ABSTRACT
Coming from outside of this research area, we have been struck by the almost universal suspicion that social and personality psychologists have recently voiced regarding self-report measures of self-esteem. The measures have been criticized as too global, too static, too culture-bound, too easily conflated with narcissism, too easily obscured by self-presentation and not really important to effective functioning. Other self-related personality variables, such as self-regulation, self-discrepancies, or self-determination have been put forward as alternative constructs that are more important to healthy functioning. Many researchers interested in self-esteem have shifted their attention to implicit measures such as the Implicit Association Test (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995) or the Initials Preference Task (Bosson, Swann, & Pennebaker, 2000). This field-wide consensus questioning the value of the traditional measurement of self-esteem led us to assume that there was probably little value in measuring people’s self-esteem with self-report scales.
