A Brief History of Self-Esteem

How confidence culture took over the world.

Ludvig Karsten’s “At the Mirror” via Artvee.

When I covered relationships and personal growth for magazines, I noticed that nearly every problem my editors asked me to address invariably led me to a single remedy: self-esteem.

I focused on gathering practical tips—asking experts about everything from the best time to ask for a raise to the best venue for a first date. But regardless of what life-betterment topic I was covering, I almost always found myself staring at a lot of expert quotes on the importance of raising your self-esteem.

Self-esteem was essential to getting a great job, a considerate partner, a vibrant social life, and a healthy bank balance. I didn't question this at the time—it seemed fairly intuitive that liking yourself was the first step to getting what you want out of life.

After nearly a decade of faithfully conveying this advice, I interviewed psychologist Kristin Neff, who told me the psychological community had misread the data on self-esteem. “We got it wrong,” she said.

Neff explained that a re-examination of the research found no evidence that people with high self-esteem are better at their jobs, more popular, more responsible, or more attractive to potential partners. They just think they are.

I was shocked. “Raise your self-esteem” was the most consistent prescription I’d heard from the experts I interviewed, and I had believed them.

But the more I thought about Neff’s comments, the more they made sense. I’ve often marveled that some of the kindest and most thoughtful people I know feel terrible about themselves, and some of the biggest jerks I’ve ever met think they’re wonderful.

So how did I, and so many others, get it so wrong?

The story begins in the 1980s, when a California state assemblyman named John Vasconcellos proposed bringing self-esteem education into the state’s public schools. Vasconcellos had struggled with his own self-esteem before discovering the Esalen Institute and the Human Potential movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. He then committed himself to spreading the gospel of high self-worth, arguing that teaching children to love themselves would lead to higher grades and lower rates of drug abuse, teen pregnancy and delinquency.

At first, this proposal made Vasconcellos a laughingstock. His plan was widely ridiculed as California hippy-dippy nonsense on The Tonight Show, in the Doonesbury comic strip, and in the op-ed pages of national newspapers like The Wall Street Journal.

As journalist Will Storr details in his fascinating book, Selfie, Vasconcellos was furious and set out to prove his detractors wrong, convening a panel of University of California professors to research self-esteem’s efficacy.

In January 1989 the task force published Toward a State of Self-Esteem, subsequently releasing a press release that enthused, “The relationship between poor self-esteem and society’s problems has definitely been confirmed.”

Vasconcellos was vindicated, and the story was picked up widely. Newspaper headlines trumpeted the power of self-esteem. Vasconcellos was interviewed respectfully on The Today Show, Nightline and The Oprah Winfrey Show.

The self-esteem movement was born. During the 1990s and early 2000s, self-esteem curriculums proliferated in U.S. schools, and its lessons later spread into therapists’ offices, workplaces like General Motors and Proctor & Gamble, and magazine articles like the ones I wrote.

Problem: The statement in the press release was false, and the University of California researchers who wrote the report knew it. Their research did not find meaningful evidence that raising people’s self-esteem would help cure societal ills. The study was, as one of the authors told Storr, “a bunch of scholarly gobbledegook.”

The researchers quietly walked back their findings in a subsequent volume,  but it was too late—the gobbledegook had already caught fire.

Why did the authors allow their research to be deliberately misconstrued? The reason is quite prosaic: Vasconcellos was the chairman of the state’s Ways and Means Committee, and thus controlled the University of California’s budget.

Vasconcellos’ purse-string power could only go so far, however. The self-esteem gospel proliferated because the idea that self-love is a path to success is deeply ingrained in our culture.

Self-esteem’s stock has fallen since I spoke to Neff. The spectacle of Donald Trump raised awareness of the hazards of narcissism, and deriding “special snowflakes” became a conservative talking point. But the self-esteem project has always been neoliberal at its core, which is why it continues to thrive, even if the term has been replaced with its more businesslike cousin, "confidence."

Today, taxpayer money is dedicated to teaching laid-off workers how to do power poses and create vision boards. Women and people of color are encouraged to build their self-confidence as a means of confronting workplace inequities.

These ideas persist because telling people to love themselves is a lot easier than addressing the economic systems that keep people stuck in poverty or dead-end jobs. Teaching visualization exercises is easy; creating policies and laws that protect workers from overseas outsourcing and wage theft is hard.

I’m not against self-esteem. Blind self-confidence gets this newsletter published twice a month, despite plenty of objective evidence that my odds of creating a sustainable income from it are very low.

And self-esteem does have benefits. Roy Baumeister, the psychologist who conducted the original research debunking self-esteem’s efficacy, writes that relative to those with low self-esteem, people with high self-esteem are happier, more confident in their views, more likely to act on their beliefs, and more likely to respond to setbacks productively—by trying again, adopting a new strategy, or finding a different goal. When you believe in yourself, you keep trying, and that matters.

But for the most part, the findings linking self-esteem to positive outcomes rely on self-reports, which as Baumeister points out are inherently flawed. “People who like to rate themselves favorably will score high on self-esteem but also high on whatever else is being measured: work performance, popularity, health, interpersonal skills, and leadership potential,” he writes.

By contrast, when researchers searched for objective measures—like salaries, or length of marriages—having high self-esteem showed no advantage. “Almost invariably the benefits of high self-esteem shone brightly in the self-report data but dwindled sharply or vanished entirely in the harsh light of objective evidence,” writes Baumeister. “For example, people with self-esteem rate themselves as more intelligent, physically attractive, and interpersonally skilled than other people—but these ostensibly desirable traits were contradicted by IQ test scores, peer ratings of appearance, and roommates’ reports of interpersonal skills.”

So trying to raise your self-esteem as a path to success probably won’t work, and it might make you insufferable to be around.

But I think the problem is worse than that. I think the confidence imperative creates a baseline anxiety in our culture. Why do we have to tell ourselves we’re great? Why can’t we just relax into the fact that most of us are, by definition, ordinary?

That’s what Neff suggested when I interviewed her, and it fundamentally shifted my perspective.

I’ve spent my life trying to stand out. When I was young this meant trying to get A’s on my report cards, speaking parts in plays, and any sort of award that would signal to colleges that I deserved an acceptance letter. When I was older, it meant convincing editors to publish my work. In my personal life, it meant trying to get eligible men to notice me in New York’s lopsided dating market. I was trying to convince others that I was special, and of course playing to my harshest critic, myself.

Relaxing into my averageness had an unexpected benefit. Deciding that I was no better than anyone else also meant I was no worse. My periodic bouts of self-loathing were, I realized, another form of narcissism, since they required believing I had a special quality that distinguished me from the rest of the human race.

I’m married now, so I don’t have to worry about proving to random strangers that I’m worth having dinner with. My husband and I are two ordinary people who have gloriously inaccurate views of one another—that is, we see each other as incredibly special.

On a professional level, though, I still have to try and stand out. I must practice what Stockholm University business professor Carl Cederstrom calls “compulsory narcissism”— that is, I must broadcast my accomplishments and praise from others in order to maintain a sustainable career. Today this requirement is no longer confined to creative professionals; even 65-year-old accountants are encouraged by their employers to build their brands on LinkedIn.

John Vasconcellos died in 2014, but his vision is stronger than ever. In the 1990s, school kids filled out workbooks where they told themselves how special they were. Today, broadcasting your wonderfulness to the world is a basic job requirement for millions of people.

“People with self-esteem rate themselves as more intelligent, physically attractive, and interpersonally skilled than other people—but these ostensibly desirable traits were contradicted by IQ test scores, peer ratings of appearance, and roommates’ reports of interpersonal skills.” —Roy Baumeister

This past Valentine’s Day, I took a yoga class led by a wonderful and lovely teacher. Before we started, she placed construction-paper hearts under our mats, which were made by her seven-year-old daughter. The teacher instructed us to read the messages on our Valentines and reflect on them. I unfolded my paper heart, which said, “I am special.”

The wonderful and lovely yoga teacher asked us to take the Valentine’s messages into our hearts, to really believe those words and know they were true.

For a moment, I felt sad and frustrated. Then I amended the words in my mind. “I’m not special. What a relief.”

Have you ever been told to work on your self-esteem? Did it help? Or was the problem more complex than that?