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The Costly Pursuit of Self-Esteem: Implications for Self-Regulation

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The Costly Pursuit of Self-Esteem: Implications for Self-Regulation 18 The Costly Pursuit of Self-Esteem Implications for Self-Regulation Jennifer Crocker, Scott Moeller, and Aleah Burson Most people want to believe that they have worth and value as human beings, that they have desirable qualities, and that other people concur in this assessment (e.g., Dunning, Heath, & Suls, 2005; Leary & Baumeister, 2000). Psychologists have sug- gested that humans have a fundamental need to pursue self-esteem and construct desir- able self-views (e.g., Baumeister, Heatherton, & Tice, 1993; Pyszczynski, Greenberg, Solomon, Arndt, & Schimel, 2004; Taylor & Brown, 1988). The specific qualities that people associate with being worthy and valuable differ across individuals, con- texts, and cultures; for example, confidence and superiority are more desirable in the US, whereas modesty and fitting in are more desirable in Japan (see Heine, Lehman, Markus, & Kitayama, 1999, for a review). But nearly everyone wants to believe they have worth and value because they have desirable qualities, and that others recognize and acknowledge those qualities (Sedikides, Gaertner, & Toguchi, 2003). We call this egosystem motivation. In this chapter, we consider the implications of this motivation for self-regulation. We argue that concern about being a person of worth and value and constructing desired private and public self-images activates the “hot” emotional system (Metcalfe & Mischel, 1999), and undermines the pursuit of other long-term goals. That is, when people simultaneously try to achieve long-term goals and try to regulate their self- esteem and the impressions others form of them, self-regulation to achieve important long-term goals will suffer. We review research showing how investing self-esteem in a particular domain such as academics, and the related goal to get others to recognize and acknowledge one’s desired qualities, undermine self-regulation. Overall, we suggest that pursuing self-esteem and constructing desired self-images undermine self- regulation of long-term goals when it matters most: when people must do things that are difficult, uncomfortable, or threatening to their ego to succeed at their most (c) 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 404 Jennifer Crocker et al. cherished goals. We propose that ecosystem motivation, and specifically concerns about having compassion and supporting others, energizes self-regulation through a “warm” system, which is emotional but not ego-involved. Because research on ecosystem motivation and self-regulation through the warm system is quite new, there is as yet less empirical evidence examining it. Nonetheless, we describe initial evidence that self-regulation through the warm system facilitates self-regulation. Egosystem Motivation The goal to construct desired images of the self in the eyes of the self and others moti- vates a great deal of human behavior; people strive to meet both their own and others’ standards of worth and value (e.g., Higgins, 1987; Leary & Baumeister, 2000; Pyszczynski et al., 2004). Constructing desired self-images helps people satisfy their needs. Other people form impressions of the self almost instantaneously on very lim- ited information (Ambady, Bernieri, & Richeson, 2000); those impressions can affect a wide range of judgments and outcomes, such as gaining acceptance and inclusion into groups and relationships and achieving prestige, resources, or status within those groups (Leary, 1995, 2007). Thus it behooves people to manage the impressions others form of them. Typically, people do not intend to deceive others, but rather intend to convey an accurate but idealized or best possible conception of the self (e.g., Baumeister, 1982; Leary, 1995; Schlenker, 1980). How people view themselves and how others view them are inextricably linked (Cooley, 1902/1956; Leary & Downs, 1995; Tetlock & Manstead, 1985). Through experi- ence, people draw conclusions about what they need to be, do, or have as a person to get others to accept, include, admire, love, or respect them and thereby gain safety, status, prestige, or resources (Rogers, 1961). Over time, those qualities may be inter- nalized as contingencies of self-worth—beliefs about the domains in which people feel they must succeed to have value and worth as a person (Crocker & Wolfe, 2001). Thus egosystem motivation involves both public and private self-images. People not only want others to see them as having desirable qualities; they also want to see them- selves as having those desired qualities (Leary, 2007). Constructing, inflating, main- taining, and defending public and private self-images becomes a means by which people try to satisfy their needs and desires. Consequently, perceived threats to the self-image feel like threats to the well-being or even survival of the self and activate the fight- or-flight self-preservation physiological system, elevating cortisol (Dickerson & Kemeny, 2004). Egosystem motivation is fundamentally evaluative; in this framework, people evalu- ate and judge themselves, and they expect evaluation and judgment from others. They focus on proving themselves and demonstrating their desired qualities, and validating their worth in their own eyes and the eyes of others. In this framework, people are concerned about others only insofar as others give or withhold something from the (c) 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved. The Costly Pursuit of Self-Esteem 405 self such as approval, inclusion, or validation (Leary & Baumeister, 2000), or the self gains or loses from association or comparison with others (Tesser, 1988). Egosystem motivation is both a state and a trait; that is, everyone has an egosys- tem motivational framework at times, but some people are chronically high in ego- system motivation whereas others are chronically low. Contingencies of self-worth represent the private side of chronic egosystem motivation; they reflect people’s private beliefs about what they must be or do to have value and worth as a person. Self-image goals represent the public side of egosystem motivation; they reflect the desire to get other people to recognize and acknowledge one’s desired images. Implications for Self-Regulation Self-regulation and self-control have demonstrated long-term benefits (Mischel & Shoda, 1995; Shoda, Mischel, & Peake, 1990). Self-regulation involves restraining impulses to engage in behaviors that have known costs to the self despite the short-term gratification they provide (e.g., smoking, binge eating, or breaking laws), as well as pursuing goals that have future benefits (Baumeister & Vohs, 2003). Achieving long-term goals requires the seemingly contradictory qualities of persistence and effort in the face of setbacks, and the ability to recognize when one course of action is fruitless and substitute another strategy to achieve the desired result. Thus self-regulation involves sustaining focus on important goals, taking action to reduce discrepancies between one’s current state and a desired state or goal, and attending to feedback about whether those actions lead to progress toward the goal (Carver & Scheier, 1998). Egosystem motivation may undermine all of these aspects of self-regulation. Metcalfe and Mischel (1999) proposed that self-control and self-regulation involve two systems: a cool, cognitive system which “allows a person to keep goals in mind while pursuing them and monitoring progress along the route” (p. 5), and a hot, emotional system that is fast, simple, reflexive, accentuated by stress, and under stimulus control. To be sure, self-regulation in the hot system also involves cognitive processes such as inter- pretation of events, causal attributions, and social judgments; hot system self-regulation is not completely devoid of cognition. However, cognition in the hot system tends to be simpler and more reflexive than cognition in the cool system (Metcalfe & Mischel, 1999). Because self-esteem and desired and dreaded self-images are linked to strong emotions, the pursuit of self-esteem is largely under the control of the “hot” system. People who chronically have egosystem motivation should experience more intense, self-relevant (i.e., hotter) emotions and have more difficulty keeping their long-term goals in mind. Following setbacks, they may indulge immediate impulses to make themselves feel better, giving short-term emotion regulation priority over other self-regulatory goals (Tesser, 1988; Tice & Bratslavsky, 2000; Tice, Bratslavsky, & Baumeister, 2001). In other words, egosystem motivation can create conflicts between self-regulation to achieve self-esteem or reduce negative affect in the short term, and self-regulation to achieve (c) 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 406 Jennifer Crocker et al. long-term goals that may involve threats to self-esteem. These conflicts can undermine self-regulation toward important long-term goals either because people give priority to the immediate goal of boosting or protecting self-esteem, or because simultane- ously juggling two conflicting goals results in subobtimal self-regulation for both goals. When people pursue self-esteem, they are motivated to construct desired self-images. As a result, they have difficulty realistically appraising their current state and com- paring it to their ideal state. A great deal of research suggests that people find it difficult to appraise their strengths and weaknesses accurately (see Dunning et al., 2005, for a review); this difficulty stems, at least in part, from egosystem motivation to view the self in a positive light (e.g., Kunda
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