9
Conscious and Unconscious Self-Esteem from the Perspective of Cognitive-Experiential Self-Theory
This chapter begins with a brief review of selected aspects of cognitive-experiential self-theory (CEST) in order to provide the background for understanding self-esteem from the perspective of CEST. It is followed by a discussion of the operation of conscious and unconscious aspects of self-esteem. The chapter closes with a brief discussion of measurement issues.
Cognitive-Experiential Self-Theory
According to CEST, people process information in two systems, experiential and rational. The experiential system is an automatic learning system that is the same system with which non-human animals have adapted to their environments over millions of years of evolution. It operates in a manner that is preconscious, automatic, nonverbal, associative, rapid, effortless, concrete, holistic, and intimately associated with affect. It acquires its schemas, or implicit beliefs, from lived experience, hence its name. The rational system, in contrast, is a uniquely human system that solves problems by reasoning. It operates in a manner that is conscious, slow, primarily verbal, effortful, abstract, analytic, and affect free. It acquires its beliefs by logical inference. To be sure, it also learns from experience, but it does so by reasoning rather than by associative learning.
The two systems operate in parallel and are interactive. Behavior is determined by their combined influence, with their relative contribution varying according to situational requirements and individual preferences. In some situations, such as solving mathematics problems, behavior is primarily determined by the rational system, whereas in others, such as those involving interpersonal relationships, behavior is primarily determined by the experiential system. Despite such variation in situations and individuals, everyday behavior for every individual is primarily determined by the experiential system, i.e., primacy of the experiential system is the default condition.
According to CEST, individuals automatically construct an implicit theory of reality in their experiential system. An implicit theory of reality consists of a self-theory, a world-theory, and connections between the two. The schemas in an implicit theory of reality are hierarchically organized cognitive–affective networks. Influence in the hierarchy proceeds in both directions, bottom-up and top-down. Higher-order schemas provide the system with stability and generality and lower-order one’s with flexibility and specificity. When a higher-order schema is invalidated it threatens the entire organization of the conceptual system.
There are four basic needs in the experiential system: obtain pleasure and avoid pain (the pleasure principle of Freud (1900/1965) and the reinforcement principle of learning theorists), maintain the stability and coherence of the conceptual system (e.g., Lecky, 1945/1969), establish and maintain relationships (e.g., Bowlby, 1973), and enhance self-esteem (e.g., Allport, 1927/1961). According to CEST, all the basic needs are equally important as each can dominate the others and the frustration of any one of these can have equally serious consequences. Behavior is determined by the combined influence of all of the needs that are activated at a particular moment in time. Associated with the four basic needs are four basic beliefs acquired in the course of fulfilling the four basic needs. Related to the basic need to maximize pleasure and minimize pain is the basic belief about the degree to which the world is a source of pleasure and security vs. pain and insecurity. Related to the basic need to maintain a coherent, stable conceptual system for accurately representing experience is the basic belief about the degree to which life is meaningful (including predictable, controllable, and just) vs. meaningless (including unpredictable, uncontrollable, and unjust). Related to the basic need for relatedness is the basic belief about the degree to which people are trustworthy, supportive, and a source of comfort vs. untrustworthy, threatening, and a source of distress. Related to the basic need for self-enhancement is the basic belief about the degree to which one is a worthy (including competent, good, and lovable) person vs. an unworthy person (including incompetent, bad, and unlovable).
The basic needs and beliefs are important not only because of their direct influence on feelings, conscious thoughts, and behavior, but also because of their interactions, including whether the different needs are fulfilled in a conflicted or a harmonious manner. Most often they are fulfilled in a way that produces compromises (Epstein & Morling, 1995; Morling & Epstein, 1997). Of particular importance is that they tend to operate in a manner that provides checks and balances against each other. When one need is fulfilled at the expense of the others, the other needs become more insistent, which moderates the fulfillment of the first need. A failure in such moderation can account for various forms of psychopathology (Epstein, 1998).
Implications of Cest for the Conceptualization of Self-Esteem
If there are two processing systems, experiential and rational, each operating by its own rules and each including its own schemas or beliefs, there must be two kinds of self-esteem, one based on self-assessments in the experiential system (automatically derived from lived experience) and the other on self-assessments in the rational system (derived from conscious inference). Self-esteem in the experiential system is manifested by a person’s feelings and behavior and therefore can be assessed by examining these. Self-esteem in the rational system is indicated by what a person consciously believes and can be assessed by what a person reports.
There are two facets of self-esteem within each system, self-esteem as a belief and self-esteem as a need or motive. Self-esteem as a belief in the rational system corresponds to a person’s conscious evaluation of the self. In addition to a global evaluation of the self, it comprises different attributes of the self, including the self as intelligent, competent, love-worthy, attractive, moral, and so on. Because the evaluations are conscious, they can readily be assessed by self-report instruments. An example of such an instrument is the Multidimensional Self-Esteem Inventory (O’Brien & Epstein, 1983), which provides a measure of Global Self-Esteem and the following components: Competence, Lovability, Likeability, Self-control, Personal Power, Moral Self-approval, Body Appearance, Body Functioning, Identity Integration, and Defensive Self-enhancement.
Self-esteem as a need in the rational system corresponds to a person’s thoughts about why it is desirable to behave in a certain way. As a thought-driven rather than an affect-driven motive it lacks the automaticity and emotional intensity that is characteristic of motives in the experiential system. It is important to recognize that a person can be aware of and therefore report the existence of a need in the experiential system. Although awareness would change a need from implicit to explicit, it would not change a need in the experiential system to one in the rational system. It would simply mean that the person is aware in his rational system of a need in his experiential system. The central issue, according to CEST, is not whether a belief or need is explicit or implicit but whether it operates in the domain of the experiential or rational system. This is not to deny that awareness can make a difference in the influence and control of an experiential need.
Self-esteem as a belief in the experiential system corresponds to a cognitive–affective schema acquired from emotionally significant experience. As previously noted, such experientially derived schemas are considered in CEST to be far more influential in determining people’s everyday feelings and behavior than the conscious beliefs in their rational system. I suspect that the main reason that conscious self-assessments predict anything at all besides other self-reports is because of their overlap with beliefs in the experiential system. That is, most people’s experientially and rationally determined beliefs are mainly congruent, or else they would be in a continuous state of conflict and stress.
Self-esteem as a need in the experiential system refers to a motive to enhance self-esteem that is driven by the anticipated positive affect following elevations in self-esteem and the anticipated negative affect following decreases in self-esteem, which in turn are determined by the affective strength of relevant past experience. As one of only four basic needs in the experiential system, self-enhancement is among the most powerful of human motives. Like the other basic needs, it can dominate all the other basic needs. Relatedly, as one of only four basic beliefs, self-esteem as a belief is among the most important cognitive-affective schematic networks in a personal theory of reality. The importance of self-esteem both as a need and as a belief can be appreciated from a consideration of their developmental origin. In agreement with Mead (1934) and Sullivan (1953), I assume that the most fundamental source of self-esteem is the internalization of the evaluation of a person by significant others, particularly parental figures. Because of its importance, let us more carefully consider why and how this occurs.
A young child is dependent on a caretaker not only for survival but because the caretaker is the greatest source of the child’s everyday pleasure and alleviation of distress. Thus, the worst fear a child can have is of abandonment. As a result, the child is strongly motivated to please the parent. A particularly effective way of accomplishing this is by adopting the parents’ values. Once the child has internalized the values of the caretaker, it can then behave naturally in ways that are most likely to gain the caretaker’s approval. From then on, whenever the child behaves consistently with its internalized values it feels comfortable, and when it behaves otherwise it feels distressed. The most important value that the child internalizes is the caretaker’s evaluation of the child as love-worthy. This internalization is the child’s most fundamental source of its self-esteem, which, operating as the nucleus of a regnant cognitive–affective schematic network, has a widespread influence on the child’s feelings, behavior, and interpretation of events that influences the child’s further development. As favorable self-evaluations produce good feelings (analogous to receiving love from a parent) and unfavorable self-evaluations produce bad feelings (analogous to rejection or disapproval by a parent) the child has also acquired an affect-driven motive to behave in ways that increase self-esteem and that avoid decreases in self-esteem.
The Role of Self-Esteem in Psychological Functioning
Self-esteem influences behavior, thoughts, and emotions in its capacity both as a basic schema and as a basic need. As a basic schema, a high level of self-esteem is normally associated with feelings of security, happiness, confidence, and general well-being (Coopersmith, 1967; Epstein, 1979; Rogers, 1959; O’Brien & Epstein, 1983). Such cognitive–affective schemas facilitate effective performance and serve as a buffer against adversity. With respect to self-esteem functioning as a basic need, anticipation of the positive affect associated with increases in self-esteem and the negative affect associated with decreases in self-esteem is a powerful motive for accomplishment.
There is also a negative side to self-esteem. A chronic low level of self-esteem is a direct source of sadness and depression and can result in giving up rather than striving to succeed. Most importantly, in a desperate attempt to defend their self-esteem, people of low self-esteem often engage in self-defeating behavior. For example, by faulting others rather than recognizing their own complicity in unfavorable outcomes, they may temporarily bolster their self-esteem at the cost of failing to learn from experience and of alienating others.
It is important to distinguish between two kinds of self-esteem, conditional and unconditional. Conditional self-esteem corresponds to William James’ (1890) view of self-esteem as people’s appraisal of their accomplishments relative to their aspirations. People with high conditional self-esteem regard themselves as highly competent and love-worthy and, as a result, generally feel good about themselves. However, should they fail to meet their performance standards or be rejected by someone they can be very disapproving of themselves. Alternatively, their high self-esteem can produce driven behavior for achievement that brings no lasting joy once the goal is obtained, for despite bringing fame, fortune, and admiration, it does not fulfill their need for unconditional love, the likely source of their lack of unconditional self-love.
In contrast, people with unconditional high self-esteem are self-accepting and feel good about themselves, no matter what their level of performance or acceptance by others. They may disapprove of their behavior and decide to work on improving it, but they do not disapprove of themselves. Unlike people with conditional self-esteem, they do not have to accomplish anything to justify their positive feelings about themselves; they simply have them. Such unconditional self-acceptance is analogous to unconditional love by a parent.
Self-esteem has important implications for mental disorders. Psychotic depression, schizophrenia, and paranoia are often instigated by events that threaten self-esteem. Pathological depression, as distinguished from reactive depression, is associated with an irrational decrease in self-esteem. The irrational reaction can be understood by recognizing that a decrease in self-esteem for an adult is similar to the perception by a child of loss of love of a parent. Some people have been more sensitized to such loss than others. An acute schizophrenic episode following a severe blow to self-esteem can be understood as the disorganization of a personal theory of reality following the deep frustration of the basic need for self-esteem and the invalidation of the basic belief that the self is love-worthy. Paranoia with delusions of grandeur can be understood as a desperate attempt to shore up self-esteem at the cost of sacrificing fulfillment of all the other basic needs. Paranoia with delusions of persecution can be understood as a defense against both disorganization and a threat to self-esteem. By focusing on an external threat and mobilizing all of the person’s resources to combat it, the paranoid is able to achieve and maintain a high degree of cohesiveness. Delusions of persecution also serve to bolster self-esteem, as having antagonists of great power and influence implies that one is a person of considerable importance oneself.
The interaction of the basic needs is able to account for phenomena that might otherwise appear anomalous. For example, there has been considerable controversy about whether it is more adaptive to be unrealistically self-enhancing than to be completely realistic. Evidence suggests that most people are somewhat unrealistically self-enhancing. Why should this be? The explanation, according to CEST, is that the unrealistic behavior represents a compromise between the basic needs to enhance self-esteem and to maintain a stable, coherent, accurate model of reality. The compromise is to be positively biased, but only within limits. That is, most people operate as strategic self-enhancers, being favorably biased under conditions in which they receive a greater gain in terms of feeling good than a loss in terms of feeling bad because of the outcome of being modestly unrealistic. When the cost of being unrealistic is increased, normal people become more realistic in contrast to subclinically depressed people, who become less realistic (Pacini, Muir, & Epstein, 1998).
The Measurement of Self-Esteem
Since the experiential and rational systems both contain self-evaluative beliefs, it is necessary to measure both if one wishes to obtain a full picture of a persons self-esteem. The different kinds of relations that the two kinds of self-esteem establish with other variables are obviously important in their own right. Of special importance are incongruities between the two systems as they can be a source of maladjustment and defensiveness. Kernis, Abend, Goldman, Shira, Paradise, and Hampton (2004) obtained interesting findings using a procedure involving an experimental induction of discrepancies between the two systems. It would be interesting to further test discrepancies by examining the relation between natural-occurring discrepancies between the two systems and measures of defensiveness and adjustment.
Measuring self-esteem at the conscious, rational level can be readily accomplished with any of several self-report instruments. An important improvement would be to recognize the distinction between conditional and unconditional self-esteem and to construct separate scales for measuring them. It would be most interesting to compare the correlates of these two kinds of self-esteem.
The situation is much more complicated for measuring self-esteem at the preconscious experiential level, as people do not have direct access to the operation of their experiential systems. The Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald & Farnham, 2000; Greenwald & Banaji, 1995) is a promising procedure for measuring self-esteem and the self-concept at the experiential level, as it is an associative test and the experiential system is an associative system. It would be interesting to include measures of individual differences in experiential and rational thinking styles, (e.g., Epstein et al., 1996; Pacini & Epstein, 1999; Pacini, Muir, & Epstein, 1998) and to examine the use of emotionally evocative images, as the experiential system consists primarily of cognitive-affective nonverbal networks (Epstein, 2003). There are several other approaches worth pursuing. One is to construct a self-report test in which people report behavior, thoughts and feelings from which inferences can be made about experiential schemas. This can be done by consulting the principles of experiential processing proposed in CEST (see Epstein, 2003) and by considering the lands of behavior and feelings in situations that are likely to be differentially acknowledged by people of high and low experiential self-esteem, such as excessive pride, boastfulness, proneness to take offense, and sensitivity to disapproval compared to confidence, forgiveness, security, and ego-strength (Epstein, 2001).
Another approach worth trying is to construct projective tests, such as Thematic Apperception Tests (TATs), Word Association Tests, and Sentence Completion Tests specially designed to elicit responses relevant to self-esteem. In a series of studies with specially constructed TATs, McClelland and Weinberger and their associates (McClelland et al., 1989; Weinberger & McClelland, 1991) demonstrated that implicit motives inferred from TAT responses predicted behavior, whereas self-reported motives predicted only other self-reported responses. In the measurement of self-esteem with projective tests measurement it is important to include stimuli at various levels of strength for eliciting self-esteem relevant responses, analogous to including items at various levels of difficulty in ability tests.
An additional approach is to use procedures other than the IAT that have been used by social psychologists in research on implicit attitudes, such as sub-threshold, reaction-time, and priming procedures (see review by Bargh & Chartrand, 1999).
As the experiential system is normally the dominant mode in everyday behavior, another approach is to infer experiential schemas from repetitive patterns of behavior. This can be accomplished with the use of diary records, time sampling, and interviews (e.g., Losco & Epstein, 1978; O’Brien & Epstein, 1974). Despite some obvious disadvantages, interviews also have advantages over other self-report procedures, as they can be used to observe expressive behavior, note defensive reactions, and, most importantly, assess the emotional intensity which certain situations evoke. Emotions, according to CEST, are the royal road to the schemas in a person’s experiential system (Epstein, 2003).
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