The “precise conclusions” of the social psychologist can be vague due to competing philosophies and political influences that make today’s social psychology truths tomorrow’s policy disasters. For example, educators in the 1960s made policy the social psychology doctrine of self-esteem: raising self-esteem in children to inoculate society “against the lures of crime, violence, substance abuse, teen pregnancy, child abuse, chronic welfare dependency, and educational failure” (California State Department of Education, 1990, p. 4).
After decades of subsequent self-esteem engineering in American society, the “Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study” consistently shows that American children rank low in mathematics and science when compared to children in other countries (Gonzales, 2009). At the same time, American children are more likely to rank themselves as being the best at math and science. Globally, a Brookings Institute study found that societies that emphasize self-esteem have lower-performing students. In addition, the social ills that the self-esteem engineers set out to cure have escalated.
After researching self-esteem for decades in hopes of finding a connection between low self-esteem and societal problems like violence, Roy F. Baumeister (1996) concluded, “the idea that low self-esteem causes violence is simply and thoroughly wrong.” The reality is that “high self-esteem is closer to the violent personality.” Likewise, the same task force that implemented self-esteem as the cure for society’s ills concluded: “Associations between self-esteem and its expected consequences are mixed, insignificant, or absent” (Smelser, 1989, p. 15).
Baumeister (1996) concluded that attempts to engineer self-esteem in American children have created a generation of “conceited fools” suffering from “egotistical delusions”, and that inflated self-esteem is the cause of escalating social problems. However, such a conclusion seems to come hard for those who have invested so much “intuition regarding the importance of self-esteem” (Smelser, 1989, p. xix) and resources into imposing self-esteem philosophies on society. Smelser argued that the “absent” connection between low self-esteem and social problems is because “the scientific efforts to establish those connections… do not reproduce those relations” (1989, p. 19).
In other words, the lack of connection results from bad research methodologies, not because the connection does not exist. The solution Smelser proposes is to escalate commitment to pushing self-esteem programs in schools while modifying the research methodologies to prove the connection between low self-esteem and social ills.
Some social psychologists and educators are slowly coming to rediscover what the conventional wisdom told them all along: “self-control” and “self-discipline” are the keys to solving social and personal problems (Baumeister, 1996, p. 129). From an education perspective, Instructor Magazine declared that inflated self-esteem is “dangerous” (Cleaver, 2010, p. 35); for self-esteem to be beneficial, it must be built on effort, persistence, and accomplishment. Otherwise, “If a student’s confidence isn’t built on their actual abilities, failure can be devastating” (Cleaver, 2010, p. 35).