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

Major Self-Esteem Research Findings 75(competence and worth) rather than one, self-esteem seems important incollective cultures as well. They went on to conduct their own study withChinese participants and concluded that self-esteem, when defined thisway, is present there, too. Tafarodi and Swann Jr. concluded that theproblem of individualistic versus collectivistic self-esteem can beaccounted for by what they named a “cultural trade off.”The trade, of course, occurs in terms of whether a culture emphasizescompetence or worth (or as they said it, “self-competence” and“self-liking”). What appears to happen cross-culturally from this perspectiveis that both factors are always present, but a culture may loadself-evaluation in one direction or the other. Such a trade-off would beconsistent with the individual focus of one culture and the communalvalues of the others. Thus, in a highly individualistic culture such as ours,we would expect to see people evaluating themselves in ways that emphasizetheir competence through their successes and failures and so forth.At the same time, it would also be reasonable to expect people in a culturebuilt on communal and collective structures to focus on the value orworth of their relationships and to diminish the value of a particularperson’s role in events. Yet, such a trade-off is never complete: It is notpossible to say that self-esteem is mainly dependent on one factor in oneculture and the other in a different one. Americans, for instance, do recognizethe value and importance of conducting oneself in a worthy fashioninterpersonally and Asians know about the importance of trying todo one’s best. When seen from a two-factor perspective, what appears tobe dichotomous turns out to be matter of emphasis, not exclusion.Accordingly, the evidence seems to favor the direction of seeing selfesteemas a basic human phenomenon. In fact, we will see later in thischapter that there is good reason to suggest that self-esteem is an importantbasic human need that is cross-cultural in nature (Sheldon, Elliot,Kim & Kasser, 2001).THE SOURCES OF SELF-ESTEEMCoopersmith (1967) was one of the first to study the sources of selfesteemand found that there are four: power (the ability to influence orcontrol others), significance (being valued by others as shown by theiracceptance), virtue (the adherence to moral standards), and competence(a successful performance in regard to a goal). More recently, Epstein(1979) pointed out that if success is involved in self-esteem, then the possibilityof failure must be active, too. Hence, he describes four similarsources, but does so more dynamically: Achievement is balanced by loss,power is offset by powerlessness, acceptance is coupled with the possibility