1. Chapter 13
Personality
© 2013 Worth Publishers

2. Overview: Ways of Looking at the Self
Freudian/Psychodynamic views of the Unconscious parts of the self
Humanistic view of the Self-Actualizing Person
Examining Traits, including the Big Five Factors/Dimensions
Social and Cognitive Influences on Personality
Self-Esteem and Self-Serving Bias
These different perspectives and concepts can help us examine:
What we have in common: Personality components, basic drives, stages of development, categories of traits
Ways in which we differ: individual paths through stages, ways of managing basic drives and needs, levels of Trait dimensions
Click to reveal all bullets.

3. Personality: An individual’s characteristic patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors [persisting over time and across situations]
Agreeable, Open
Introverted
Naïve
No animation.
Yes, I changed the name of one of the dwarfs to both respect and satirize political correctness and then decided to change the rest into terms more related to personality traits, although “Sleepy” was a tough one, Sneezy was a distortion, and Doc was a stretch. See if students can recall which original names go with the names I made.”
Instructor: The last line of the definition is added to make it clear that we are talking about qualities that are not just a function of one role or one phase of life.
Sensitive, Reactive
Contentedly lethargic
Conscientious
Neurotically irritable

4. Psychodynamic/Psychoanalytic Theories
These theories of human personality focus on the inner forces that interact to make us who we are.
In this view: behavior, as well as human emotions and personality, develop in a dynamic (interacting, changing) interplay between conscious and unconscious processes, including various motives and inner conflicts.
Click to reveal bullets.
To help and understand people was to focus on bringing out unconscious thoughts, feelings, conflicts, including those rooted in childhood.
These models of understanding the mind began with the man who once said he was “the only worker in a new field”: Sigmund Freud.

5. Freud’s Path to Developing Psychonalysis
Sigmund Freud ( ) started his career as a Vienna physician.
He decided to explore how mental and physical symptoms could be caused by purely psychological factors.
He became aware that many powerful mental processes operate in the unconscious, without our awareness.
This insight grew into a theory of the structure of human personality and its development.
His name for his theory and his therapeutic technique: psychoanalysis.
Click to reveal bullets.
Instructor, you can mention that he saw patients with unusual symptoms, such as recurring blindness or paralysis only of the hand, that did not seem to have physical causes.
He sought to understand how the different parts of the human personality interacted, including the hidden, unconscious parts.

6. Psychoanalysis: Techniques
Techniques for revealing the unconscious mind:
He used creative techniques such as free association: he encouraged the patient to speak whatever comes to mind, then the therapist verbally traces a flow of thoughts into the past and into the unconscious.
He also suggested meanings for slips of the tongue (as in this cartoon) and for the “latent” content of dreams.
Click to reveal bullets.
How did Freud use Psychoanalysis to bring unconscious processes of patients into conscious awareness, especially an embarrassing process such as a shame about touching one’s genitals (leading to the hand paralysis)?

7. Freud’s Personality/Mind Iceberg
The Mind is mostly below the surface of conscious awareness
Personality develops from the efforts of our ego, our rational self, to resolve tension between our id, based in biological drives, and the superego, society’s rules and constraints.
Click to reveal bullets.
The Unconscious, in Freud’s view: A reservoir of thoughts, wishes, feelings, memories, that are hidden from awareness because they feel unacceptable.

8. The Developing Personality
In a toddler, an ego develops, a self that has thoughts, judgments, and memories following a “reality principle”, though still focused on serving the id’s needs.
We start life with a personality made up of the id, striving impulsively to meet basic needs, living by “the pleasure principle.”
Around age 4 or 5, the child develops the superego, a conscience internalized from parents and society, following the ideals of a “morality principle.”
Click to reveal three stages.
The ego works as the “executive” of this three-part system, to manage bodily needs and wishes in a socially acceptable way.

9. Freud’s Theory of Psychosexual Stages
The id is focused on the needs of erogenous zones, sensitive areas of the body.
People feel shame about these needs and can get fixated at one stage, never resolve how to manage the needs of that zone’s needs.
Click to reveal bullets and table.
Instructor: see if students can describe how the cartoons (one will be revealed later in the slide content) relate to one of the psychosexual stages.

10. Male Development Issues
Freud believed that as boys in the phallic stage seek genital stimulation, they begin to develop unconscious sexual desires for their mothers and hate their fathers as a rival, feeling guilt and fearing punishment by castration.
He named these feelings “the Oedipus complex,” after a story from Greek mythology.
Resolution of this conflict: Boys identify with their fathers rather than seeing them as a rival.
Click to reveal bullets.
The Oedipus story, which Freud apparently saw as an allegory to the general male experience: Oedipus kills a man he later realizes is his birth father, and later marries a Queen that he eventually realizes was his birth mother.

11. Defending Against Anxiety
Freud believed that we are anxious about our unacceptable wishes and impulses, and we repress this anxiety with the help of the strategies below.
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12. Which Defense Mechanism Am I?
These two are sometimes confused with each other.
The common theme, as with all defense mechanisms: they seek to prevent being conscious of unacceptable feelings.
The difference: the first one compensates, the second one distracts.
A politician gives anti-gay speeches, then turns out to have homosexual tendencies.  Reaction Formation Someone with an anger problem accuses everyone else of being angry and threatening.  Projection
Click to reveal questions, answers, and text box.
Reaction formation seeks to compensate for an unacceptable desire by acting in the opposite direction.
Projection distracts the attention of self and others away from one’s own unacceptable traits, points the finger of blame elesewhere.

13. Neo-Freudian, Psychodynamic Theorists
Psychodynamic theorists, such as Adler, Horney, and Jung, accepted Freud’s ideas about:
Psychodynamic theorists differed from Freud in a few ways:
The importance of the unconscious and childhood relationships in shaping personality
The id/ego/superego structure of personality
The role of defense mechanisms in reducing anxiety about uncomfortable ideas
Adler and Horney believed that anxiety and personality are a function of social, not sexual tensions in childhood
Jung believed that we have a collective unconscious, containing images from our species’ experiences, not just personal repressed memories and wishes
Click to reveal bullets.
Instructor: although few psychodynamic theorists and clinicians today accept Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious, they do accept a similar idea, that we do have some universal human tendencies, formed through evolutionary rather than cultural history, that operate at an unconscious level.

14. More About the Psychodynamic Theorists
Carl
Jung
Alfred
Adler
Karen
Horney
Highlighted universal themes in the unconscious as a source of creativity and insight. Found opportunities for personal growth by finding meaning in moments of coincidence.
Focused on the fight against feelings of inferiority as a theme at the core of personality, although he may have been projecting from his own experience.
Click to reveal description of each.
Criticized the Freudian portrayal of women as weak and subordinate to men.
She highlighted the need to feel secure in relationships.

15. Assessing the Unconscious: Psychodynamic Personality Assessment
Freud tried to get unconscious themes to be projected into the conscious world through free association and dream analysis.
Projective tests are a structured, systematic exposure to a standardized set of ambiguous prompts, designed to reveal inner dynamics.
Rorschach test: “what do you see in these inkblots?”
Problem: Results don’t link well to traits (low validity) and different raters get different results (low reliability).
Click to reveal bullets.

16. Evidence has updated Freud’s ideas
Development appears to be lifelong, not set in stone by childhood.
Infant neural networks are not mature enough to create a lifelong impact of childhood trauma.
Peers have more influence on personality, and parents less, than Freud assumed.
Dreams, as well as slips of the tongue, have many possible origins, less likely to reveal deep unconscious conflicts and wishes.
We may ignore threatening information, but traumatic memories are usually intensely remembered, not repressed.
Still, sexual abuse stories are more likely to be fact, less likely to be wish fulfillment, than Freud thought.
Gender and sexual identity seems to be more a function of genetics than Oedipus conflicts and relationships with parents.
Click to reveal bullets.

17. Unrepresentative sampling: Flaws in Freud’s scientific method
Unfalsifiability:
He developed theories that are hard to prove or disprove: can we test to see if there is an id?
Post facto explanations (hindsight bias) rather than predictions:
Whether or not a situation makes you anxious or not, you could either be fixated or repressing.
Unrepresentative sampling:
He did not build his theories on a broad sample of observations; he described all of humanity based on people with unusual psychological problems.
Flaws in Freud’s scientific method
Click to reveal four flaws.
Biased observations:
He based theories on his patients, which may give him an incentive to see them as unwell before his treatment.

18. The Unconscious As Seen Today: Processing, Perceptions, and Priming, But Not a Place
The following processes operate at an unconscious level, not because they’re repressed, but because they are automatic:
Schemas guide our perceptions
Right hemisphere makes choices the left hemisphere doesn’t verbalize
Conditioned responses, learned skills and procedures, all guide our actions without conscious recall
Emotions get activated
Stereotypes influence our reactions
Priming affects our choices
Unconscious: a stream, not a reservoir
Click to reveal bullets.
The title refers to the unconscious not being a storage area for repressed memories, but more a set of processes that operate without the need for the involvement of our conscious awareness.

19. Freud’s Legacy
Freud benefitted psychology, giving us ideas about: the impact of childhood on adulthood, and human irrationality, sexuality, evil, defenses, anxiety, and the tension between our biological selves and our socialized/civilized selves.
Most colleges have courses related to psychoanalysis outside of psychology departments!
Freud gave us specific concepts we still use often, such as ego, projection, regression, rationalization, dream interpretation, inferiority “complex,” oral fixation, sibling rivalry, and Freudian slips.
One concept in the text not listed on the slide: terror management theory, which observes that when we think about death, and thus presumedly engage our fear of death, it affects some of our attitudes and choices, making us more self-centered, self-protective. This is mentioned because it resembles Freud’s idea that we defend ourselves against anxiety.
Not bad for someone writing over 100 years ago with no technology for seeing inside the brain.

20. Humanistic Theories of Personality
Abraham Maslow
Carl Rogers
In the 1960’s, some psychologists began to reject:
the dehumanizing ideas in Behaviorism, and
the dysfunctional view of people in Psychodynamic thought.
Maslow and Rogers sought to offer a “Third Force” in psychology: The Humanistic Perspective.
They studied healthy people rather than people with mental health problems.
Humanism: focusing on the conditions that support healthy personal growth.
Click to reveal bullets.

21. Maslow: The Self-Actualizing Person
In Maslow’s view, people are motivated to keep moving up a hierarchy of needs, growing beyond getting basic needs met.
At the top of this hierarchy are self-actualization, fulfilling one’s potential, and self-transcendence.
In this ideal state, a personality includes being self-aware, self- accepting, open, ethical, spontaneous, loving caring, focusing on a greater mission than social acceptance.
Click to reveal bullets.

22. Rogers’ Person-Centered Perspective
Rogers agreed that people have natural tendencies to grow, become healthy, move toward self-actualization
Genuineness: Being honest, direct, not using a façade.
Acceptance, a.k.a Unconditional Positive Regard: acknowledging feelings, even problems, without passing judgment; honoring, not devaluing.
The 3 conditions that facilitate growth (just as water, nutrients, and light facilitate the growth of a tree):
Click to show three boxes and text on the right.
Note: Empathy is NOT sympathy: what is important to nurture growth is to have someone understand you, consider your feelings and hold them for you. This is more vital to growth than having someone feel sorry for you.
Empathy: tuning into the feelings of others, showing your efforts to understand, listening well (NOT sympathy: people need to be heard, not to be pitied)

23. Assessing the Self in Humanistic Psychology: Ideal Self vs. Actual Self
Questionnaires can be used, but some prefer open interview. Questions about actual self: How do you see yourself? What are you like? What do you value? What are you capable of? If the answers do not match the ideal, self- acceptance may be needed, not just self-change
Click to reveal bullets.
In the humanistic perspective, the core of personality is the self-concept, our sense of our nature and identity
People are happiest with a self-concept that matches their ideal self
Thus, it is important to ask people to describe themselves as they are and as they ideally would like to be.

24. Critiquing the Humanist Perspective What about evil?
Some say Rogers did not appreciate the human capacity for evil.
Rogers saw “evil” as a social phenomenon, not an individual trait:
“When I look at the world I’m pessimistic, but when I look at people I am optimistic.” –Rogers
Click to reveal bullets.
About the capacity for evil, it doesn’t necessarily contradict the humanistic model: it is possible to say that some people are not moving far up the hierarchy, are stuck pursuing basic survival and security needs even if they already have enough money to survive, or are stuck seeking and defending self-esteem.
Humanist response: Self- acceptance is not the end; it then allows us to move on from defending our own needs to loving and caring for others.

25. Critiquing the Humanist Perspective Too much self-centeredness?
Some say that the pursuit of self- concept, an accepting ideal self, and self-actualization encouraged not self- transcendence but self- indulgence, self-centeredness.
Humanist response: The therapist using this approach should not encourage selfishness, and should keep in mind that that “positive regard” means “acceptance,” not “praise.
Click to reveal bullets.

26. Trait Theory of Personality
Trait: An enduring quality that makes a person tend to act a certain way.
Examples: “honest.” “shy.” “hard-working.”
MBTI traits come in pairs: “Judging” vs. “Perceiving.” “Thinking” vs. “Feeling.”
Gordon Allport decided that Freud overvalued unconscious motives and undervalued our real, observable personality styles/traits.
Myers and Briggs wanted to to study individual behaviors and statements to find how people differed in personality: having different traits.
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a questionnaire categorizing people by traits.
Trait theory of personality: That we are made up of a collection of traits, behavioral predispositions that can be identified and measured, traits that differ from person to person.
Click to reveal bullets and text boxes.
A full descriptions of the scales on the Myers-Briggs:
Energy: Extraversion vs. Introversion
Learning: Senses vs. Intuition
Decisions: Thinking vs. Feeling
Relating: Judging vs. Perceiving.
Example of a profile: ENTJs supposedly make good executives.

27. Factor Analysis and the Eysencks’ Personality Dimensions
Factor Analysis: Identifying factors that tend to cluster together.
Using factor analysis, Hans and Sybil Eysenck found that many personality traits actually are a function of two basic dimensions along which we all vary.
Research supports their idea that these variations are linked to genetics.
Click to reveal bullets.

28. Traits: Rooted in Biology?
Brain: Extraverts tend to have low levels of brain activity, making it hard to suppress impulses, and leading them to seek stimulation.
Body: The trait of shyness appears to be related to high autonomic system reactivity, an easily triggered alarm system.
Genes: Selective breeding of animals seems to create lifelong differences in traits such as aggression, sociability, or calmness, suggesting genetic roots for these traits.
Click to reveal bullets.
Other species show evidence that individuals have distinct, differing, and enduring personality traits.

29. Assessing Traits: Questionnaires
Personality Inventory: Questionnaire assessing many personality traits, by asking which behaviors and responses the person would choose
Empirically derived test: all test items have been selected to because they predictably match the qualities being assessed.
Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI): Designed to identify people with personality difficulties
T/F questionnaire; items were selected because they correlated with various traits, emotions, attitudes
Example: depressed people tend to answer “true” to: “Nothing in the paper interests me except the comics.”
Click to reveal bullets.

30. Sample MMPI Test Profile
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Instructor: this is an optional sample of the MMPI showing its use to measure the effectiveness of mental health treatment; here we see that what the MMPI measures goes well beyond the topic of stable personality traits, which may be why this chart is no longer in this chapter.

31. Personality As Seen in Palms and Stars
And handwriting, and crystal balls, and tea leaves, and scattered bones
By saying something that is vague and likely to be true of you, then following up on comments that you reinforce by nodding, someone can appear to see into your soul.
You too can turn your keen sense of the obvious into a career in predicting the present!
I see by your handwriting you like bananas.
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32. The “Big Five” Personality Factors
The Eysencks felt that people varied along two dimensions
Current cross-cultural research and theory supports the expansion from two dimensions to five factors:
Conscientiousness: self-discipline, careful pursuit of delayed goals
Agreeableness: helpful, trusting, friendliness
Neuroticism: anxiety, insecurity, emotional instability
Openness: flexibility, nonconformity, variety
Extraversion: Drawing energy from others, sociability
to help us remember the five factors, remember that the first letters spell “CANOE”…
Click to reveal bullets and five CANOE factors. Then click to show canoe.

33. The “Big Five”/ C.A.N.O.E. Personality Dimensions
Impulsive
Trusting
Anxious
Conforming
Fun-Loving
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Instructor: Here we have the dimensional profile of a dog.
I refer to the big five factors as Dimensions here to emphasize that each person can have a profile of a varying levels, rather than factors to be multiplied. The word “variables” would also work, but “dimensions” is more commonly used regarding when describing a person with traits that vary on a spectrum.

34. Questions about Traits These topics are the subject of ongoing research:
Stability: Does one’s profile of traits change over the lifespan?  No, one’s distinctive mix of traits doesn’t change much over the lifespan.
However, everyone in adulthood becomes:
More conscientious and agreeable, and
Less extraverted, neurotic/unstable, and less open (imaginative, flexible).
Predictive value: Can we use these traits to predict behavior?  levels of success in work and relationships relates to traits.
Heritability: Are traits learned or genetic?  in general, genes account for 50% of the variation for most traits
Click to reveal three text boxes.
Stability question: note that although there are general trends affecting most people, your unique profile, including your levels of each trait relative to other people, doesn’t change much. This suggests that from the trait perspective, though we still go through some changes with adult development, personality is stable.
Prediction question: success in school and work obviously relates to levels of conscientiousness, but there are other patterns: in our communication, extraverts use more personal pronouns, agreeableness predicts use of positive emotion words, and neuroticism predicts use of negative emotion words.

35. Change vs. Consistency: Shifts with Age
Over years of development, we change interests, attitudes, roles, jobs, relationships; we develop skills, maturity. Do traits stay stable through all this change?
The evidence shows that it takes time for personality to stabilize. Traits do change, but less and less so over time. We change less, become more consistent.
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36. Person-Situation Controversy
Trait theory assumes that we have traits that are a function of personality, not situation.
There is evidence that some traits are linked to roles and to personas we use in different cultures, environments.
Click to reveal bullets.

37. Personality Affecting the Situation, Not Just a Function of the Situation
Your Facebook timeline and profile picture, your website, music lists, choice of ringtone--these all reflect your personality.
These choices also may shape how others treat you, which may affect your personality
This room may reflect the personality of the guy who lives there. The setup and contents of the room may also shape his personality.
Click to reveal bullets.

38. Social-Cognitive Perspective
Albert Bandura believes that Personality is:
The result of an interaction that takes place between a person and their social context, involving how we think about ourselves and our situations.
Questions raised in this perspective:
How do the personality and social environment mutually influence each other?
How do we interpret and respond to external events? How do those responses shape us?
How do our memories, expectations, schemas, influence our behavior patterns?
Click to reveal questions.

39. Reciprocal: a back and forth influence, with no primary cause
Reciprocal Influences in Becoming “the Kind of Person Who Does Rock Climbing”
Reciprocal: a back and forth influence, with no primary cause
Example: a tendency to enjoy risky behavior affects choice of friends, who in turn may encourage rock climbing, which may lead to identifying with the activity.
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Avoiding the highway today without identifying or explaining any fear: the “low road” of emotion.

40. Reciprocal Determinism: How personality, thoughts, social environment all reinforce/cause each other
Why is Jake a happy, smiley person? He may have started with an “Easy” temperament;
He may attract other happy people, and people are more likely to smile when around him, which reinforces his smiles;
His mind fills in the reasons why he’s smiling even if some of it was a reflection of his happy friends, and these happy reasons give him more reason to smile.
Click to reveal bullets.
An optional slide, giving another example to help illustrate this concept and how it relates to personality.

41. Biopsychosocial Approaches to Personality
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42. External vs. Internal Locus of Control
Locus of control: Our perception of where the seat of power over our lives is located.
Internal locus of control: we feel that we are in charge of ourselves and our circumstances.
External locus of control: we picture that a force outside of ourselves controls our fate.
Click to reveal all text.
Too much internal locus of control: We blame ourselves for bad events, or have the illusion that we have the power to prevent bad events.
Too much external locus of control: We lose initiative, lose motivation to achieve, have more anxiety about what might happen to us, don’t bother developing willpower

43. Self-Control: Resource, Skill, Trait
The ability to control impulses and delay gratification, sometimes called “willpower”
This is a finite resource, an expenditure of brain energy, which is replenished but can be depleted short-term: People asked to resist eating cookies later gave up sooner on a tedious task
With practice, we can improve our self- control
There seem to be individual differences in this trait in childhood
The Marshmallow study: Kids who resisted the temptation to eat marshmallows later had more success in school and socially
Click to reveal bullets.

44. Learned Helplessness vs. Personal Control
Normally, most creatures try to escape or end a painful situation. But experience can make us lose hope.
Experiment by Martin Seligman: Give a dog no chance of escape from repeated shocks. Result: It will give up on trying to escape pain, even when it later has the option to do so.
Learned Helplessness: Declining to help oneself after repeated attempts to do so have failed.
No animation.
Personal Control: When people are given some choices (not too many), they thrive

45. Optimism vs. Pessimism
We can be optimistic or pessimistic in various ways:
Prediction: We can expect the best or the worst. At the extremes, we can get ourselves overconfident or simply depressed or anxious about the future.
Focus of attention: We can focus on what we have (half full) or what we don’t have (empty).
Click to reveal bullets.
Attribution of intent: We can assume that people meant to hurt us or that they were having a bad day.
Valuation: We can assume that we or others are useless, or that we are lovable, valuable.
Potential for change: We can assume that bad things can’t be changed, or have hope.

46. Excessive Pessimism vs. Excessive Optimism
Realism
It will be easy, I won’t think about it.
I can’t do it, might as well forget it.
It might be hard; I’d better plan.
I’m trapped, can’t get out of this
I want to make changes or get out.
Someone will rescue me.
Click to reveal examples. In each row, they appear one at a time: Pessimism, then Optimism, then Realism.
I’m sure he just wants what’s best for me, I’ll trust him.
That person hates me, he is against me.
I should ask what he feels about me, what he wants.
Excessive pessimism can leave us depressed, inactive.
Excessive optimism can leave us unprepared, unsafe.

47. A More Positive Psychology
Martin Seligman, who earlier kept dogs from escaping his shocks until they developed learned helplessness.
Developed Positive Psychology, the “scientific study of optimal human functioning,” finding ways to help people thrive.
Focus: building strengths, virtue, emotional well-being, resilience, optimism, sense of meaning.
Click to reveal bullets.
Three pillars of Positive Psychology:
Emotions, e.g. engagement
Character, e.g. courage
Groups, Culture, Institutions

48. Evaluating Behavior in Situations: Blindness to One’s Own Faults
Donald Trump as the host of “The Apprentice” prided himself on assessing executive skills in others.
Assessments based on performance in such simulations predict future job performance better than interviews and questionnaires.
Donald Trump as a politician could not understand why more people didn’t join his candidacy, his debates, his “birther” theories.
Click to reveal bullets.
Two topics that otherwise wouldn’t exactly go together if they didn’t cross in the same person.

49. Evaluating the Social-Cognitive Perspective
The social-cognitive perspective on personality helps us focus on the interaction of behaviors, thoughts, and social situations.
This focus, though, may distract us from noticing an individual’s feelings, emotions, inner qualities.
Critics note that traits may be more a function of genetics and upbringing, not just situation.
Example of two people with different reactions in the same situation: Two lottery winners sharing a jackpot; one sobbed, the other slept.
Click to reveal bullets.

51. Exploring the Self, Viewing the Self
Research in personality includes the topic of a person’s sense of self.
Topics of research include self-talk, self-esteem, self- awareness, self- monitoring, self-control.
The field has refined a definition of “self” as the core of personality, the organizer and reservoir of our thoughts, feelings, actions, choices, attitudes.
Topics for our study of people’s sense of self:
The Spotlight Effect (self-consciousness)
Self-esteem, low and high, benefits and risks
Self-Serving Bias
Narcissism
Self-disparagement
Secure self-esteem
Click to reveal bullets.
Instructor: it might be accurate to add to the definition on the left by saying that the “self” is the consciously aware (and self-aware) part of our personality. One could also say that the self is not just the identity but our feelings about that identity.

52. Self-Consciousness: The Spotlight Effect
Experiment: Students put on Barry Manilow T-shirts before entering a room with other students. (Manilow was not even cool “back in the day.”) Result: The students thought others would notice the T-shirt, assumed people were looking at them, when this was not the case; they greatly overestimated the extent to which the spotlight was on them. The spotlight effect: assuming that people are have attention focused on you when they actually may not be noticing you. Lesson: People don’t notice our errors, quirks, features, and shirts as much as we think they do.
Click to reveal bullets.

53. Self-Esteem: High and Low, Good and Bad
People who have normal or high self-esteem, feeling confident and valuable, get some benefits:
Increased resistance to conformity pressure
Decreased harm from bullying
Increased resilience and efforts to improve their own mood
But maybe this “high” self- esteem is really realistic, and is a result, not a cause, of these successes.
Low self-esteem, even temporarily lowered by insults, leads to problems: prejudice, being critical of others
Click to reveal bullets.

54. Self-Serving Bias
We all generally tend to think we are above average. This bias can help defend our self-esteem, as it does for the people in this wheel.
Click to rotate larger comic.

55. Self-Focus and Narcissism
Since 1980, song lyrics have become more focused on the self, both gratification and self-praise.
Empathy scores and skills are decreasing, being lost; people increasingly don’t bother trying to see things from the perspective of others.
There is a rise in narcissism (self-absorption, self- gratification, inflated but fragile self-worth).
Narcissists see themselves as having a special place in the world.
Danger, especially in narcissism: When self-esteem is threatened, it can trigger defensive aggression.
Preventing this aggressive defense of self-esteem: not raising self-esteem, but reinforcing it, having people state their own values and qualities
Click to reveal bullets.
Another evolutionary example: the expression of “disgust” might close the nostrils to block breathing of toxic fumes.

56. Self-Disparagement, Self-Acceptance
Left behind in the supposed increase in egotism: those who feel worthless, unlovable. Some people have a habit of self-disparaging self-talk: “I’m no good. I’m going to fail.” Sometimes such remarks are a sign of depression or at least feeling inferior. Sometimes such remarks may elicit pity, or prepare us for possible bad events, or help us learn from mistakes (people are more critical of their past selves). Moving from defensive to secure self-esteem requires realistic expectations and self-acceptance.
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