Sources of self-esteem: From theory to measurement and back again

According to some conceptions, self-esteem possesses a moral dimension; according to others, it does not. According to some, the realism of the self-evaluation matters; according to others, it does not. For some investigators, narcissism is just high self-esteem; for others, narcissism involves internal conflicts within one's self-evaluation, which is strongly dependent on admiration extracted from other people. The best known procedure for measuring self-esteem has been a 10 question survey introduced by Rosenberg in 1965. Along with other insensitivities and biases, the Rosenberg scale fails to respond to the different high-level values or “sources” that are constitutive of self-esteem for different individuals. A person's self-esteem can be contingent on internal sources (such as independent thinking, productive projects, and moral commitments), or on external sources (such as fame, wealth, physical appearance, or the approval of peers). A study reported here investigated the relationships among global explicit self-esteem (as assessed with the Rosenberg scale), reliance on internal sources of self-esteem (measured with the Self-Esteem Sentence Completion Instrument), reliance on several external sources (via the External Sources of Self-Esteem scale), and narcissistic tendencies (as per the Narcissistic Personality Inventory). The participants were 97 undergraduate college students enrolled in psychology courses. Rosenberg and NPI scores displayed different patterns of correlation with various subscales of the ESOSES, raising the prospect that profiles of various external sources will enable us to differentiate between self-esteem and narcissism. Meanwhile, scores on the SESCI were not significantly related to any other variable, except for a mild negative correlation with the success recognition subscale of the ESOSES—an outcome that raises both theoretical and measurement questions about internal sources. Contrary to frequent assumptions of direct rivalry, reliance on internal sources of self-esteem may be largely independent of reliance on external sources. At the same time, however, more work obviously needs to be done on measuring internal sources of self-esteem, both explicit and implicit.