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Self-Esteem Does Not Come From Within
How guesswork determines your wellbeing.
Surprising as it may sound, our self-esteem is only partly based on how we feel about ourselves. Confused? Find out what does determine our self-esteem.
Self-esteem is one’s feeling of approval, acceptance, and liking of oneself. We feel our self-esteem is based on our own judgment of ourselves, but American psychologist Mark Leary (1954) proposed — in his sociometer theory — that the judgment is primarily based on our perceptions of other people’s judgments of us. What you experience as your self-esteem, according to Leary, is your best guess of how much the people, whose opinion you care about, accept and respect you.
As evidence for this theory, Leary and others found — through research — that there is a strong correlation between self-esteem and the belief one is generally accepted by others. In a further study of real-life experiences, people felt higher self-esteem after praise and social acceptance, and lower self-esteem after social rejection. The most convincing evidence came from a study into the question of whether good or bad results on a test had any effect on self-esteem. As it turned out, the influence on self-esteem became a lot greater if the participant was made aware of other people learning about the test results. If self-esteem had been all…
