14 DAY TRIAL // Teens today apparently place a lot more emphasis on getting boosts to their self-esteem than they do on most other pleasurable activities, such as for example being in an intimate relationship, eating their favorite foods, drinking, meeting friends, using drugs or getting paid for a job.
This preference has been found to be very strong in both teens and young adults, say researchers at the Ohio State University and the US Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory.
OSU scientist Brad Bushman, PhD, the lead author of the study, led the research team together with BNL expert Scott Moeller and OSU professor of psychology Dr. Jennifer Crocker.
Details of the work have just been published online in the latest issue of the esteemed scientific Journal of Personality, and are also scheduled to appear in an upcoming print edition of the magazine.
“It is somewhat surprising how this desire to feel worthy and valuable trumps almost any other pleasant activity you can imagine,” Bushman says. “We found that self-esteem trumped all other rewards in the minds of these college students,” he adds.
In two separate experiments, groups of students were asked about how much they liked various activities, that contributed to either pleasure or boosting self-esteemed. The participants were asked to rate these activities from 1 (least pleasant) to 5 (most pleasant).
Some of the self-esteem-boosting activities listed in the questionnaires included receiving a good grade or receiving a compliment from a friend or an adult, PsychCentral reports.
In the second study, students were asked to take a test that measured their intellectual ability. Once the results were returned, they were told they could wait for another 10 minutes, and then retake the tests with a new computational algorithm.
The investigators told them that this particular algorithm usually yields higher scores than the one the students had just used. Of those that waited for 10 minutes, the vast majority was made up of test subjects that had already demonstrated they valued self-esteem.
“They were willing to spend their own precious time just to get a small boost in their self-esteem,” Bushman explains. However, “it wouldn’t be correct to say that the study participants were addicted to self-esteem,” he adds.
“American society seems to believe that self-esteem is the cure all for every social ill, from bad grades to teen pregnancies to violence. But there has been no evidence that boosting self-esteem actually helps with these problems. We may be too focused on increasing self-esteem,” Bushman goes on to say.
“The problem isn’t with having high self-esteem; it’s how much people are driven to boost their self-esteem. When people highly value self-esteem, they may avoid doing things such as acknowledging a wrong they did,” Crocker concludes.