Many scientific studies have linked high self-esteem to positive factors, such as good health, happiness, well-being, and success at home and work. That is why lot of countries – with the United States foremost among them – have invested in programs to increase self-esteem for many decades. Thousands of self-help manuals have been published, and they are popular in Estonia as well. Then again, the hoped-for benefits to well-being, health, and success haven’t followed, according to Kerttu Mäger, a master’s student in psychology at the University of Tartu who analyzed self-esteem and self-compassion in her master’s thesis.
Self-esteem, a post-it wall. (Photo: Flickr: Creative Commons/Kiran Foster)
Why is this so? There are many incentives that can boost self-esteem for a little while: a good grade at school, promotion, increased salary (or some other work-related victory), praise, compliments, a large number of Facebook likes, etc. These things can make most people feel better – even to such an extent that students may value the factors increasing self-esteem more than sex, their favorite food, or meeting a best friend. This is according to scientists Bushman and Moeller in their article “Sweets, sex or self-esteem?”.
At the same time, it has not been convincingly proven that interventions aimed at increasing self-esteem can do it in a lasting manner and bring about success at school or in other fields. For example, Roy Baumeister, one of the leading social psychologists, has teamed up with other scientists to research situations where researchers have tried to raise the self-esteem of students who are not doing so well at school. It turned out that those students had worse exam results on average than those whose self-esteem was “left alone”. While it is true that good grades at school and high self-esteem are linked, it could rather be claimed that good grades push our self-esteem higher, not that high self-esteem helps us to get good grades.
