ABSTRACT
Should self-esteem be thought of as an adaptive, evolutionary trait, or is it a more recent, perhaps Western, social creation? In this chapter, we argue that there is support for an evolutionary basis of self-esteem in a relatively unelaborated form. By this, we mean that our ancestors had positive feelings surrounding the self and that these were linked to positive outcomes on important tasks, such as social inclusion. However, these positive feelings were not conceptualized or expressed as “self-esteem” or any psychological or linguistic variant. We then argue that much of what we currently describe as self-esteem is a cultural, specifically recent and Western, elaboration and amplification of this “proto” self-esteem. Put another way, a social psychologist traveling back in time 50,000 years would not have received meaningful responses other than confusion to the question “Do you have high self-esteem?” With probing, however, this same psychologist would have found that the self was seen as positive and that the level of positivity was associated with success in various endeavors.
