America: Land Of Conceited Fools

I recently caught part of a television feature on “road rage,” the increasingly common tendency of drivers to become violent when the rest of the motoring world fails to treat them with the deference they think they’re entitled to.

Welcome to California, the state of self-esteem.

That was the title of a preposterous 1990 California task force report asserting, among other improbable claims, that “the lack of self-esteem is central to most personal and social ills plaguing our nation.”

Wrong, says Roy Baumeister, a professor of psychology at Case Western Reserve University who’s spent decades studying the subject.

“The effects of self-esteem are small, limited and not all good” and the claims of the self-esteem movement “range from fantasy to hogwash,” he writes in an article “Should Schools Try to Boost Self-Esteem?” published by the journal American Educator in its summer 1996 issue.

Children who do well in school do have slightly higher self-esteem than those who do poorly, he acknowledges, but then they ought to, since doing well in school is rightly something to be proud of. But the difference is so small that artificially boosting self-esteem would have a barely measurable effect on academic achievement - even assuming “that self-esteem is the cause, not the effect, contrary to many indications.”

In particular, Baumeister says, “the idea that low self-esteem causes violence is simply and thoroughly wrong.”

He and two of his graduate students, Laura Smart and Joseph Boden, researched all the literature on violence and concluded exactly the opposite (their work was published in Psychological Review earlier this year).

Most perpetrators of violence, he says, “are acting out of some sense of personal superiority, especially one that has been threatened in some way.”

Hence the road-ragers.

If you encounter such a person, the television program advised, don’t provoke him (it’s usually “him”) by getting into an argument. Avoid eye contact. Back down.

In other words, protect yourself by behaving like a person with low self-esteem.

Someone with low self-esteem is typically “shy, humble, modest and self-effacing,” Baumeister says, and violent people are decidedly not like that.

People with these traits may be anxious and depressed as well, especially if they are the victims of bullying, but the bullies themselves are usually quite secure.

Baumeister demolishes the theory that childhood bullies, teen gang members, adult criminals “and various obnoxious narcissists” are just pretending that they’re tough and self-confident, but really their bad behavior results from a hidden internal insecurity.

First, plenty of researchers have tried very hard to find that hidden insecurity, and haven’t succeeded. And second, internal insecurity seldom leads to violent behavior when it isn’t hidden. So even if the insecurity exists, the problems result from the pose of high-self-esteem.

Obviously, not all people who think well of themselves are violent; the problem comes from those whose opinion of themselves is a lot higher than it ought to be.

“If you overestimate your abilities,” Baumeister notes, “reality will be constantly showing you up and bursting your bubble.” It’s those encounters that lead to destructive responses.

When someone is taught to have an exaggerated notion of his own accomplishments, “the eventual result will be failure and heartbreak,” Baumeister says. “Along the way, he’s likely to be angry, troublesome, and prone to blame everybody else when something goes wrong.”

The research evidence has been available for a long time. A classic study of juvenile delinquency dating from 1950 showed that delinquent boys “were more likely than (non-delinquent) controls to be characterized as self-assertive, socially assertive, defiant and narcissistic.”

Boosting self-esteem in children would be fine, Baumeister said, if it were limited to helping the relatively small number who underestimate themselves. But when it comes to desirable traits, most people take more credit than they deserve.

One survey of high school students discovered that only 2 percent thought they were below average in leadership ability, and 25 percent believed they were in the top 1 percent. None at all thought they were below average in ability to get along with others.

Adults aren’t immune, of course. Another study showed that 90 percent of us rate ourselves as better-than-average drivers.

In international comparisons, American children’s educational achievements are embarrassingly poor. But at the same time, they report more satisfaction with their own performance than the children in other countries who are leaving them in the dust.

“This is precisely what comes of focusing on selfesteem,” Baumeister writes, “poor performance accompanied by plenty of empty self-congratulation.”

It’s alarming to think, he says, what will happen when this generation of schoolchildren grows up thinking they’re smarter than the rest of the world. “America will be a land of conceited fools,” he says.

And too many of them are out there on the highway in a rage. xxxx