Willpower

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. They tend to make very good first impressions but don’t wear well. When the psychologist Delroy Paulhus asked people in groups to rate one another, the narcissists seemed to be everyone’s favorite person, but only during the first few meetings. After a few months, they usually slipped to the bottom of the rankings. God’s gift to the world can be hard to live with.
    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 narcissim 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. Whitney Houston’s “Greatest Love of All” has been taken to another level by musicians like Rivers Cuomo, the lead singer of Weezer, who wrote and performed a popular song in 2008 titled “The Greatest Man That Ever Lived.” It was autobiographical.
    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. Like the students in Forsyth’s class in Virginia, when the going gets tough, people with high self-esteem often decide they shouldn’t bother. If other people can’t appreciate how terrific they are, then it’s the other people’s problem.

Exceptional Asians
    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