Self-Esteem: Feeling Good About Ourselves

SELF-ESTEEM: FEELING GOOD ABOUT OURSELVES

In the movie Election, the character Tracy Flick is ambitious and hardworking, but struggles to make friends. “That’s okay,” she tells herself. “I’ve come to accept that very few people are truly destined to be special, and we’re solo fliers . . . if you’re gonna be great, you’ve got to be lonely.”6 Like Tracy, we often use soldier mindset to protect our egos by finding flattering narratives for unflattering facts. I may not be wealthy, but that’s because I have integrity. The reason I don’t have a lot of friends is because people are intimidated by me.

All sorts of beliefs can get drafted into service defending our egos because they relate in some way to our strengths or weaknesses. If your desk is constantly covered in piles of books and papers, you might be especially receptive to the claim “Messiness is a sign of creativity.” If you have the time and disposable income to travel a lot, you might believe “You can’t be a truly well-rounded person without having seen the world.” If you did poorly on the SATs, you might be especially sympathetic to arguments like, “Standardized tests don’t measure how smart you are, only how good you are at taking tests.”

Over time, our beliefs about the world adjust to accommodate our track record. One study in the late 1990s followed students throughout four years of college, tracking the GPA they expected to achieve, the GPA they actually achieved, and their beliefs about the importance of grades. Students who consistently underperformed their own expectations increasingly began to conclude that “Grades aren’t that important after all.”7

Your self-image shapes even your most fundamental beliefs about how the world works. Poorer people are more likely to believe that luck plays a big role in life, while wealthier people tend to credit hard work and talent alone. When economist Robert Frank wrote in a New York Times column that luck was an important (though not sufficient) ingredient in success, Fox business commentator Stuart Varney bristled. “Do you know how insulting that was, when I read that?” he asked Frank. “I came to America with nothing thirty-five years ago. I’ve made something of myself, I think through hard work, talent, and risk-taking, and you’re going to write in the New York Times that this is luck.”8

Again, there’s a wrinkle in this story: Motivated reasoning for the sake of self-esteem doesn’t always mean believing that you’re brilliant and talented and everyone likes you. Psychologists make a distinction between self-enhancement, which means boosting your ego with positive beliefs, and self-protection, which means avoiding blows to your ego. For the sake of self-protection, you might err on the side of assuming the worst about yourself. In a popular video, YouTuber Natalie Wynn calls it “masochistic epistemology”—whatever hurts is true. The term resonated with a lot of people. As one viewer commented, “It feels safer to assume that people think I’m unattractive rather than getting my hopes up that someone thinks I’m pretty when they really don’t.”9