Understanding the Inner Nature of Low Self-Esteem: Uncertain, Fragile, Protective, and Conflicted
Abstract
In recent decades, psychologists have offered many speculations and hypotheses about people with low self-esteem. Perhaps they hate themselves. Perhaps they seek to distort things in a negative, pessimistic direction. Perhaps they are indifferent to praise and popularity. Perhaps they lack some key drive to succeed or to think well of themselves. Perhaps they are irrational and self-destructive. In the last two decades, however, a growing body of enlightening data on low self-esteem has allowed psychologists to move beyond the earlier, more speculative theories. One can begin to sort the welter of competing theories into a coherent set of empirically grounded conclusions.