Giving students incentives to study harder, for example, is more likely to lift their grades than making them feel good about themselves. Educating teenagers about contraception is more likely to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies than raising global feelings of self-worth. One reason may lie in the fact that the concept of self-esteem embodies a deeply held cultural value. The flipside of this coin is that social problems are understood as individual problems, caused by factors within the person and cured by interventions operating on the person. Such individualized values are far from universal.
Many cultures emphasize the individual self less than North American culture does.
It seems safe to assume that good feelings are universally appreciated. Strikingly, however, few cultures share the notion that one could feel or should feel good about oneself. Indeed, if the language does not supply the tools to express this idea, it is doubtful that the idea has much psychological presence. This grammatical construction makes a reference to the self, but the self remains the feeling agent and not the felt object. Inasmuch as cultural and linguistic environments shape the representation of behavioral problems and their causes, they guide and constrain the search for remedies.