The Man Who Destroyed America’s Ego
Tags: Big Stories Matter, Ego, Psychology

AS THE IDEA OF SELF-ESTEEM AS A SOCIAL VACCINE spread from California to other parts of America and elsewhere, Baumeister was pricked with doubts. “There wasn’t a specific moment,” he says, “there was just a growing sense of skepticism. I started noticing they were making awfully extravagant claims, like they could balance the state’s budget because people with high self-esteem earn more money and pay taxes.” He read the California state report and its argument, and wasn’t impressed. “The data was quite weak. I thought, ‘If that’s the best case, then it’s not that strong.’”

It was then that his critical break with the movement came. “Everybody said low self-esteem was a big cause of violence because people with low self-esteem were aggressive,” he says. “But I knew from my lab work that they’re actually shy and unsure of themselves. They don’t want to take chances or stand out. They do what other people tell them. None of that sounds like they’re going to be aggressive.”

Intrigued by the apparent contradiction, Baumeister attempted to chase down the source of the idea that people who hit out do so because, deep down inside, they feel bad about themselves. “Everybody who said it cited somebody else, so I’d look up the previous source, and they’d also cited somebody else. That’s when I realized there was no evidence for it.”

He remembers feeling surprised: “It would be easy to do that experiment. The fact that there was nothing made me suspicious.” He began to wonder; to theorize. “It’s not thinking badly of yourself that causes aggression. It’s when other people think badly of you. That’s where it all goes horribly wrong.”

In 1996 Baumeister, now teaching at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, co-authored a review of the literature that concluded that it was, in fact, “threatened egotism” that lead to aggression. Evil, he suggested, was often accompanied by high self-esteem. “Dangerous people, from playground bullies to warmongering dictators, consist mostly of those who have highly favorable views of themselves,” he wrote.

It was an astonishing theory because it ran counter to everything that society and the experts who inform it had been saying for years. It wasn’t low self-esteem that caused violence: It was when self-esteem was artificially high.

BAUMEISTER’S PAPER MADE an unhappy man of Nathaniel Branden. The movement’s founding father complained of the “specious reasoning” in Baumeister’s study, holding it up as an example of “what can happen when consciousness and reality are omitted from the investigation.” For Branden, the violent people Baumeister wrote about might have appeared confident, but underneath all that bluster they actually had low self-esteem. “One does not need to be a trained psychologist to know that some people with low self-esteem strive to compensate for their deficit by boasting, arrogance, and conceited behavior,” he wrote.

But Baumeister had more bad news for the self-esteem boosters. In 1999 the American Psychological Society (since renamed the Association for Psychological Science) asked Baumeister to lead a team that would review the literature in its entirety to see, finally, what effect self-esteem had on behaviors such as happiness, health, and interpersonal success.

“Our first computer search looking for ‘self-esteem’ in the abstract came up with 15,000 papers,” Baumeister recalls. “We had a stack of manuscripts waist-high. Several big boxes-full. We cut it down with strict criteria. We wanted actual data, not just clinical case studies and things like that. We sorted through them, critiqued them, and tried to pull the information together.”

A major problem with many of the papers was that they relied on self-reporting. “People with high self-esteem just say everything about them is great,” Baumeister says. “If you give them a questionnaire and ask them about their relationships, they’ll say, ‘Oh, yeah, my relationships are great!” The team would only accept papers that measured self-esteem objectively. After their cull of the woolly and anecdotal, just 200 or so papers remained.

Among the most egregious errors they discovered were those in the papers that focused on academic performance. A correlation had been repeatedly found between high self-esteem and good grades. So, the logic went, if you boosted self-esteem you’d also boost grades. But the authors had made one of the most elementary mistakes in science. “When they tracked people over time,” says Baumeister, “the grades came first, and then the self-esteem. High self-esteem was a result of good grades, not a cause.”

Baumeister realized that efforts to boost self-esteem hadn’t improved school performance. Nor did self-esteem help in the successful performance of various tasks. It didn’t make people more likeable in the long term, or increase the quality or duration of their relationships. It didn’t prevent children smoking, taking drugs, or engaging in “early sex.” His report made the claims of the self-esteem movement look like those of a street-corner wizard.

Baumeister and his team did find a few benefits. “High self-esteem makes you feel good,” he says. “It also seems to support initiative.” But as the paper archly observed in its conclusion, “Hitler had very high self-esteem and plenty of initiative, too, but those were hardly guarantees of ethical behavior.” Baumeister’s study was published in May 2003. “It was,” he says, “a shock to a lot of people.”

Where does all this leave that confused and pulled-apart thing, the human self? What is the nature of that which lies beneath? Are we that saturnine creature of the Old World, of Freud and Baumeister’s father? A beast that needs to be controlled? Or is there still a chance that the New World can prevail, with its hopeful vision of a pure heart that thirsts only for freedom?

IN A 2000 PAPER in the journal Advances in Experimental Psychology, Baumeister and colleagues proposed a new way of thinking about the problem. In their “sociometer” theory, self-esteem is a system for monitoring how well we’re doing in our quest for social acceptance. Assaults on our self-esteem trigger a form of pain signal that alerts us to the fact that damage is occurring to the opinions that others hold of us. “Self-esteem,” they wrote, “is one’s subjective appraisal of how one is faring with regard to being a valuable, viable and sought-after member of the groups and relationships to which one belongs and aspires to belong.”

The paper also contained a warning. It compared the pleasure of hollow self-esteem boosting to cocaine abuse.

“Drugs take advantage of natural pleasure mechanisms in the human body that exist to register the accomplishment of desirable goals,” they wrote. “A drug such as cocaine may create a euphoric feeling without one’s having to actually experience events that normally bring pleasure, fooling the nervous system into responding as if circumstances were good. In the same way, cognitively inflating one’s self-image is a way of fooling the natural sociometer mechanism into thinking one is a valued relational partner.”

We have a word for people who have become high on their own hollow self-esteem: narcissist.

The dangers of narcissism became apparent to Baumeister when he tested his theory that people with high self-esteem are largely responsible for violent acts. In one experiment, two people played a game in which the loser is punished with unpleasant barrages of noise. Each player sets the decibel level at which opponents get blasted. Would those with high self-esteem, as Baumeister predicted, turn the sound up to the most aggressive levels? Actually, no. In fact, the effects of self-esteem on aggression appeared to be vanishingly weak. But participants’ levels of narcissism had also been measured. “People had just started talking about narcissism, which seems to be the nasty kind of high self-esteem,” he says. “That had the strong effects. It was people who were high in narcissism who were more provoked and more aggressive than everybody else.”

The problem seemed to be that high self-esteem is a mixed category. Some who have it are presumably healthily and accurately confident in themselves. Their sociometers are functioning well. “If you went up to Einstein and told him he was stupid,” says Baumeister, “he’s not going to get mad.” Narcissism, though, is different: It’s the desire to feel you’re superior. “Narcissists believe they deserve to be treated better than other people,” he says. They also lack the moral values of people with genuine high self-esteem.

Narcissism, then, is a kind of addiction to self-esteem. So what would happen if you took an entire generation of young people and systematically and repeatedly masturbated their self-esteem mechanisms? Could it be true that the children raised in the school of Rogers, Branden, and Vasconcellos were growing up to be entitled, egomaniacal narcissists?

Baumeister has certainly been noticing something like that amongst his students. “They’re very confident and self-assured, but because of that, they don’t work as hard as they might,” he says. “Other faculties are saying the same thing. Some just cannot take criticism, which is a big problem in academic life. We get criticized endlessly when we submit something. Believing you’re perfect is not a good preparation for that.”

The appalling possibility that the self-esteem movement had created a generation of narcissists was picked up by Jean Twenge, one of Baumeister’s protégés. In her 2006 book Generation Me, Twenge laid out astonishing data. For example, by the mid-1990s, the average college male had higher self-esteem than 86 percent of college men in 1968. The figure for women was 71 percent. The average child in the mid-1990s had higher self-esteem than 73 per cent of children in 1979.

Back in the 1950s, just over one in ten 14- to 16-year-olds agreed with the statement “I am an important person.” By the late 1980s, that number had risen to 80 per cent, a figure Twenge describes as “incredible.” She argued the surge was linked to concomitant surges in rates of depression and anxiety. “We fixate on self-esteem and unthinkingly build narcissism,” Twenge wrote. “This will stay with us even if self-esteem programs end up in the dustbin of history.”

Both Baumeister and Twenge have their critics. Some academics take issue with the link between aggression and high self-esteem, arguing instead that factors like shame are more important. The evidence for a narcissism epidemic, too, has suffered an assault: researchers have questioned the methods used to measure narcissism and pointed to studies that don’t support such a rise. More recently, critics have proposed that every generation is “Generation Me,” and narcissism is just an eternal symptom of youth.

Yet Twenge insists she’s supported by the weight of the numbers, observing that there are 22 datasets that show generational increases—and only two that don’t. She also points out that her data compares youngster to youngster, not youngster to middle-aged grump.

In 2009, she published The Narcissism Epidemic, a follow-up written with another of Baumeister’s former students, W. Keith Campbell. Twenge claimed that narcissism among Americans was rising at the same rate as obesity, and documented how the mantras of the self-esteem movement had begun infiltrating churches, with God himself being redrawn in our new self-obsessed image. Pastor Joel Osteen, for example, preaches in Lakewood, Houston, at the biggest church in America. “God didn’t create you to be average,” he tells his congregation. “You were made to excel.”

But this is not the world that the progenitors of the self-esteem movement thought they were making. For them, positive self-regard was a state that had to be earned. “Nathaniel Branden meant something a little more honestly come by,” says Campbell, the co-author of The Narcissism Epidemic. “When people talked about self-actualization, that meant really pushing yourself to reach your full potential. Self-actualization is really hard.” The reason the empty version of self-esteem proved infectious, Campbell believes, is simple: “It feels good.”

The movement’s U.S. origins are surely no coincidence. Self-esteem fits perfectly over the top of the traditional ideal of the free and noble individual, striving to achieve the American dream. The movement’s sin was making it sound easy. It removed the part about striving, replacing it with an unearned assumption of exceptionalism. The lesson became that simply wanting it is enough. You’re special. You deserve it.

“My kids have to do tasks at school where they talk about why they’re special,” says Campbell. “I mean, you know, they’re not! They’re kids! It’s a curse in a lot of ways. It’s such a crazy idea.”