ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, April 12, 1996 TAG: 9604120049
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAVID R. BOLDT
MOST NORMAL people have probably concluded at this point that the concept of self-esteem is simply the latest pap from Psychobabble Land, worthless but harmless.
Now comes disturbing evidence that it can actually be dangerous.
In an article titled ``The Dark Side of High Self-Esteem,'' Roy Baumeister, a professor of psychology at Case Western Reserve University, argues that an ``inflated or ill-founded'' sense of self-esteem can contribute to violence.
Baumeister's critique hardly comes out of left field. It appears in the current issue of Psychological Review, the journal of the American Psychological Association, and follows a series of articles and books raising questions about the validity and value of self-esteem.
Psychologist Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania viciously attacked the ``self-esteem movement'' in his recent book, ``The Optimistic Child.'' In a section called ``Where Boomer Child-Rearing Went Wrong,'' he argued that the movement, by emphasizing the importance of ``feeling'' good - whether or not one is ``doing'' well - can make children vulnerable to depression.
The slippery nature of the concept was illustrated in the controversy over a study done a few years ago by the American Association of University Women. The study supposedly showed adolescent girls are suffering from a near-terminal meltdown of their self-esteem.
The study, based on answers to questions such as ``Are you always happy?,'' differed from the findings of many other researchers, and contained a perplexing contradiction.
On the self-esteem index it used, white high school girls came in at the bottom, followed by white teen-age boys, then African-American girls. The highest scores were posted by African-American boys.
In other words, the self-esteem scores were roughly the reverse of those groups' actual achievement measurements, such as grades and college admissions. (Interestingly, in international comparisons, American students have the highest perception of their abilities - and the lowest scores.)
In her book ``Who Stole Feminism?,'' Christina Sommers argued that low scores on the AAUW scale didn't show a low degree of self-esteem; they actually showed a high degree of ``maturity.''
A student who said he or she was always ``good at a lot of things,'' Sommers argued, didn't have high self-esteem, as the AAUW study posited; the student just had an underdeveloped understanding of the real world.
The only damage done by the AAUW study was that Congress allocated several hundred million dollars to deal with the probably nonexistent problem of sagging egos among adolescent girls.
Baumeister's analysis suggests that the fixation of educators and others on boosting self-esteem by any means available might have more sinister results.
He contends that violent criminals, generally speaking, don't suffer from low self-esteem. Just the opposite. And their exaggerated self-appraisals exacerbate their violent tendencies in two ways.
First, psychopathic criminals tend to think their superiority entitles them to exploit ordinary mortals.
The second dynamic is based on his hypothesis that certain people who have an inflated sense of self-esteem tend to respond with irrational and disproportionate violence when that self-appraisal is challenged. (He adds that this also seems to be true of ethnic groups that carry out oppression and genocide.)
Baumeister contends that he found the evidence to support his thesis by simply going through the studies that purportedly showed a link between ``low'' self-esteem and violent behavior. He found that the murderers, rapists, terrorists and brawlers under study turned out to be risk-takers who confidently sought out dangerous situations to prove their merit - all qualities associated with high self-esteem.
To borrow another point made in the article, public understanding of the issue might be aided if we went back to calling self-esteem by its synonyms: ``egotism,'' ``arrogance,'' ``conceitedness'' and ``narcissism.''
David Boldt is a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer.
- Knight-Ridder/Tribune
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