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From self-conceptions to self-worth: On the sources and structure of global self-esteem.

1989; American Psychological Association; Volume: 57; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1037/0022-3514.57.4.672

1939-1315

Brett W. Pelham, William B. Swann,

Global Education and Multiculturalism

Three factors were identified that uniquely contribute to people's global self-esteem: (a) people's tendencies to experience positive and negative affective states, (b) people's specific self-views (i.e., their conceptions of their strengths and weaknesses), and (c) the way people frame their self-views.Framing factors included the relative certainty and importance of people's positive versus negative self-views and the discrepancy between people's actual and ideal self-views.The contribution of importance to people's self-esteem, however, was qualified in 2 ways.First, importance contributed only to the self-esteem of those who perceived that they had relatively few talents.Second, individuals who saw their positive self-views as important were especially likely to be high in self-esteem when they were also highly certain of these positive self-views.The theoretical and therapeutic implications of these findings are discussed.Max made his living robbing convenience stores.He never completed high school and spent a considerable portion of his adult life in a state penitentiary.Yet his pride and self-confidence revealed that he considered himself a capable, worthy person, easily on par with those employed in more respectable trades.Gene's was a very different story.After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard Law School, Gene became president of a large and successful law firm.Yet Gene continued to question his self-worth, as he had since his childhood.Plagued by worries and depression, one day he scribbled a note indicating that he regarded himselfa failure and took his own life.These hypothetical examples dramatize an important question: How do people move from specific knowledge of their abilities and accomplishments to global evaluations of their selfworth?The stories of Gene and Max suggest that self-esteem is not simply the product of some simple cognitive calculus that summarizes people's abilities and accomplishments.Conceivably, a more complex cognitive formula, one that incorporates the idea that some self-views are weighted more heavily than others, would offer a clearer insight into the origins of self-esteem.Alternatively, relatively undifferentiated "affective" (as compared with purely "cognitive") factors may play a role in self-esteem.Our goal in this report is to better understand the cognitive and affective underpinnings of self-esteem.We begin by presenting a hypothetical model of the development of self-esteem,