Self-Esteem Research, Theory, and Practice Toward a Positive ...

Major Self-Esteem Research Findings 73Our general assessment of these findings is as follows: while the resultsprobably do not justify the conclusion that blacks have higher self-esteemthan whites, the weight of the evidence certainly does not seem to supportthe general conclusion that their self-esteem is lower. (1971, p. 8)Unfortunately, common sense is often hard to defeat even when evidencecontradicts it and the belief that African-Americans suffer low selfesteempersists. Thus, Twenge and Crocker (2002) undertook a largemeta-analysis of race, ethnicity, and self-esteem. They confirmed the basicfinding, but went beyond it to other groups. “From highest to lowest selfesteemscores, the groups are ordered as follows: Blacks, Whites,Hispanics, American Indians, and Asians” (p. 377). Twenge and Crockerwent on to address the question of how to understand these major selfesteemfindings by considering four different explanations.The first one is based on the concept of internalized stigma. This ideais based on the notion of the “generalized other”: In this case, if societyas a whole looks down on a group of which I am a member, then I shouldlook down on myself because I internalized that generalized other in constructingmy identity. Stigma as self-protection is another possible explanation,which holds that self-esteem may be buffered from the effect ofdiscrimination by selective comparison. According to this view an individualwho is in the minority may discount failure in a particular domainif this area is one in which his or her minority is perceived as being sociallydisadvantaged. Instead of attributing failure to internal or personal factorsin such situations, it is attributed to external ones such as the socialforces of discrimination so that the poor performance does not affect selfesteem.Next, the positive racial identity hypothesis suggests that self-esteemcould be higher in a minority group because that group focuses largely onits positive qualities, which elevates its status at least in their own eyes.Finally, the cultural differences hypothesis maintains that certain aspects ofcultural identity, particularly whether it is based on the individual or thegroup, could account for the data. In this case, groups that value individualismwould be likely to emphasize such things as personal performance,especially success, which would be reflected on measures of self-esteem thatdetect such a variable. Here, groups that downplay the role of the individualwould also tend to de-emphasize personalizing success, which couldaffect scores on the same measures in a negative direction.Twenge and Crocker then compared each hypothesis with the dataand found that with little question, the cultural difference theory seemsto be the only one that is able to account for all the findings. In other words,the central variable that runs through each group in the expected directionis how the individual is emphasized by a particular group. In short, the