The 1989 California Task Force self-esteem report became the best-selling state document in history at 60,000 copies, despite researchers knowing its claims of a 'strong link' between self-esteem and social problems were false.
Where this was said
At 3:56:33 · chapter starts 3:54:00
The Association for Psychological Science needed someone to definitively settle the question, so they tapped superstar researcher Roy Baumeister — himself a committed believer in the movement — and gave him all the resources he needed. His 2003 paper was devastating: self-esteem is largely a downstream consequence of living well, not an upstream cause of it. The only two effects that survived scrutiny were modest — high self-esteem people reported being slightly happier and were marginally more likely to take action.[1] Everything else the movement had promised — lower crime, better academic performance, less drug use — dissolved. More damaging, Baumeister found that high self-esteem was positively correlated with narcissistic traits, and that ego threat in high self-esteem individuals produced heightened aggression. Prison populations, he noted, score very high on self-esteem measures. Crocker and Knight's follow-up research added the crucial nuance: it wasn't the level of self-esteem that predicted problems but whether it was anchored to real-world evidence. Stake your self-worth on a single fragile domain and any feedback in that domain becomes an existential threat, producing defensiveness and aggression. The chapter closes with Mark making the case that Carl Rogers' original clinical insight — have more compassion for yourself — was a reasonable individual-level observation that the movement wrongly tried to scale to all of society, creating a cartoon version of what the serious thinkers had actually said.
In 1986, California assemblyman John Vasconcellos funded a three-year academic study to prove self-esteem causes positive social outcomes. The researchers found nothing. He controlled the University of California budget. The 1989 press release declared the link 'definitively confirmed' — a claim the researchers knew was false. The report became the best-selling state document in history and infected education systems across the Western world.
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