Self-esteem
A person's overall evaluation of their own worth — how much they like and value themselves.
What it means
Self-esteem is the evaluative dimension of the self — a person's global sense of their own worth and the degree to which they regard themselves positively. It is distinguished from the descriptive self-concept (what one believes about oneself) by its affective, judgmental character, and theorists separate trait self-esteem, a stable baseline, from state self-esteem, momentary fluctuations. Long assumed to cause a host of good outcomes, self-esteem turns out on careful review to be more often a consequence than a cause of success, with surprisingly weak links to performance and some downsides at the high, fragile, or narcissistic end. Sociometer theory reframes it functionally as an internal gauge of one's social acceptance and relational value. The nuance is that contingent self-esteem, riding on specific achievements, is more brittle than secure, unconditional self-regard. It matters as one of psychology's most studied — and most overhyped — constructs.
Examples
Two people with identical accomplishments can differ sharply in self-esteem, one quietly secure in her worth and the other anxiously dependent on the next success.
A man whose worth rides entirely on his job title is levelled by one redundancy, while a colleague hearing the same news is shaken but not diminished.
A teenager's mood collapses when she is left out of one group chat — the gauge is reading whether she is still wanted, not tallying anything she has achieved.
First described in Morris Rosenberg (1965); sociometer account by Mark Leary (1995).