Relation of Threatened Egotism to Violence and Aggression:
The Dark Side of High Self-Esteem
Roy F. Baumeister
Case Western Reserve University
Laura Smart
University of Virginia
Joseph M. Boden
Case Western Reserve University
Ego-Latin for “I”
 “Violence appears to be most commonly a result of threatened egotism (5).”
 Self’s superiority
 “The mediating process may involve directing anger outward as a way of avoiding a downward revision of the self-concept (5).”
 Pragmatic- advocating behavior that is dictated more by practical consequences than by theory
 Futility- unimportant
 Hypothesis- one main source of such violence is threatened egotism (5)
 Egotism- self-appraisals
 “We shall examine the arguments for the low self-esteem view and treat is as a rival hypothesis to our emphasis on high self-esteem (5).”
 “In brief, the purpose of this article is to understand how self-appraisals are related to interpersonal violence (7).”
Low Self-Esteem Causes Violence
 Many examples that low self-esteem cause violence are gang related according to E. Anderson (1994) and Jankowski (1991).
 Examples also include spousal violence according to Renzetti (1992) and Gondolf (1985)
 MacDonald (1992) claimed that robbers “lack self-esteem)”
 “In one of the classic works on the psychology of violence, Toch (1996/1993) referred to a “compensatory relationship between low self-esteem and violence” (pp. 133-134), and he suggested that people with low self-esteem turn violent as a way of gaining esteem (6).”
 “Our review did not uncover any one definitive or authoritative statement of the theory that low self-esteem causes violence, so it is necessary for us to consider several possible versions of that theory. One view (and one that seems implicit in many writings) is that people