Willpower

of the people who make up society.”
    He also noted, in a later passage that wasn’t nearly as newsworthy, that it was “disappointing” to see the lack of really solid scientific evidence “to date.” But better results were expected once more work was done, and there was plenty of money available for self-esteem research. The studies continued, and eventually another institution commissioned another report. This time it was not a political unit, like the state of California, but a scientific body, the Association for Psychological Science. The conclusions did not inspire any performances from Whitney Houston or Lady Gaga.

From Self-esteem to Narcissism
    The psychologists on the review panel, which included Baumeister, sifted through thousands of studies 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. The consensus of the scientific literature happens to jibe with anecdotal evidence from the Baumeister household, where there have been conversations like this:
    Daughter (4 years old): I know everything.
    Mother: No, honey, you don’t know everything.
    Daughter: Yes, I do. I know everything.
    Mother: You don’t know the square root of thirty-six.
    Daughter (without batting an eye): I’m keeping all the really big numbers a secret.
    Mother: It’s not a really big number. It’s only six.
    Daughter: I knew that.
    And this was a child whose parents had not attempted to boost her self-esteem.
    The review panel also concluded that high self-esteem generally does not make people more effective or easier to get along with. People with high self-esteem think they’re more popular, charming, and socially skilled than other people, but objective studies find no difference. Their self-esteem generally does not lead to better performance at school or at work, and it does not help prevent cigarette smoking, alcohol and drug use, or early sexual behavior. While there may be a correlation between low self-esteem and problems like drug addiction and teenage pregnancy, that doesn’t mean that low self-esteem causes these problems. It works the other way: Being a sixteen-year-old pregnant heroin addict can make you feel less than wonderful about yourself.
    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