Feeling good about oneself, being bad to others? Remarks on self-esteem, hostility, and aggressive behavior
Section snippets
Is high or low self-esteem associated with aggressiveness?
Intuitively, it seems quite odd to presume that a person who feels good about him/herself is aggressive toward others — at least the view that his/her feeling good about him/herself causes his/her aggression seems peculiar at first sight. The more so because the early environmental and parental factors known to predict an individual's aggressiveness are such that they can hardly be thought to have fostered the development of a high self-esteem. For example, parents' emotional rejection of the
What is wrong with the self-esteem measures?
Even if the claim “the typical, self-defining statements by both groups and individuals who aggress indicate a belief in their superiority, not inferiority” (Baumeister et al., 1996) is right, one might be tempted to ask, What is behind these “superiority” statements. The traditional self-esteem measures that are based on self-report have been criticized as inadequate. Most studies, however, rely exclusively on these devices. The question of importance is how do we interpret high self-evaluated
Threatened egotism and aggression
Baumeister (1997) and Baumeister et al. (1996) have proposed that aggression is associated with a high self-esteem. Many of their arguments in favor of this view are based on “indirect” evidence rather than on direct empirical comparison of aggressive and non-aggressive groups. According to Baumeister (1997), there are groups that are known to have a higher self-esteem and are also known to be more aggressive than some other groups (e.g., men as compared with women, non-depressed individuals as
What type of aggression are we talking about
In the field of aggression research, several distinctions have been made between different types of aggressive behavior. Some of these distinctions have to do with the conditions surrounding the aggressive act, such as its antecedents, or the motivation of the perpetrator. For example, aggression has been classified into hostile versus instrumental (Hartup, 1974), or reactive versus proactive Dodge & Coie, 1987, Dodge, 1991 aggression. The idea is that in instrumental, or proactive aggression,
Conclusions
The question of the relation between aggression and self-esteem is theoretically important, but as has been shown, it is also empirically controversial. In order to make progress in examining this issue, it seems that distinctions and clarifications have to be made within the concept of self-esteem itself. Further, methods used to measure self-esteem need to be developed, guided by these conceptual clarifications. As Johnson (1997) has pointed out, we should have a clear, theoretically grounded
Acknowledgements
I thank Professor Kirsti Lagerspetz, Ari Kaukiainen, MA, and Laura Pakaslahti, PhD, for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper, and Jacqueline Välimäki, MA, for revision of the English.
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