Learning and self-esteem

Stephanie West Allen notes

Parents who praise often may be creating "praise junkies": Self-esteem just might be overrated

This excerpt from the new book NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children is a fascinating read. I am still thinking about it and I don't even have kids. Be sure to read "Chapter One: The Inverse Power of Praise" (NPR). At that same page is an interview of Po Bronson, one of the book's coauthors.

Well, anyone who has listened to me preach on this subject will hardly be surprised that I agree. And I do have kids, and grandkids.

To restate briefly, there is no significant general relationship between self-esteem and achievement.

True, a particular student may underachieve due to low self-esteem. He assumes he will never achieve anything anyway, so he doesn't try. That must be addressed. His problem is one reason why schools need counselling services.

But in the same classroom, there may be girls who are intensely neurotic over a single error and guys who are laughing at the back of the room because they "showed" Old Lady Jones that they didn't have to learn anything she told them to learn. They failed to pay attention or do any homework, so they got an F-. And they are pleased as punch about their "achievement."

No general theory about the relationship between learning and self-esteem can emerge from the current data.

Psychology: New "syndrome" called "Academic Entitlement"

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette editor Paul Greenberg writes about a supposed new disorder:

... a team of academics has written a paper about this sad trend. ("Self-Entitled College Students: Contributions of Personality, Parenting and Motivational Factors"). The syndrome now has a name (Academic Entitlement) and an abbreviation (AE) — just like Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).

Doubtless there will soon be federal grants and endowed chairs to study AE and a drug to treat it. And sure enough, it'll turn out to be more widespread than anyone ever suspected.

The four scholars who did this Pioneering Study trace the origins of AE to parental pressure, material rewards for good grades, competitiveness, and "achievement anxiety and extrinsic motivation." They conclude that AE is "most strongly related to exploitive attitudes towards others and moderately related to an overall sense of entitlement and to narcissism."

Curiously, I finally got a chance to write about this today and - what do you know? - it's front page news here in in Ontario (a province of Canada) as well (Toronto Star, April 6, 2009):

James Côté, a sociology professor at the University of Western Ontario, says the survey confirms a lot of recent research, and that the decline in student preparedness began years ago but has more recently accelerated.

"It's a wider societal issue, where leisure is very much valued and work habits are not necessarily reinforced in the way that they were in the past. The work ethic is not what it used to be ... no pain, no gain doesn't seem to be prevalent any more."

Côté co-authored a book, Ivory Tower Blues: A University System in Crisis, that in part chronicled the issues professors have with today's students and he writes a blog where he hears from professors all the time.

With the current focus on stemming high-school dropouts, discipline and punctuality are not longer reinforced, and students come to university expecting to continue that, he added.

I've always regarded the claim that self-esteem (and the resulting sense of entitlement) were strong motivators for achievement as just another form of false knowledge (the things we "know" that ain't so). When I was young, I often saw girls who got 99% on a test beating themselves up emotionally for a single mistake, and boys who flaunted their drastically low scores in contempt for the system. (Some of those boys would be in jail not many years later, but there was no question who had the higher self-esteem They did.)

There are as many ways of explaining that situation as there are schools of psychology, but the idea that self-esteem is closely related to achievement has not turned out to be one of the good ones.

Psychology: Picture yourself deciding you actually like the way you look!

In "The skinny on why thin is still in" (National Post, October 2, 2008), Joanne Laucius,
summarizes recent news and opinion around the ultra-thin, photoshopped models in magazines.

In one of his studies, Kees and a fellow marketing researcher found that, although female subjects felt badly about themselves after looking at ads with skinny models, they also evaluated the brands the models were selling more highly. The subjects who saw ads with regular-sized models didn't feel bad about themselves, but they also gave the brands a lower value.

It gets worse.

Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty got a lot of attention. A 75-second viral film for Dove that showed the fast-motion "evolution" of a live model into a billboard pastiche through the magic of makeup and retouching got more than 1.7 million views on YouTube in 2006.

But empowering women doesn't necessarily sell soap. Sales of Dove bumped up during the first two years of the campaign, then levelled off.

The sad fact is that many women are used to feeling bad about themselves, and they seek out opportunities. They decide that thin is good, and also hard to attain, and the rest is dieting, self-punishment, and eating disorders.

Laucius's informative article documents the conflicting opinions around the question of whether ultra-thin, photoshopped models encourage eating disorders among women of normal body size. I've written about that elsewhere, and, quite frankly - despite all the disclaimers you hear from the fashion industry and its supporters - the answer is, yes, of course they do.

For example, Dr. Janet Polivy, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto and an expert on eating behaviour, is quoted as saying, "If they're asked to compare themselves, naturally, they feel inferior". (And in the mood for self-punishment, I suspect.)

Recently, Spain banned ultra-thin models from the catwalk, and many supported the move. After all, low body mass index (= serious underweight) is strongly associated with early death. If the fashion industry is going to howl about the use of fur and such, they could at least spare a thought for human skin that dies to be thin.

Historically, thin has not been hard to attain. It is called starvation, and is widely shunned worldwide. That's why most traditional cultures thought plump women were beautiful. And they were right, too.

I am not advocating censorship; my solution is that readers should insist on models with normal body mass index - women who make normal look good.

I sometimes tell younger women, there is such a thing as healthy self-love. Here's one way of looking at it: The great religious commandment "Love your neighbour as yourself" assumes that you do love yourself. And if you don't, you won't be able to love others either. So just accept yourself the way you are today, and make the world a slightly happier - and less commercially driven - place.

See also:

"Hungry men supposedly prefer plump women for "evolutionary" reasons":

Oh? So everyone in the world is and always has been as obsessed with body shape and image as anorexic, white, middle-class American/European girls? ... The article notes the interesting cultural fact that some African women are force-fed milk to fatten them.

"Grandma was right: Just eat and be thankful" (Contrary to the scare stats, only seriously obese people (body mass index over 35) are at greater risk of premature death.)

Pudging the Truth Exercise matters far more to health than dieting

Our weighty obsession - this one should be required reading for teen girls you know. Eating disorders very often begin with a diet. And things have got so bad now that fashion gurus have started throwing emaciated models off the catwalk.