Most researchers draw a distinction between self-esteem and self-concept.
Your self-concept is the cumulation of what you see as your personal char-
acteristics —that is, the kind of person you believe yourself to be. Self-esteem
refers to your evaluation of your self-concept. In essence, do you like this
person? Although we often speak of self-esteem in our everyday conversa-
tions, researchers face several challenges when trying to identify and measure
this concept.
One problem is that the way we feel about ourselves can change from
one situation to the next. Most people get a little down on themselves whenthey act in ways they know they shouldn ’t, and most of us can ’t help but
think well of ourselves when someone heaps praise on us for a job well done
(Heatherton & Polivy, 1991). However, these fluctuations in feelings should
not be confused with self-esteem. Rather, psychologists refer to these ups and
downs as feelings of self-worth (Brown & Dutton, 1995). In contrast, self-
esteem has to do with relatively stable self-evaluations. As with other person-
ality variables, researchers find some people are prone to more positive self-
evaluations than others. These individuals may have bad days and disappointthemselves on occasion, but in general they like themselves and feel good
about who they are and what they do. Of course, we also can identify people
who frequently experience negative self-evaluations. Although these low self-
esteem people also have good days and feel good about much of what they
do, compared to others they seem to lack a basic confidence in themselves or
an appreciation for who they are.
Self-Esteem and Reaction to Failure
Evaluation is an unavoidable part of most of our lives. After only a few
years of elementary school, most students become accustomed to having
their schoolwork graded. Evaluation is commonplace in the business world,
if not overtly in the form of an annual review, then implicitly in the size
of one ’s raise. Any type of competition, from sports to chess to gardening,
brings with it the possibility of both victory and defeat as we compare
our abilities and accomplishments agai nst those of others. All of this evalu-
ation means that each of us has experienced our share of successes andfailures.
However, not all people react the same to these evaluations. Several labo-
ratory experiments have looked at how high and low self-esteem people re-spond when told they have done well or poorly on a test (Brockner, 1979;Brown & Dutton, 1995; Kernis, Brockner, & Frankel, 1989; Stake, Huff, &
Zand, 1995; Tafarodi & Vu, 1997). Participants in these studies usually take
a test supposedly measuring some intellectual aptitude or work on a task call-
ing for some specific ability. Researchers give bogus feedback to participants,
indicating they have done either very well or rather poorly. Of particular in-
terest is how people respond to failure. When told they have done poorly,
low self-esteem people typically don ’t try as hard, perform more poorly, and
are more likely to give up when given a follow-up test. In contrast, high self-
esteem people work just as hard on the second test regardless of how they did
on the initial test.Self-Esteem 325