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

180 SELF-ESTEEM RESEARCH, THEORY, AND PRACTICEevaporation that comes with neglecting to respect the importance ofbeing diligent about our values or behaviors in minor ways. Another is tostumble hard enough in life to spill the vital contents, which is to say byacting in ways that undermine one’s authenticity and self-esteem byharming others, acting without virtue, and so forth. Truly, then, it is upto us to manage self-esteem once we become adults, and there are noguarantees about what final type or level any given person may reach.REEXAMINING THE LINK BETWEEN SELF-ESTEEMAND BEHAVIOR (CO-CONSTITUTION)The last area to tackle in developing a comprehensive phenomenologicalmeaning-based theory of self-esteem is to articulate the link between selfesteemand behavior from this perspective. Looking back, it appears thatthere are three basic approaches to understanding the connectionbetween self-esteem and behavior. The first one, of course, is to minimizeit altogether due to what appears to be a weak statistical relationship(Baumeister, Smart & Boden, 1996; Baumeister, Campbell, Krueger &Vohs, 2003; Damon, 1995; Emler, 2001; Seligman, 1990). However, wesaw that there are several problems with this conclusion, especially thepossibility that much of the statistical weakness might arise from definingself-esteem in a lopsided fashion, or from the difficulties associated withmeasuring meaning. Second, it is also possible to see self-esteem as a specialtype of self-fulfilling process. It is one that is based on self-esteemacting as feedback for a self-system that seeks to maintain a high degree ofstability while attempting to maximize its potentials (Bednar, Derezotes,Kim & Specht, 1989; Coopersmith, 1967; Epstein, 1980, 1985).As tempting as it might be to embrace the second possibility, there isa fundamental problem with the approach, namely, that informationprocessingviews are highly reductionistic (Costall & Still, 1987; Dreyfus& Dreyfus, 1986). That is, likening a human being to a computer, even asophisticated computer, reduces the fullness of the person and the richnessof the human experience by making lived processes merely mechanicalones. For example, making a choice implies a certain degree of freewill. However, a person is seen as making a “decision” from a cognitivepoint of view and even computers can do that on the basis of logic trees,parallel processing strategies, and so forth. Although such an approach ismore “scientific” in the natural science sense, it fails at the descriptivelevel because it does not have any way to talk about explicitly human factorssuch as meaning.In other words, the cognitive perspective is fine for describing suchthings as computational processes and perhaps even modeling how basic