ABSTRACT
We will start with a riddle: “What does everyone want, yet no one is entirely sure what it is, what it does, or where it can be found?” Although there may be more than one answer to this question, “self-esteem” is surely a likely candidate. In the past 30 years, self-esteem has become deeply embedded in popular culture, championed as the royal road to happiness and personal fulfillment, and an antidote to a variety of social ills, including unemployment, gang violence, and teenage pregnancy. Despite its widespread usage within nonacademic circles, academic psychologists have been divided with respect to self-esteems function and benefits. Whereas some argue that high self-esteem is essential to human functioning and imbues life with meaning (Pyszezynski, Greenberg, Solomon, Arndt, & Schimel, 2004), others assert that it is of little value and may actually be a liability (Baumeister, Campbell, Krueger, & Vohs, 2003; Baumeister, Smart, & Boden, 1996). Between these two extremes lie various positions of an intermediary nature.
