Replicating the Two-Factor Approach to Self-Esteem

It is unusual to spend time with almost any news source without being warned about yet another crisis. One of the more recent ones in psychology and related disciplines, for example, is called the “replication crisis.” This issue involves the important process of duplicating research to test its findings. Some even say that replication is the “backbone” of the scientific method because describing what we did and how we did it, step-by-step, allows others to repeat the process. This basic feature of science makes it possible to either verify or question findings or claims and build up a body of knowledge over time.

Still, science, including social science, is a human creation, which means it has flaws. They include such things as a tendency to focus too much on dramatic findings, jumping to conclusions, and failing to offer independent confirmation. Indeed, the Open Science Collaboration (Nosek, 2015) examined 100 articles in three top-tier psychology journals only to find that merely a third of them were replicable – and that is among the best of the best! This situation should concern anyone interested in scientific claims about human behavior.

Fortunately, there are two ways to replicate work. One is called “conceptual replication” and involves independent work that corroborates a concept or idea. The other is to do “exact replication,” which involves duplicating existing research as closely as possible. Scientific claims, especially claims about behavior, that do not offer replicative support should be met with skepticism.

The Replication Crisis and Self-Esteem

The first post in this series describes how the psychology of self-esteem underwent a crisis of confidence in the 1990s. Until then, the value of high self-esteem, usually defined as a sense of worth or feeling worthy as a person, was taken for granted. Eventually, increasing self-esteem “caught on” and became a major goal of parents, educators, and therapists, if not society in general. However, after checking the actual research, it was found that those who are narcissistic and those who frequently demonstrate antisocial behavior often score high on self-esteem tests. The problem is that if self-esteem is defined as simply as feeling worthy, then self-esteem can be associated with very negative as well as positive behavior.

The crisis of self-esteem threw the entire field into a state of disarray and even led many to criticize the value of concept, not to mention claims about it. For example, most introductory psychology textbooks significantly reduced covering the topic to just a few words. However, every crisis presents an opportunity, and eventually social scientists began re-examining research on self-esteem and revised what we know about it today. One of the most important results of this work is the value of understanding self-esteem as a product of two variables, rather than one.

Replicating the Two-Factor Approach to Self-Esteem

This two-factor approach, as it is called, sees self-esteem as a relationship between competence and worth or worthiness. In this view, self-esteem occurs when we face life’s challenges in ways that both show our competence or ability to deal with problems, but do so in ways that demonstrate our worth or value as a person. This approach means that such things as a sense of entitlement, which is associated with narcissism, or a lack of respect for the rights of others, which occurs in antisocial behavior, cannot be associated with authentic self-esteem. This definition also happens to be theoretically consistent with how self-esteem is measured by such testing instruments as the Multidimensional Self-Esteem Inventory (O’Brien and Epstein, 1988). Since that test was developed independently, it indicates that the two-factor approach can be replicated conceptually.

The value of understanding self-esteem as a relationship between two factors has also been duplicated in actual studies. For example, I used this definition to develop practical way of enhancing self-esteem called Competence and Worthiness Training (Mruk, 2013). The program aims at helping people increase one or both of the factors, as needed. This process involves measuring self-esteem using the test mentioned above, participating in five, two-hour, weekly sessions, and then testing self-esteem once again. The program was first studied in a typical community mental health center and showed that the program significantly increases self-esteem.

Almost a decade later, the effectiveness of the program was duplicated at a different community mental center by other researchers and showed similar positive results. Since then, it has been successfully used in other settings as well. Duplicating the results in this way makes it possible to claim that although the two-factor view of self-esteem is not the only one, it certainly has been shown to have a meaningful degree of conceptual and exact replicability. This type of information should be welcome by anyone interested in research about real self-esteem and how to enhance it. To say it another way, findings or claims without such support might best be taken with a degree of skepticism: the proverbial grain of salt.