Terror Buffer
Everybody knows self-esteem is important. Over 10,000 scholarly
studies attest that people have a strong and pervasive need for the
feeling of being of primary value in a meaningful universe.
But just exactly why do people need self-esteem? Until Jeff
Greenberg, Ph.D., of the University of Arizona, and seven psychologist
colleagues tackled it, no one had actually asked.
Now, Greenberg and company think they know the answer. Self-esteem
protects people against the anxiety they'd otherwise experience from
awareness of their vulnerability and - especially - mortality.
A series of three studies they recently conducted confirms their
so-called terror-management theory of social behavior, the team reports
in the journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Vol. 63, No.
6).
In one, they boosted the self esteem of a group of people by
"testing" them and telling them what great personalities they had. Then
they showed vivid video images of death from a documentary, Faces of
Death.
So distressing were the images, in fact, that no women would even
sit through the study. Still, the self-esteem high insulated the men from
anxiety in response to the film; the men also reported few negative
feelings of any kind afterwards. By contrast, anxiety ran high among men
not first told how wonderful they were.
In a second and third study, a different method of increasing
self-esteem similarly protected other groups of men against another type
of anxiety - namely, the threat of pain from electric shocks. This time
anxiety was measured not only externally, by how they felt, but also
internally, by how much nervous system arousal the subjects
experienced.
The men who first got boosts of self-esteem - they were given
highly positive but still-plausible feedback on a supposed test of verbal
intelligence - had significantly less physiologic arousal than those who
got no feedback on intelligence. They also reported feeling less
anxiety.
For Greenberg and colleagues, concern about vulnerability and
mortality is not just any anxiety, it's our most deeply rooted fear, "the
ultimate basis of all anxiety." The feeling of being of personal value
reduces susceptibility to anxiety largely because it evokes feelings of
safety and security that were first created by good parenting and,
ideally, later reinforced by a just society.
Tags:
boosts,
electric shocks,
faces of death,
jeff greenberg,
journal of personality,
journal of personality and social psychology,
meaningful universe,
pervasive need,
scholarly studies,
self esteem,
self-esteem,
social behavior,
time anxiety,
university of arizona,
verbal intelligence,
video images
