The Dark Side of High Self-Esteem
Roy F. Baumeister
Case Western Reserve University
Laura Smart
University of Virginia
Joseph M. Boden
Case Western Reserve University
Ego-Latin for “I”
“Violence appears to be most commonly a result of threatened egotism (5).”
Self’s superiority
“The mediating process may involve directing anger outward as a way of avoiding a downward revision of the self-concept (5).”
Pragmatic- advocating behavior that is dictated more by practical consequences than by theory
Futility- unimportant
Hypothesis- one main source of such violence is threatened egotism (5)
Egotism- self-appraisals
“We shall examine the arguments for the low self-esteem view and treat is as a rival hypothesis to our emphasis on high self-esteem (5).”
“In brief, the purpose of this article is to understand how self-appraisals are related to interpersonal violence (7).”
Low Self-Esteem Causes Violence
Many examples that low self-esteem cause violence are gang related according to E. Anderson (1994) and Jankowski (1991).
Examples also include spousal violence according to Renzetti (1992) and Gondolf (1985)
MacDonald (1992) claimed that robbers “lack self-esteem)”
“In one of the classic works on the psychology of violence, Toch (1996/1993) referred to a “compensatory relationship between low self-esteem and violence” (pp. 133-134), and he suggested that people with low self-esteem turn violent as a way of gaining esteem (6).”
“Our review did not uncover any one definitive or authoritative statement of the theory that low self-esteem causes violence, so it is necessary for us to consider several possible versions of that theory. One view (and one that seems implicit in many writings) is that people