Too Much of a Good Thing Can Lead to Trouble

In a culture that embraces self-esteem and positive thinking with all the fervor of religion, it seems sacrilegious to even ask: Is it possible to have too much esteem?

A recent study suggests that an unrealistically glowing self-image is bad for the psyche and may be worse for everyone else. Excess esteem can wreak personality ruin, alienate friends and family, and cloak our flaws. Self love, perhaps, is blind too.

In a second inquiry, which reviewed 70 years worth of data on people prone to violence, researchers say they found that most violent behavior arises from high self-esteem (defined as an all-around positive view of oneself) rather than low self-esteem, as is widely believed.

The researchers concede that there are some benefits to thinking you are a little bit better than you really are--such as a willingness to take more risks, to approach an attractive person for a date or to rebound after a lousy day. But those positive effects have been overblown as a vaccine for social ills, they say.

“Our society has greatly exaggerated the positive effects of self-esteem,” says Roy F. Baumeister, a psychology professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and co-author of the review on the violent population.

“There is this idea that raising self-esteem will help prevent crime, drug abuse and teen pregnancy. But the links are weak, tenuous and inconsistent.”

But the father of the self-esteem movement, Los Angeles clinical psychologist Nathaniel Branden, says inaccurate, overly broad definitions of esteem are being used in research, skewing conclusions.

“The absence of a scientific definition of self-esteem has dogged the movement since it began 30 years ago,” says Branden, who wrote the seminal work “The Psychology of Self-Esteem” (Nash / Bantam, 1969) and several others, most recently “Taking Responsibility” (Simon & Schuster, 1996).

“Self-esteem is being competent to cope with the basic challenges of life and feeling worthy of happiness. At its roots, self-esteem is trusting your ability to think and trusting your instincts. The point is self-esteem is reality based, not a hallucination. And megalomania is a compensatory mechanism for feeling inadequate and insecure.”

And therein lies the rub. Not only is there no agreed-upon definition of self-esteem but there is no way to quantify the ideal quotient. Self-esteem is largely a subjective experience. Clearly, below-sea-level esteem with the accompanying daily mantra “I am not worthy” can be life crippling. But at what point does self-esteem become so pumped up that it is virtual fantasy?

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In the study that questioned the value of thinking too highly of yourself, psychology professors David C. Funder at UC Riverside, C. Randall Colvin at Northeastern University and Jack Block at UC Berkeley, assessed the personalities of 100 people eight times as they aged from 3 to 23. To determine if overly positive self views had negative effects on relationships, the researchers videotaped each study subject at 18 in a brief conversation and during a short debate with another person.

Male self-enhancers made narcissistic claims of self-perfection and interrupted to brag about things such as how easy a test was, how many friends they had or how busy their lives were. Self-enhancers of both sexes were described by psychologists and friends as driven, testy, uneasy, suppressive, socially awkward, hostile and tending to fall apart under stress in the experiment.

In contrast, non-self-enhancers were seen as relaxed, comfortable, interested, seemed to like and want to be liked by their partner.

“There is a level at which the [self-enhancers] are living a lie, maintaining an image,” says Funder, who added that insecurity underlying the illusion is compensated for with braggadocio in men and irritability in women. “They can’t respond to their partner as a real person. One way I can prove how brilliant I am is to prove what an idiot you are.”

Self-enhancers’ personality perception (at age 18 and again at 23) was then compared to objective impressions from roommates, siblings or friends (who were promised confidentiality) and to psychologists’ assessments. Self-enhancer men and women described their personalities with adjectives such as energetic, cheerful and adventurous, but psychologists and acquaintances saw them as relatively guileful, hostile, condescending, concerned with their own adequacy, self-pitying, self-defeating and anxious.

Conversely, non-self-enhancers described themselves as relatively charming, poised and sought after by others for counsel--and the objective observers agreed.

Five years later, different psychologists reassessed the study participants and found little had changed.

“Down deep, the inferences are that these people haven’t developed a way to live and cope with the world,” says Block, whose earlier 1955 study found that “people who were venturing into narcissism” were over-controlled, stiff, unspontaneous and denying and suppressing threatening emotions. “They have set up a defensive structure and they don’t dare acknowledge their problems or human frailties.”

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Such coping problems may begin early in life. Personality assessments conducted when study subjects were 14 (they were tracked from age 3), suggest that adolescents who were not well adjusted psychologically, were more likely to become self-enhancers as young adults.

Further challenging notions about self-esteem is a recently published review of data from various disciplines on aggression, crime and violence spanning 70 years. Authors Baumeister and Joseph M. Boden at Case Western, and Laura Smart at University of Virginia claim there is a preponderance of evidence, despite outward appearances, that people with violent impulses suffer from excessive self-esteem. The schoolyard bully, street gangsta and tyrant consistently express an exaggeratedly favorable view of the self. Violence ensues when that self view is challenged. The threat is a “choice point,” Baumeister says, where the violence-prone person can either lower their self opinion or maintain it by humiliating and subjugating a challenger.

Baumeister cites 1994 research on bullies that concludes that there are “no indicators that aggressive bullies are anxious and insecure under a tough surface” or that they “suffer from low self-esteem.”

Also noted is a homicide study, which found that the “offender privately holds a positive view of self, but eventual victim impugns that view and implicitly humiliates the offender, often in front of an audience.”

Similar research findings are examined about duelers (in Europe and the South), political terrorists, racists and youth gangs. Studies on the latter group, found that gang members “expressed a strong sense of self-competence” and when they failed, they always blamed something external rather than inadequacy or error. The last point is particularly important, he insists, because controlled studies demonstrate that blaming outside causes instead of personal flaws is a behavior characteristic of people with high self-esteem.

And if low self-esteem were an underlying cause of violence, Baumeister argues, then shy, self-deprecating, insecure and depressed people would exhibit higher rates of violence. But studies show that patterns of low self-esteem produce remarkably few criminals. Even if it could be documented that low self-esteem somehow caused violent behavior, Baumeister says, “it would still be necessary to regard the surface egotism rather than the hidden self doubts as causally crucial.”

“There are some people who think they are great and there is no need to attack [or behave condescendingly],” says Baumeister. “I imagine if you went up to Albert Einstein [who had a secure ego] and told him he was stupid it wouldn’t bother him.”

But self-delusion is not completely functionless, the experts say. Marginal over-evaluation of the self is beneficial because it fosters a kind of optimism. It functions as a sort of Armor All for the psyche, a protectant that allows us to filter out some of life’s grimmer realities.

But moderation clearly is the key. Individuals deemed psychologically well-adjusted in Block’s 1955 study were those with slightly positive views of themselves, who were willing to acknowledge frailties and who genuinely liked themselves.

“You should like yourself and you should feel that you are basically a decent person,” advises Block. “But don’t like yourself so much that you can’t see your frailties.”