The costs of seeking self-esteem

Americans are deeply engaged in the pursuit of self-esteem, attempting to satisfy contingencies or criteria for what makes a person worthwhile. In this article, I examine the costs of this pursuit of self-esteem for the self in terms of competence, relatedness, and mental health, and for others. I hypothesize that external contingencies of self-worth require validation from others and are unreliable as a basis of self-esteem, and hence are associated with greater costs. Data from a longitudinal study of an ethnically diverse sample of 642 college freshman support the view that contingencies of self-worth shape how students spend their time, and the prediction that external contingencies of self-worth, especially appearance, have high costs for stress, aggression, drug and alcohol use, and symptoms of disordered eating.