Joel Wade

In a study by Jean Twenge of San Diego State University, she found that college kids today are more likely to call themselves gifted and driven to succeed, while their test scores and hours spent studying are decreasing. Their tendency toward narcissism has also increased over the last 30 years.

Today I want to look at what I consider one of the sources of this trend: the unearned self-esteem movement.

Many years ago, when I was young psychology graduate student studying with Nathaniel Branden, I remember him talking one day about how he had been invited to be part of The California Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem, lead by California State Assemblyman John Vasconcelos.

Nathaniel couldn’t see why he would be involved in that, since he did not see a role for government in the development of self-esteem. Nonetheless, the Task Force carried on, and created guidelines for building “self-esteem” in a way that Branden would never have advocated.

According to a New York Times article about the study group in October of 1986:

Mr. Vasconcellos, a 53-year-old Democrat, is described by an aide as “the most radical humanist in the Legislature.” Mr. Twombly said the study group was an attempt by the Assemblyman to translate into political action his 20 years of “personal emotional work” in various forms of psychological therapy at Esalen Institute near Big Sur and other places.

”I’ve explored a lot of alternative ways of being and relating,” Mr. Vasconcellos said. The bill that created the 25-member study group says its aim is to compile “the world’s most credible and contemporary research regarding whether healthy self-esteem relates to the development of personal responsibility and social problems” such as crime, drug abuse, teen-age pregnancy and welfare dependency.

Whether it was Vasconcelos’s intention or not, the model of self-esteem that the task force has effectively encouraged was the one that my favorite social psychologist Roy Baumeister showed did nothing to improve a person’s happiness, success, or character.

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As this political season heats up, and all the arguments, indignation and accusations that go with it come to a rolling boil, I thought it would be worth having a look at some of the deeper biases that we all can get immersed in, regardless of ideology or political sentiments.

I write this, not because I think you should be apathetic about politics, or choose a particular side that I might like. I write this because the bombardment of manipulations we are subject to can cause us to lose focus on the meaningful details of our own lives; and the biases which politics are teeming with can throw off our judgment about what’s most important.

By politics, I mean the process by which we – politicians and media most strongly, but individuals as well – persuade, cajole, manipulate, trick, argue, deceive, and otherwise do everything we can to empower those we want to empower, and disempower those we want to disempower.

This is an equal opportunity inquiry. We all have our personal beliefs, and, regardless of what they are, every single one of us gets seduced by our biases.

Emotional Bias:

First of all, politics, and the media hype around it, creates an emphasis on emotion. From the regal music of the Sunday news shows, to the passionate oration of the politicians, to the choreographed sneers and eye rolls of the political commentators, politics feeds into our emotional system much more than our rational, intellectual assessments, no matter how much a given speaker may insist that they offer the “True Facts.”

Tribal Bias:

Human beings are by far the most caring, empathetic creatures on earth. We have unique wiring in our brain that makes this possible. If a chimpanzee in the wild is injured, he will not be taken care of by the troop – they will let him suffer and starve; but when current day members of human hunter gatherer bands were questioned, fully half of the members had been in just such a situation, and the band nursed them back to health.

This is significant, because the exceptions stand out in stark relief. When we see or hear about examples of people doing monstrous things to other people, it horrifies us – because this is not how almost all of us behave toward our fellow human beings. (There are examples of other animals, dogs, elephants, etc. showing deep caring; but these are moving because they seem so human – they are also, almost always, toward direct relations.)

But politics feeds into a tribal bias. That level of compassion and empathy mostly disappears when we think of people as outside of our group. These days, more than any time in history, the whole world is our group, which is a very good thing. But when we judge a politician from an opposing party, we lose that empathy and compassion. Our bias is strongly for our party, and against the other.

Which means we’ll tend to see only or mostly the good in members of our team, and only or mostly the bad in the other. Regardless of what the actual truth may be.

Immediacy Bias:

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One day in East Africa, deep in our primitive past, an exceptional innovator carved a palm sized, pear shaped, razor sharp axe head out of stone. This must have revolutionized the ability for he or she and their band of hunter-gatherers to hunt, to butcher food… and to wage war on their neighbors.

This was about seventeen hundred thousand years ago, long before homo sapiens had even appeared on earth. Over time, others learned to copy this stone ax head, and the innovation spread throughout the relatively small population of pre-humans, known as homo erectus, or “upright man.”

The identical design of what archaeologists call Acheulean hand stone axes has been commonly found at many different archaeological sites throughout different eras, and up to about a hundred thousand years ago they were still being made, in exactly the same way, by our homo-sapiens ancestors.

For over a million and a half years, as far as we can tell from the archeological record, this was the extent of human and pre-human innovation. That was it! Nothing new for over 1,600,000 years.

Then, something revolutionary happened; something that changed the nature of humanity and transformed our cultural growth as a species… the world’s first jewelry was invented.

One day, about 90,000 years ago, something new appeared in the heart of Africa. Beads. Beads, made of the shells of a tiny marine snail called Nassarius gibbosulus, painted, and with tiny holes drilled in them.

What was truly transformational, though, wasn’t the beads themselves, it was the mystery they presented. How did beads originally found at the seashore of Mediterranean Algeria make their way hundreds of miles to the south? That would be crossing the Sahara Desert now, but back then it was a lush, green hunter’s paradise.

They were brought there. Not as some one-time haul from a murderous raiding party – which would have been the most likely way up to that point for one tribe to get something from another tribe.

No, these beads were part of something new; something that from any evidence we currently have, had never been seen on the face of the earth before; something we take completely for granted today:

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