Self-control -- Part 3

Self-esteem is not sound performance.

One notices in life various efforts to promote children’s “self-esteem.”  But as Walter Mischel writes in his book The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control, we already have a natural tendency toward self-promotion:

The psychological immune system preserves our sense of being good, smart, and worthy. Provided we are not severely depressed or dysfunctional, it allows us to see ourselves as having more positive and fewer negative qualities than most of our peers. It does not work this way with everything, though: you may see yourself as intelligent overall but incompetent with technology, or as being good at self-control when it comes to work but not when it comes to chocolate. Nevertheless, when people rate themselves on Shelley Taylor’s “How I See Myself” questionnaire, which lists 21 qualities including “cheerful,”“academically able,”“intellectually self-confident,”“sensitive to others,” and “desire to achieve,” between 67 and 96 percent rate themselves better than they rate their peers. David G. Myers, a social psychologist at Hope College, captured the gist of the multitude of studies on self-evaluation. In one College Board survey of 829,000 high school seniors, zero percent rated themselves below average in “ability to get along with others,” 60 percent rated themselves in the top 10 percent, and 25 percent rated themselves in the top 1 percent.

And this natural tendency to artificially boost one’s own self-esteem is not a good one.  As Roy Baumeister and John Tierney write in their book Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength:

[P]sychologists on [a] review panel [of the Association for Psychological Science], which included Baumeister [one of the authors], sifted through thousands of studies [on self-esteem] looking for the ones that met high standards of research quality. The panel found several hundred, like the one that tracked high school students for several years in order to understand the correlation between self-esteem and good grades. Yes, students with higher self-esteem did have higher grades. But which came first? Did students’ self-esteem lead to good grades, or did good grades lead to self-esteem? It turned out that grades in tenth grade predicted self-esteem in twelfth grade, but self-esteem in tenth grade failed to predict grades in twelfth grade. Thus, it seemed, the grades came first, and the self-esteem came afterward. In another carefully controlled study, Donald Forsyth tried boosting the self-esteem of some of the students in his psychology class at Virginia Commonwealth University. He randomly assigned some students who got a C grade or worse on the midterm to receive a weekly message boosting their self-esteem, and some students with similar grades to get a neutral weekly message. The weekly pep talks presumably helped the students feel better about themselves, but it didn’t help their grades—quite to the contrary. When they took the final exam, not only did they do worse than the control group but their grades were even lower than what they’d gotten on the midterm. Their average score dropped from 59 to 39—from borderline passing down to hopeless. Other evidence showed that, across the country, students’ self-esteem went up while their performance declined. They just felt better about doing worse. In his own research, Baumeister puzzled over the observation that some people doing truly awful things—like professional hit men and serial rapists—had remarkably high levels of self-esteem. After reviewing the scientific literature, the panel of psychologists concluded that there is no modern epidemic of low self-esteem, at least not in the United States, Canada, or western Europe. (There’s not much known about trends of how people regard themselves in, say, Myanmar.) Most people already feel pretty good about themselves. Children in particular tend to start off with very positive views of themselves.

As Baumeister and Tierney write:

There seem to be only two clearly demonstrated benefits of high self-esteem, according to the review panel. First, it increases initiative, probably because it lends confidence. People with high self-esteem are more willing to act on their beliefs, to stand up for what they believe in, to approach others, to risk new undertakings. (This unfortunately includes being extra willing to do stupid or destructive things, even when everyone else advises against them.) Second, it feels good. High self-esteem seems to operate like a bank of positive emotions, which furnish a general sense of well-being and can be useful when you need an extra dose of confidence to cope with misfortune, ward off depression, or bounce back from failure. These benefits might be useful to people in some jobs, like sales, by enabling them to recover from frequent rejections, but this sort of persistence is a mixed blessing. It can also lead people to ignore sensible advice as they stubbornly keep wasting time and money on hopeless causes. On the whole, benefits of high self-esteem accrue to the self while its costs are borne by others, who must deal with side effects like arrogance and conceit. At worst, self-esteem becomes narcissism, the self-absorbed conviction of personal superiority. Narcissists are legends in their own mind and addicted to their grandiose images. They have a deep craving to be admired by other people (but don’t feel a special need to be liked—it’s adulation they require). They expect to be treated as special beings and will turn nasty when criticized.

Sadly, the authors write, naïve modern efforts to promote self-esteem may have unintentionally boosted narcissism:

By most measures in psychological studies, narcissism has increased sharply in recent decades, especially among young Americans. College professors often complain that students now feel entitled to high grades without having to study; employers report problems with young workers who expect a quick rise to the top without paying their dues. This trend toward narcissism is even apparent in song lyrics over the past three decades, as a team of researchers led by Nathan DeWall demonstrated in a clever study showing that words like “I” and “me” have become increasingly common in hit songs. This broad rise in narcissism is the problem child of the self-esteem movement, and it is not likely to change anytime soon, because the movement persists despite the evidence that it’s not making children become more successful, honest, or otherwise better citizens. Too many students, parents, and educators are still seduced by the easy promises of self-esteem.

As we’ve explored previously, reasonable optimism is generally a good thing, but narcissism relates to over-optimism to the point of risking serious costs.  As Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, writes in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow:

One of the benefits of an optimistic temperament is that it encourages persistence in the face of obstacles. But persistence can be costly. An impressive series of studies by Thomas Åstebro sheds light on what happens when optimists receive bad news. He drew his data from a Canadian organization—the Inventor’s Assistance Program—which collects a small fee to provide inventors with an objective assessment of the commercial prospects of their idea. The evaluations rely on careful ratings of each invention on 37 criteria, including need for the product, cost of production, and estimated trend of demand. The analysts summarize their ratings by a letter grade, where D and E predict failure—a prediction made for over 70% of the inventions they review. The forecasts of failure are remarkably accurate: only 5 of 411 projects that were given the lowest grade reached commercialization, and none was successful. Discouraging news led about half of the inventors to quit after receiving a grade that unequivocally predicted failure. However, 47% of them continued development efforts even after being told that their project was hopeless, and on average these persistent (or obstinate) individuals doubled their initial losses before giving up. Significantly, persistence after discouraging advice was relatively common among inventors who had a high score on a personality measure of optimism—on which inventors generally scored higher than the general population. Overall, the return on private invention was small, “lower than the return on private equity and on high-risk securities.” More generally, the financial benefits of self-employment are mediocre: given the same qualifications, people achieve higher average returns by selling their skills to employers than by setting out on their own. The evidence suggests that optimism is widespread, stubborn, and costly. The damage caused by overconfident CEOs is compounded when the business press anoints them as celebrities; the evidence indicates that prestigious press awards to the CEO are costly to stockholders. The authors write, “We find that firms with award-winning CEOs subsequently underperform, in terms both of stock and of operating performance. At the same time, CEO compensation increases, CEOs spend more time on activities outside the company such as writing books and sitting on outside boards, and they are more likely to engage in earnings management.

Today’s social media platforms only enhance the tendency toward narcissism.  As Johann Hari writes in his book Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention – and How to Think Deeply Again:

Narcissism, it occurred to me, is a corruption of attention— it’s where your attention becomes turned in only on yourself and your own ego. I don’t say this with any sense of superiority. I am embarrassed to describe what I realized in that week [when Harsi went without his cell phone] that I missed most about the web. Every day in my normal life— sometimes several times a day— I would look at Twitter and Instagram to see how many followers I had. I didn’t look at the feed, the news, the buzz— just my own stats. If the figure had gone up, I felt glad— like a money-obsessed miser checking the state of his personal stocks and finding he was slightly richer than yesterday. It was as if I was saying to myself, See? More people are following you. You matter. I didn’t miss the content of what they said. I just missed the raw numbers, and the sense that they were growing … [Social media] sites and apps are designed to train our minds to crave frequent rewards. They make us hunger for hearts and likes. Once you have been conditioned to need these reinforcements, Tristan [Harris, a former Google engineer] told one interviewer, “it’s very hard to be with reality, the physical world, the built world— because it doesn’t offer as frequent and as immediate rewards as this thing does.” This craving will drive you to pick up your phone more than you would if you had never been plugged into this system. You’ll break away from your work and your relationships to seek a sweet, sweet hit of retweets.

Baumeister and Tierney also point to evidence on cultural differences regarding self-esteem, which has tended to spare some groups from enhancements of narcissism more than others:

There’s one notable exception to the trend toward narcissism observed in psychological studies of young Americans. It doesn’t appear among young Asian-Americans, probably because their parents have been influenced less by the self-esteem movement than by a cultural tradition of instilling discipline. Some Asian cultures put considerably more emphasis on promoting self-control, and from earlier ages, than is common in America and other Western societies. Chinese parents and preschools pressure children quite early in life to become toilet trained and acquire other basic forms of impulse control. By one estimate, two-year-old Chinese children are expected to have levels of control that correspond roughly to what American children reach at age three or four. A clear difference between Chinese and American toddlers emerges when they’re asked to override their natural impulses. In one test, for instance, the toddlers are shown a series of pictures and instructed to say “day” whenever they see the moon, and “night” whenever they see the sun. In other tests, the toddlers try to restrain themselves to a whisper when they’re excited, and play a version of Simon Says in which they’re supposed to obey one kind of command but ignore another kind. The Chinese four-year-olds generally perform better on these tests than Americans of the same age. The Chinese toddlers’ superior self-control might be due in part to genes: There’s evidence that the genetic factors associated with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) are much rarer in Chinese children than in American children. But the cultural traditions in China and other Asian countries undoubtedly play an important role in instilling self-discipline, and those traditions in Asian-American homes have contributed to the children’s low levels of narcissism as well as their later successes. Asian-Americans make up only 4 percent of the U.S. population but account for a quarter of the student body at elite universities like Stanford, Columbia, and Cornell. They’re more likely to get a college degree than any other ethnic group, and they go on to earn salaries that are 25 percent above the American norm. Their success has led to the popular notion that Asians are more intelligent than Americans and Europeans, but that’s not how James Flynn explains their achievements. After carefully reviewing IQ studies, Flynn concludes that the scores of Chinese-American and Japanese-American people are very similar to whites of European descent. If anything, the Asian-Americans’ IQ is slightly lower, on average, although they do show up more at both the upper and lower extremes. The big difference is that they make better use of their intelligence. People working in what Flynn calls elite professions, like physicians, scientists, and accountants, generally have an IQ above a certain threshold. For white Americans, that threshold is an IQ of 110, but Chinese-Americans manage to get the same elite jobs with an IQ of only 103. Moreover, among the people above each threshold, Chinese-Americans have higher rates of actually getting into those jobs, meaning that a Chinese-American with an IQ above 103 is more likely to get an elite job than an American with an IQ above 110. The pattern is similar for Japanese-Americans. By virtue of self-control—hard work, diligence, steadiness, reliability—the children of immigrants from East Asia can do as well as Americans with higher IQs.

Baumeister and Tierney also make a connection between kids’ desire for competition and their love of video games, noting that:

The self-esteem movement, fortunately, never took hold in the video game industry, probably because children would have been too bored by games that began by telling them what great players they were. Instead, children have preferred games in which they start out as lowly “noobs” (as in newbies) who must earn respect through their accomplishments. To acquire skills, they fail over and over. The typical teenager must have endured thousands of digital deaths and virtual fiascos, yet somehow he retains enough self-esteem to keep trying. While parents and educators have been promoting the everybody-gets-a-trophy philosophy, children have been seeking games with more demanding standards. Players need concentration to fight off Ork after Ork; they need patience to mine for virtual gold; they need thriftiness to save up for a new sword or helmet. Instead of bemoaning the games’ hold over children, we should be exploiting the techniques that game designers have developed. They’ve refined the basic steps of self- control: setting clear and attainable goals, giving instantaneous feedback, and offering enough encouragement for people to keep practicing and improving. After noticing how hard people work at games, some pioneers are pursuing the “gamification” of life by adapting these techniques (like establishing “quests” and allowing people to “level up”) for schools and workplaces and digital collaborations. Video games give new glamour to old- fashioned virtues. Success is conditional— but it’s within your reach as long as you have the discipline to try, try again.

This concludes this series of essays on self-control.