Self-esteem
14th October 2024
Observations
Self-esteem manifests in different situations and aspects. I first list some of them below.
- Low self-esteem is connected to insecurity and lack of belief in own abilities
- Low self-esteem in the extreme case leads to feeling worthless, sometimes even leading to suicide
- Low self-esteem means feeling uncomfortable in social situations
- Self-esteem raises after doing impressive things, and drops after failures
- Self-esteem seems to be only weakly correlated with the global social status
- Self-esteem seems to be impacted by hormones, with testosteron raising it. In general, it is considered a masculine trait.
- Developing (having) higher self-esteem is deemed valuable by others.
- Having too high self-esteem is labelled narcissism.
- There is a connection between self-esteem and social confidence.
- There is a connection between self-esteem and agency.
- There is some connection between self-esteem and assertiveness.
- There is some connection between self-esttem and childhood/parents status.
Questions
- What are the differences between high self-esteem, self-love, narcissism and egoism?
- How to explain the weak correlation between self-esteem and global status?
- Is high self-esteem beneficial overall? What are the trade-offs? Is low self-esteem a spandrel?
- Is (low) self-esteem causal, or is it possible to change it independently?
My own experience
- I am sometimes described as having low self-esteem (A., K.), to a point where I internalised this description.
- I behave quite egoistically, and mostly assertively, but this is through independence and withdrawal from conflict, not through going into the conflict and resolving it.
- I don't have a sense of belonging, and don't have an impression of having many allies.
- I don't feel masculine in some aspects (leadership, aggression), but I do feel in others (independence, self-reliance, resourcefulness, ambition). I don't feel confident in a conflict situation: neither in a verbal or emotionar, nor in a physical fight.
- I can be either risk-seeking or risk-averse depending on a situation, although the former applies mostly to career/adventure situations, and the latter to social ones.
- I experience periods of high- and low-agency.
Theories
Sociometer theory
Self-esteem tracks how valuable we are to other people, and the level of support we can get from others.
Hierometer theory
Self-esteem tracks our status withing the group.
Prospensity towards shame theory
Feeling shame is a mechanism - a precommitment of sorts - for creating self-punishment. As not all social transgressions are punished (hard to detect, not socially acceptable to punish), prospensity towards shame means others can trust us more, since they expect any transgressions to be self-punished.
Self-esteem is then a measure of how strongly we are predisposed towards feeling shame (globally), or in general how shameful we feel on aggregate.
Self-esteem as social risk tolerance theory
Doing things in public is an implicit leveraged bid for status. Doing things privately is an implicit option on status. Self-esteem in a public setup translates into higher prospensity towards more risky - leveraged - behavior, i.e. higher social risk tolerance.
There is some optimal amount of risk tolerance. EV raises with risk, but also probability of ruin.
Ideal self theory
We have an image in our head of what kind of a person we should be. We also track what kind of a person we currently are. The self-esteem is then the difference between the first and the second image.
Maybe there's something in that, but I am wary of the theories that violate the hedonic thredmill heuristic - feeling good and bad should mostly depend on the gradient, not on the absolute level.
An appropriate modification of this theory is that we increase self-esteem if we move towards (or over) the ideal self, and lose self-esteem if we move away from it (under).
In this sense, low self-esteem might be beneficial as a motivator to do be better. Levels of self-esteem are then also a factor of general epistemics: hacking own self-esteem to be higher means self-deception.
Sources
LessWrong