Embracing the Dark Side

Discerning the positive aspects of sadness, bereavement, and other negative feelings.

by Jenna Baddeley

Self-esteem: a zero-sum game?

If self-esteem is social dominance, not everyone can have it

Published on August 4, 2009 by Jenna Baddeley in Embracing the Dark Side

Many commentators have criticized the self-esteem movement that swept the country and especially the schools during the 1980s. People find varied reasons to hate the self-esteem movement. For example, some have argued that self-esteem is not correlated with valued outcomes like good behavior and academic achievement, so it made no sense to teach it in schools. Others have argued that the methods used to teach self-esteem either did not work (i.e., having children repeat "I love me" or "I'm special" did not actually produce self-esteem) or were likely to backfire (specifically, empty praise may do more harm than good, making recipients less resilient to criticism). Some have gone so far as to say that the self-esteem movement may have produced a generation of entitled and narcissistic adults.

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There is another problem that the commentators have not, to my knowledge, considered. Namely, the idea that everyone could have high self-esteem may be flawed from the beginning. A. H. Maslow took self-esteem as synonymous with (self-perceived) dominance. A close look at the widely-used measure of self-esteem, the Rosenberg self-esteem scale, shows that it taps one's perceived place in the social hierarchy. It assesses a person's perceptions of his or her own worth relative to the worth of others when it asks for level of agreement with such statements as "I am able to do things as well as most other people" and "I feel that I am a person of worth, at least the equal of others."

Dominance hierarchies are present in all kinds of animal species, from apes and dogs to fish and birds. They are certainly also present in human societies. Evolutionary psychologists would argue that dominance hierarchies make societies function efficiently. If you believe that self-esteem is basically the same thing as dominance, you would have to agree that it would be just as impossible for everyone to have high self-esteem just as it would be for everyone to take dominant social roles.

If we can't build high self-esteem in everyone, what can we do? We might look to build more of self-esteem's quieter sister, self-acceptance. Self-acceptance is less about how one compares with others and more about how one feels about oneself. The term "self-acceptance" might feel like the equivalent of passive resignation to one's lot in life, giving up the hope of self-improvement, but that isn't what I mean at all. By self-acceptance, I mean dealing compassionately with the self through successes and failures alike. Such self-acceptance may be essential to growth, and unlike self-esteem, it is not a zero-sum game.