IN THE film
Meet the Fockers, a proud Bernie Focker attempts to impress the parents of his son’s fiancée by waving to a shelf of trophies. “I didn’t know they made ninth-place ribbons,” says the bemused would-be father-in-law.
“They have them up to tenth place,” Focker replies earnestly. “There’s a bunch on the ‘A for Effort’ shelf there.”
Greg Focker, played by Ben Stiller, represents a generation of American kids reared in the 1980s on the philosophy that any achievement, however slight, deserved a ribbon. Plaudits replaced punishment; criticism became a dirty word. In Texas, teachers were advised to avoid using red ink, the colour of reprimand. In California, a task force was set up to inject the concept of self-worth into the education system. Swathing youngsters in a sturdy shield of self-esteem, went the philosophy, would protect them from the nasty things in life, such as bad school grades, underage sex, drug abuse, dead-end jobs and criminality. Even the taxman would benefit — those kids would supposedly go on to earn more. And so the National Association for Self-Esteem rolled out the feel-good mantra across the States.
Except that the ninth-place ribbons are in danger of strangling the very children they were supposed to help. America’s obsession with self-esteem — like all developments in psychology, it gradually filtered its way to Britain — has turned children who were showered with compliments into adults who crumple at even the mildest brickbats. Deborah Stipek, dean of education at Stanford University, revealed recently how she keeps a box of Kleenex in her office for students who, for the first time in their lives, receive tough feedback and can’t deal with it. Many believe that the feel-good culture has risen at the expense of traditional education, an opinion espoused in a new book, Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why American Children Feel Good About Themselves But Can’t Read, Write, or Add, by the conservative commentator Charles Sykes.
Not only that, but the foundations on which the self-esteem industry is built are being exposed as decidedly shaky. Roy Baumeister, professor of psychology at Florida State University and once a self-esteem enthusiast, is now pioneering a revision of the populist orthodoxy. “After all these years, I’m sorry to say, my recommendation is this: forget about self-esteem and concentrate more on self-control and self-discipline,” he wrote recently. “Recent work suggests this would be good for the individual and good for society — and might even be able to fill some of those promises that self- esteem once made but could not keep.”
In 2001, at the invitation of the American Psychological Association, Baumeister and three other academics came together to review the self-esteem literature to investigate whether a positive opinion of oneself really did trigger an avalanche of measurable benefits. After all, given that the bandwagon started rolling in the Eighties, it should be clear if the intellectual policy was paying practical dividends. The result, Baumeister says, was “one of the biggest disappointments of my career”.
The take-home messages were these: high self-esteem does not of itself earn children higher grades (although high grades cause self-esteem to rise); it does not make people better at their jobs, although employees with a strong sense of self-worth may erroneously think they are more competent than their less confident colleagues (much to their colleagues’ annoyance); a survey for the Harvard Business Review found that humility, rather than self-regard, is a better predictor of who will make a successful leader; far from having a low sense of self-worth, bullies and other aggressors tend to have an inflated sense of their own importance; praising a child constantly won’t stop him from cheating, stealing, engaging in risky sex or abusing drugs; adults who think highly of themselves do not have better love lives, and are not necessarily more popular with their peer group than adults who don’t think much of themselves.
It is not unadulterated bad news — people with high self-esteem tend to be happier, show more initiative and are less prone to eating disorders. Even so, Baumeister was unable to uncover proof that ratcheting up an individual’s self-esteem could either increase happiness or reduce depression. In other words, the link is there but the evidence of causality is not. As Baumeister puts it: “Those (benefits) are nice, but they are far less than we had once hoped for, and it is very questionable whether they justify the effort and expense that schools, parents and therapists have put into raising self-esteem.”
In a comprehensive article for Scientific American, Baumeister reveals that much self-esteem work is flawed because researchers have asked people to rate themselves, and psychologists accept that we are not always as truthful or impartial as we should be (psychometric tests even include questions designed to elicit the extent to which a candidate is bending the truth to appear socially desirable).
For example, when people are asked to judge both their own looks and self-esteem, a clear correlation emerges. People who rate themselves as attractive also report high self-esteem, while those who consider themselves unappealing report low self-esteem. It sounds plausible — beautiful people appear to be valued more highly in society and treated better, which may well lead to high self-esteem.
But when objective assessments are carried out — with a panel of judges deciding the attractiveness scores — the link between prettiness and self-esteem vanishes. “Clearly, those with high self-esteem are gorgeous in their own eyes but not necessarily so to others,” he sums up. In fact, whenever a correlation crops up between a self-reported positive attribute and high self-esteem, it may just reflect that people who think highly of themselves rate themselves highly in other areas, perhaps without justification.
Only 200 out of around 15,000 studies used objective measures, all but emptying the pool of reliable data on self-esteem. The remaining puddle, Baumeister argues, just doesn’t provide proof that self-esteem can steer an unswerving course towards fulfilment. Not only that, but an unjustifiably high self-esteem can tip over into narcissism (excessive self-love). A failure by others to return this unearned high regard can result in violence. The data on bullies, for example, shows that they report less anxiety than other children.
But Baumeister’s analysis is not entirely popular. The International Council for Self Esteem (ICSE), a web-based networking organisation with representatives in 70 countries, including the UK, says that the dark traits that Baumeister identifies with self-esteem — egotism, arrogance, narcissism, superiority complex — are really attributes disguising a low self-esteem. “This is why we often use the term ‘healthy’ self-esteem to make the distinction between those who may exhibit signs of self-esteem but are compensating for feelings of inadequacy and those who truly possess those characteristics of self-esteem,” the council’s website explains. The council does accept that the vast claims made for boosting self-esteem are “difficult to substantiate . . . (but) this does not lessen the significance of the connection between self-esteem and human behaviour.”
Murray White, a former head teacher based in Cambridge, is the UK representative of the ICSE and a consultant on self-esteem issues. He appreciates that a link between self-esteem and achievement doesn’t mean that the former causes the other, but maintains that boosting self-esteem has tangible benefits. “The field has its critics but I think they’re wrong,” he says. “I have conducted programmes to raise children’s self-esteem, and they become more capable and confident, less bullying and more tolerant. Having a sense of self-esteem inculcates a sense of purpose and confidence.” Much of the backlash, White suggests, is due to a misunderstanding of how to raise self-esteem. “In some American schools the message was misinterpreted, so they were giving children unwarranted praise. This is not about giving them groundless feelings of euphoria. There is good praise and bad praise.” Good praise is bestowed, specifically, for something done well; bad praise is indiscriminate and unspecific. White adds that people also confuse high self-esteem with conceit or arrogance: “Self-esteem isn’t about making comparisons with others; it’s not about being more attractive or more popular than anyone else. Other people just don’t come into it — it’s about being OK with yourself.”
Nonetheless, Baumeister concludes: “We have found little to indicate that indiscriminately promoting self-esteem in today’s children or adults, just for being themselves, offers society any compensatory benefits beyond the seductive pleasure it brings to those engaged in the exercise.”
