The issue of self-esteem is critical in clinical psychology and understanding the wider processes in the field of psychology. There are two types of approaches to self-esteem – cognitive and constructivist, which consider self-esteem as a product of sociocultural influences. The Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSES), as well as the theories of James, Rogers, Kelly, and others, perceive self-esteem as a result of human cognitive activity (Turner et al., 2021). At the same time, Fredrickson and Roberts look at self-esteem in terms of sociocultural influences. This paper aims to compare and contrast the two approaches to self-esteem by discussing their similarities and differences.
Cognitive Approach
Psychological approaches that consider self-esteem as a cognitive attitude are based on the Rosenberg scale. Equally important, the emergence of these approaches led to an understanding of the existence of cognitive biases in human self-esteem. The Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale is a questionnaire that illustrates that a person’s self-esteem is based on his or her cognitive perception of a role in relationships with other people. This scale included a series of questions, in response to which the respondent had to answer, indicating the degree of their agreement with the statements.
Most of the statements suggested that a person sees themself as a subject of interpersonal relationships and evaluates themself by following their ideas about how they are perceived by other people. For example, the questionnaire included the statements “I feel that I am a person of worth, at least on an equal plane with others,” “I feel that I have many good qualities,” and “All in all, I am inclined to feel that I am a failure” and other statements assessing the respondent’s knowledge and feelings about their personality (Turner et al., 2021, p. 170). This approach assumed that a person’s self-perception can be determined by considering the projections of their mind on the opinions and actions of people around them. This method has been widely accepted as sensible, although it has met with some criticism, which will be outlined below.
James’s theory is another example of how scientists have understood self-esteem as a concept of cognitive perception. According to this theory, an individual’s self-respect depends on relationships with other people, but these relationships are perceived by a person through four prisms – the materialistic self, the social self, the spiritual self, and the ego. In particular, James believes that the materialistic self consists of the body, as well as such ‘acquisitions’ as children and partners.
At the same time, the scientist believes that the social includes recognition by many comrades and acquaintances, and is largely determined by the relationship of a person with other people. The spiritual self has been seen as a constant stream of thoughts, moods, and innermost aspirations that accompany a person throughout the day. Finally, the ego is understood as the individual identity of a person, that is, their thoughts, tastes, and preferences, which remain unchanged (Turner et al., 2021). It can be concluded that James laid the foundations of the modern attitude to self-esteem in the camp of adherents of the cognitive approach in the 1950s, developing a universal division of self-perception into spheres of life or individual existence. James’s theory qualitatively supplemented Rosenberg’s ideas about the cognitive importance of interpersonal relationships and became one of the main contributions in this direction.
Notably, in the 1960s, the humanistic cognitive approach described above was tested by scientists who used experimental approaches to social cognition. Self-assessment research has grown in scope and received worldwide attention. Tafarodi and Milne re-evaluated the Rosenberg scale and emphasized the characteristics of self-esteem and self-love or acceptance (Turner et al., 2021). At that time, scientists formed a common belief that self-esteem is the result of cognitive tendencies that are common to all people, known as cognitive bias. Understanding the existence and nature of these delusions has become a discovery in the field of psychology and has enriched the understanding of the self-perception of the individual.
In particular, these biases included misremembering, self-serving attribution, sour grapes effect, and unrealistic optimism. In the case of misremembering people tend to change past events in their favor, such as giving false explanations for failures or attributing false victories to themselves. Then, self-serving attribution, which is associated with positive self-esteem, determines the tendency of people to blame failures on external events but to accept successes as the result of internal factors (Turner et al., 2021). Also, the sour grapes effect refers to how, in an unfavorable situation, people deny their desire to win if their chances are low.
Finally, unrealistic optimism describes an attitude towards reality in which people tend to imagine that their lives are disproportionately filled with good events than the lives of other people. In other words, cognitive bias became a discovery in the field of psychology in the 1960s and subsequently, there was a widely accepted understanding that people tend to evaluate reality unrealistically as part of their adaptive responses aimed at maintaining high self-esteem and motivation. Overall, cognitive bias and cognitive perception of self-esteem have been a milestone in understanding human psychology.
Self-Esteem and Self-Objectification
Notably, the sociocultural psychological explanation links self-esteem with self-objectification and sees it as a product of sociocultural influences. According to the theory of James and Mead, people can see themselves as an object, that is, objectify themselves in the process of thinking. Later, when Fredrickson and Roberts developed a new theory, self-objectification took on a special meaning. According to scholars, the saturation of the flow of multimedia messages in Western culture, which presented a woman as a sexual object, has led to a change in women’s self-perception and self-objectification.
In particular, women, to be part of a mass or general culture, have become inclined to objectify themselves, attaching more importance to their bodies as an object. As a result, according to this sociocultural theory, the female body became an object of acculturation and was socially constructed under the new requirements of modern tastes and trends. In other words, women have transformed their self-image by prioritizing what they look like and rejecting the importance of ideas and how they feel or what they can do for the community. Interestingly, this approach is partly consistent with RSES and James’ theory of the importance of others in self-esteem. But in this case, since others are replaced by a more mechanistic concept of mass culture, the individual has to objectify himself.
Similarities
The two approaches to self-esteem presented above – sociocultural and cognitive-oriented have some similarities. In particular, RSES and James’s theory take into account the importance of the social environment for self-esteem. Fredrickson and Roberts’ theory of self-objectification also recognizes the importance of others in the cognitive creation of self-image. Equally important, both the first and second approaches recognize that self-esteem is a product of the cognitive activity, that is, it can change depending on what a person thinks about himself or herself, or how other people think about him or her. The findings and conclusions of both studies are important as they determine the further development of the understanding of self-esteem. As a consequence, application in the real world is conditioned by the methods used in psychological practice.
Differences
The approaches described above have more differences than common qualities. First, an approach that focuses on the cognitive component of self-esteem analyzes which modes of perception – in the case of RSES or areas of life – within the framework of James’s theory, cognitive self-perception is affected. In other words, the cognitive approach is aimed at developing categories of cognitive perception of oneself by an individual, and these categories are personal, that is, they consider the individual as a subject. This quality is true for James’s perspective, where he analyses the influence of the social environment on self-esteem. As a result, the differences in the findings lie depending on the external and internal factors of the RSES and James theories, respectively.
At the same time, the socio-cultural approach introduces an element of culture into the process of self-perception. Since culture is an abstract concept, the recognition of its direct influence on the individual was a revolutionary discovery. Moreover, the abstract nature of culture determined the quality of self-esteem within the framework of the sociocultural approach as mechanized or objectified. This led to the fact that an understanding of culture as a subject of psychological relations appeared in society, and the influence of culture began to be assessed from this perspective. Subsequently, such an understanding could be associated with the development of community psychology, where the individual is also perceived as an object and society as the subject of social relations. The real-life application also differs in practice: the first theory is aimed at preventing abuse and depression, while the second theory is aimed at preventing conflicts.
Conclusion
Thus, cognitive and social-cultural approaches to self-esteem were compared and contrasted by discussing their similarities and differences. The first approach describes the relationship between a personality and its self-esteem from the subject-subject position. At the same time, the second approach considers the relationship of the individual and his self-esteem from the position of the object-subject. Interestingly, in this case, the development of theories of self-objectification within the framework of the socio-cultural approach led psychologists to understand the fact of objectification of the individual by culture and society or society. Equally important, various experimental approaches to the analysis of cognitive self-perception have resulted from a more structured understanding of the internal psychological processes of a person’s self-esteem.
Reference List
Turner, Jim, Hewson, Claire, Mahendran, Kesi, and Alisa Strathie (Eds.). 2021. Living Psychology: From the Everyday to the Extraordinary. The Open University.