them fearful enough 
not to challenge one's position).

One would expect high self-esteem to be correlated with higher 
social status, and/or with the pursuit of a "risk-taking" social 
strategy independent of one's status.  One would thus expect it to 
be tied into aggression, and into retaliation against perceived 
threats to one's status - these are the bread and water of a "high-
status male" approach to life.  Low self-esteem, on the other hand, 
is the mark of someone who isn't likely to win all their fights, and 
has found themselves for whatever reason on the short end of the 
status stick.  For them, aggression is not so valuable, and being 
too ready to retaliate against the slights of others is more likely to 
get them hurt then to advance their status.  One would expect low 
self-esteem to be associated with an evolutionary strategy of being 
less aggressive, more eager to cooperate, and more likely to back 
down from fights which are about status rather than survival or 
concrete resources.

In short, evolutionarily speaking, one would expect violence to be 
associated more with high self-esteem than with low self-esteem.  
And additionally, one would expect that people with high self-
esteem but low social status would be the most violent, because 
they would more often perceive others to be "dissing" them rather 
than treating them in line with their self-perceived rightful status.  
(The general evolutionary view that intragroup violence is adaptive 
more as a way of establishing a pecking order through deterrance 
rather than as a direct way to grab some concrete asset is also 
quite compatible with the finding that high levels of violence are 
found most reliably in people who perceive high levels of social 
threat from others and are disposed to retaliate against this 
injustice).

The old view that people with low self-esteem will become violent to 
make themselves "feel big" or because they are simply 
"maladjusted", on the other hand, seems evolutionarily 
unsubstantiated - aggression is a better strategy for those who are 
most likely to be able to succeed in aggressive competition, hardly 
a characteristic one would associate with low confidence in one's 
own abilities (either through low confidence making one a better 
"dominant", or through better dominance abilities giving one a low 
self-confidence).