For decades, the people thought that aggression is based on low self-esteem. The paper of Roy F. Baumeister, Brad J. Bushman, and W. Keith Campbell published in 2000, challenges this low-self-esteem theory. Just image a person with low self esteem: this person is unsure and confused about its own position which makes them emotionally labile and shy. This person is not a person which is risking a confrontation, isn’t it? Now imagine a violent person. Assuming that you will not be motivated to start a conflict on yourself when there is no chance for you to win it, the aggressive person is confident of itself. It has a strong sense of personal superiority. Does this means that the low-self-esteem theory is wrong? It seems likely. Does it means it is high self esteem which makes people aggressive? No. Of course there are also people with high self esteem which are not aggressive at all. So what makes people aggressive? There are studies about instability of self-esteem as well as narcissism as base of aggressive behaviour. However, you can not say that a narcissistic person is an aggressive person. The highly favourable self-view is just a risk factor for aggressive behaviour against persons who challenge this view. Therefore, “threatened egotism, rather than low self-esteem, is the most explosive recipe for violence.” Self-Esteem, Narcissism, and Aggression: Does Violence Result From Low Self-Esteem or From Threatened Egotism?
Roy F. Baumeister, Brad J. Bushman, and W. Keith Campbell Current directions in psychological science 9.1 (2000): 26-29.
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IdeaI love to increase my general science knowledge by reading papers from different fields of science. Here I share some of them. Archiv
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